Boredom gives rise to the most beautiful dreams and the finest works of art.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A SONG|

Gaël Faye’s first solo album, Pili Pili sur un croissant au beurre, was released in 2013. One of the songs on the album really stood out: “L’ennui des après-midi sans fin” [The boredom of endless afternoons]. The lyrics told a story, conjuring up childhood images and memories, sowing the seeds for a picture book. Gaël Faye now tells the story for readers big and small.

IN GAËL FAYE’S OWN WORDS

“As a child, I was lucky enough to feel bored. There was no school in the afternoons and at home, no screens or televisions. So I had to learn to develop my imagination to come up with games and pastimes. I lived with my father and my little sister in an old red brick house built in the days of Belgian colonization. Inside, the ceilings were high, the floor tiling wove a strange web of gray stones, and the huge rooms gave us cool shelter all year round. Outside, a vast garden ringed the house. It was planted with mango, guava, and papaya trees. But my absolute favorite was a gigantic fig tree with powerful roots, an impressive trunk, and branches so long that they covered practically the entire garden. My father was a herpetologist, a reptile specialist. All over the garden stood cages full of cobras, vipers, garter snakes, and pythons. We also had aviaries full of fluttering, shimmering birds that brightened our days with their melodious warbling. In that gloriously colorful realm, my life slowly passed to the alternating rhythm of the dry and rainy seasons. Of those days without movement, my abiding memory is of a magical period when I crammed the strongbox of my imagination full. The boredom of my childhood afternoons was a journey where time belonged to me, a space where I wove immense dreams, a world with no beginning and no end, like a sentence that ends with three little dots…”