A Dreamer’s Fervor

In A Dreamer’s Fervor , Odile and Célestin de Quernevelle dive into a two-year odyssey across the globe, marked by spectacular nature, art of rare beauty, unforgettable encounters, and moments of peril and self-discovery. Célestin, a complex French adventuresome humanist, is raising his nine-year-old daughter after his beloved wife, the girl’s mother, died at childbirth. Their journey, which begins as an adventure, acquires a life-changing seriousness in Leningrad in 1980—the mission to free Olya Naratovna, a Russian-Tatar political poet, imprisoned by the Soviet authorities. Her beauty is enhanced by mental strength and depth of soul. The little girl and her father are shocked by the wall dividing Berlin. They ascend Mount Moses in the Sinai and are moved deeply by Auschwitz survivors they befriend in Jerusalem. Later, in South Africa under apartheid, with Nelson Mandela on a desolate island, they are stunned by the roar and grace of wild animals. Under bizarre circumstances, the extreme north of Japan calls them urgently. Within the breathtaking bear hug of the novel, encompassing the majestic Cape of Good Hope where two oceans collide, and the straits strewn with ice floes between Hokkaido and the USSR, the father and daughter mature together, as does the love between Olya and Célestin.