Frédéric Pajak and Lea Lund have been married for over 20 years. Both illustrators, in this work he has taken on the role of writer while she is responsible for the artwork. Their book tells the story of their relationship, their complicity, their joys, their conflicts, their fiascos, their travels. As in a hall of mirrors, their story is dotted with various well-known or more obscure characters, unusual characters of love – or death. We meet Karl Marx, his second daughter Laura and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue — author of the famous The Right to Be Lazy —, who died together in a suicide pact; the strange Maria de Naglowska and her elegy to divorce, her taste for strangulation; Stendhal, and his excessive love for a lost mother, his heartbreaking relationship with Victorine Mounier, and with his cousin, the Countess Daru, his blind passion for Angela Pietragrua, his aversion to Paris and the French spirit, an evocation of courtly love, the birth of a daughter; the description of the terrible agony of a mother; dark or enchanting visions of Paris, of Cuba, of Sifnos — in the Aegean Sea —, of Lausanne, of Haute-Engadine, of the sadly modernised Italy of today. And all of sudden we’re off to South Africa, its pervasive violence, its hatred and heartbreaks, the amazing beauty of the Cape of Good Hope: pleasure, horror, paranoia culminate in an apotheosis during a solo piano concert by jazzman Abdullah Ibrahim — ex-Dollar Brand musician — in a remote concert hall in Cape Town, a deserted and windswept Sunday night.
A couple tells the story of their 22 years together, with a text by Frédéric Pajak in which we discover various figures of joyful or desperate love, given form or offset in 400 drawings by his wife Lea Lund, in pencil or charcoal: portraits, architecture, landscapes, fantasy. The book takes us on a stroll through space and time: travels, families, readings, and enchanting, melancholic or grotesque visions — passing through life with one’s eyes ablaze to “the world’s strange beauty”.