“The House in Which, Volume I,” by Mariam Petrosyan: a sort of “Harry Potter” in the style of Julia Ducournau

In the early 1990s, a young Armenian woman working at Armenfilm, a Yerevan animation company, began writing fiction. “ My first stories were strange ,” Mariam Petrosyan later confided. “ They felt like they were part of a big novel.” Her intuition was correct: the massive manuscript would run to 800 pages and take 18 years to write. She gave it to a friend to read, who passed it on to her son, who then gave the text to an acquaintance, who forgot it in a closet for three years. A friend picked it up, read it in one sitting and passed it on to the next person. One thing led to another, and it ended up in the hands of a Russian publisher, who published it in 2009. Readers thus discovered the mysterious boarding school for disabled students that serves as the setting for "The House in Which," with its strangely named heroes, Tabaqui, Pompey, Babillard, Cher Ami, Tuk-Tuk. It's no wonder that the book aroused the immediate curiosity of enthusiastic readers upon its release, and the most bizarre interpretations on the internet. "'The House' is a succession of walls whose paint never stops peeling. It's also endless flights of narrow steps. Midges dancing under the balcony lanterns."

Translated into several countries, the book was discovered in France by Dominique Bordes, also editor of "La Maison des feuilles" by the equally legendary Mark Z. Danielewski. Bordes first published the book in 2016 as a very thick, sooty volume. He is now reissuing this masterpiece in three hardcover books. It is the only known text by Mariam Petrosyan. It is a novel of rust and bone, "Harry Potter"...

Article reserved for subscribers.

Log in

Summer offer: €1/month for 6 months

Discover all our offers