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Photo Jeff Topping
Please make a warm welcome to our new contributor, Julien. Ju Lien is an avid fly angler and outdoor photographer with quite a fanatic obsession for wilderness in both real life and literature. The recent release of Harrison’s last opus in French is kick-off contribution to Le Mouching! You can see more of his photos on his page.
About a year ago, American author Jim Harrison published a new novel, The Big Seven which should be on every self-respecting Mouching reader’s must-read list! Here we revisit Sunderson, the antihero and retired detective from “The Great Leader”, Harrison’s previous novel. In “The Big Seven”, Saunderson contemplates the deadly sins of his past life while coming to the rescue of an unruly and strange family of redneck criminals who have taken up residence beside his favorite trout stream.
Big Jim is known for his colorful and rural characters with a lust for sex and bourbon and at the same time a voracious appetite for wild trout fishing and the wilderness. One thread that runs through his work is the pairing of a wild, self possessed male protagonist with and anchoring, free spirited female character. This always makes for an interesting dynamic. His stories are full of duality; they tread the fine line between irrepressible hilarity to depression. They weave the ordinary facts of life into the universal human condition. What probably is the most touching about this writer to me is that all of his stories offer a unique perception of contemporary life through characters who we care about; characters who are lost and searching while trying to regain a little dignity along the way.
You, the Mouching reader, will be enchanted by Harrison’s poetical fury, intoxicated by his humor and lust for life. His themes will be familiar to your passions: the wilderness, fine food, lust, grace and freedom; genuine and at the same time loaded with irony. By the time you reach the last page, you will be left with only one option: to devour life in all it’s intensity and find your way out, ecstatically.
Long live Big Jim!