Serge Lecomte

Arthur's Undoing Serge Lecomte

Arthur's Undoing is a sequel to The Casanova of Binche, the second part of a trilogy. It's War II, and nineteen-year-old Arthur Comte has sex on the brain; every woman he sees is a potential pleasure machine. In the small town of Binche, Belgium, he's a Lothario of epic proportions, and his uncle and godfather Oskar (emphasis on god) thinks he needs to learn a lesson about women and love. Shortly after being executed in the town square by a Nazi firing squad, Arthur is resurrected from nothing into something and finds himself hurtling through space. He comes fully awake as he crashes through the top of a railway car filled with "undesirables" on their way to the death camps. So begins Serge Lecomte's novel ARTHUR'S UNDOING, an alternately horrifying and bleakly comic account of a young man's education in the teeth of the Holocaust, an unholy cross between Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Sartre's No Exit.