Removing oneself from the frenzied pace of the world

Every night, tucked away in a village on the Mediterranean cost, Charles Korzybski observes the calm of the sky. One evening, when a coloured dot begins to shine brightly, the amateur astronomer is ecstatic. He has just witnessed the explosion of a star… a supernova. Soon, it will shine even in broad daylight. The event is so rare that the scientific community decides to name the star after its discoverer. A frenzy takes hold of the newsrooms in Paris: everyone talks about the Korzsbyski supernova, but who is this man? Chloé Legrand, a journalist, rushes to try and get an interview. But Charles refuses and hides. He has long since made the decision to avoid his fellow human beings. The frivolity of ephemeral sensationalism fills him with rage. He knows that he is but a tiny cog in the vast mechanism of the universe. Chloé tracks him down, ready to go to any lengths to feed the great machine of continuous news and, when necessary, invents a past to complete her story. The media is insatiable and the eccentric old man’s silence resilient… There will be a heavy price to pay for this antagonism.

Supernova is a novel of contrasts. The incessant noise of the media is confronted with the silence of nature. The insignificance of humans with the vastness of the universe. Dimitri Kantcheloff subtly orchestrates these contradictions in this hugely original faux thriller. And questions our uneasy relationship with the environment and our difficulty to accept choices that are different from our own, to understand each other.