Guide du pourquoi pas ?

Jean-Martin Charcot, founder of modern neurology, explorer of the soul, practiced as chief physician at the Salpêtrière in Paris. His son, Jean-Baptiste Charcot, dreamed from childhood of being a sailor; he surveyed the poles, and died in 1936 in the wreck of his ship, the Pourquoi-Pas? IV, off Reykjavik.

Let’s take a simplified map of Iceland, turn it over on itself, and we have the drawing of a brain. And vice versa: a brain, rotated, and this is Iceland. Like father, like son.

From then on, is it any wonder that this island is, by common knowledge, the land of elves, ghosts, dark forces? Perhaps the dead are not so dead, the living have more than one foot in the grave: an eye, an ear.

Stéphanie Solinas went to collect the words of scientists, mediums, artists, in the land of invisible presences, volcanoes and shared genes. She offers us a dreamy topography, between laboratories and beliefs. Do elves and hidden people exist? What are our identities made of?

Beyond Iceland, Stéphanie Solinas explores and reveals our not necessarily so clear relationship to the irrational, to magic, to mystery. The hardened Cartesians will not turn the pages of this book. The others will plunge into it, at the risk of a vertigo full of humor and properly staggering.