Lost Words - Paperback

by Xavier Hennekinne (Author), Phil Day (Illustrator)

Lost Words is an elegant and deeply personal collection of prose pieces by Xavier Hennekinne, a French-born, Australian-based writer, accompanied by original prints and drawings by artist Phil Day. Published by Gazebo Books in 2019, the book takes its epigraph from Gaston Bachelard - "Only through reverie can unusual images be communicated" - and holds true to that spirit throughout.

The pieces range freely across film, literature, memory, and language: a chance encounter with Romy Schneider's daughter in a Paris theatre; reflections on Mishima's suicide at forty-five; the fear that videogames are colonising a child's imagination; memories of a French Catholic school and the lies told to a dismayed teacher; the faces of Spanish actresses hidden under a mattress. Running through everything is the narrator's lifelong obsession with cinema - particularly European art-house film - and the way images from the screen fuse inseparably with intimate memory.

Interwoven with Phil Day's striking lithographs and drypoint engravings, Lost Words is a book as much to look at as to read. Steeped in European literary and cinematic culture yet rooted in an Australian present, it is a meditation on expatriate identity, the mysteries of resemblance, the failures and unexpected gifts of language, and the interior life of a reader and writer for whom reverie is both vocation and refuge.