Translation: David Camus © Éditions Mnémos, 2010 Text written in collaboration with E. Hoffman Price, who provided the main material. Lovecraft, a little dubious about the story proposed by Price, greatly modifies the style and elements of the plot – seeking to intelligently mix everything with the previous stories featuring the now famous Randolph Carter (see #10 - "The Testimony of Randolph Carter", #47 - "The Silver Key", and #49 - "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"). In Price's own opinion, Lovecraft "had kept less than fifty words" of what Price had proposed... the revision seems to have been quite radical! Despite the weaknesses that pepper the story (the general framework is ultimately very conventional, and the ending is not astonishingly original), the Lovecraft fan will find what he is looking for. First of all, in the author's multiple winks: beyond the narrative "reminders" (chapter 1 refers us to "The Testimony of Randolph Carter" and "The Silver Key"), there are allusions to Clark Ashton Smith (chapter 5, and his "cult of the black and plastic Tsathoggua"), to "The Call of Cthulhu" (chapter 7, and its "r'lyehian, a language brought to Earth countless cycles ago by the larva of Cthulhu"), not to mention the countless links to Yog-Sothoth or the Necronomicon, elements from the Lovecraftian universe itself. Even more amusing, Howard Phillips Lovecraft caricatures himself in one of the protagonists of the story: the "old eccentric from Providence, Rhode Island", a certain Ward Phillips (what a disguise!), an amateur of the occult "with stooped shoulders, was frail, freshly shaven and had a long nose". But delving deeper into this story, certain elements catch our attention. First of all, the story puts forward bold concepts in chapters 4 and 5. Here, 80 years before a film like Interstellar, we have a quantum vision of space and time. You either like it or you don't, but you have to admit that the idea is innovative. Then, we find as in previous stories (cf. #2 - "The Tomb", #4 - "Polaris") the theme of identity exchange. Randolph Carter himself Zkauba, and Zkauba substituting himself for the identity Randolph Carter - who is none other than himself. The story features four characters: Ward Phillips, then, Étienne Laurent de Marigny (personification of Price), an occult enthusiast of Creole origin (to avoid the neo-colonialist caricature, I preferred to give him the borrowed tone of a stiff Frenchman with an execrable English accent), Ernest B. Aspinwall (the grumpy one in the story), and the strange pandit Chandraputra. An opportunity to weave some amusing dialogues between these multiple personalities and points of view. 0:00:38 chapter 1 0:21:08 chapter 2 0:27:04 chapter 3 0:53:28 chapter 4 1:06:01 chapter 5 1:25:18 chapter 6 1:40:30 chapter 7 1:50:35 chapter 8 2:03:19 epilogue ------- Reading, Illustration and Music of Tindalos ------- Next video: The Book ------- To find the illustrations, music, and the whole universe of Tindalos https://www.tindaloslechien.com To find the stories in mp3 https://hearthis.at/tindalos To follow Tindalos on Facebook / tindalos.lechien.5 To follow and support Tindalos on Patreon, with lots of rewards / tindalos For a nice little boost by supporting Tindalos on Tipeee https://fr.tipeee.com/tindalos Want to offer an illustration of Tindalos? https://www.tindaloslechien.com/bouti... #Lovecraft #RandolphCarter