Books by Gustaf Sobin

Philippe Cabassac has fly-truffled every winter since childhood on his family estate. Since the death of his young wife Julieta, however, the truffles come to represent far more than a delicacy for his palette. They trigger now a series of dream visions in which he and his lost wife communicate.

This text explores the landscapes of Provence and Languedoc, drawing on prehistory, protohistory and Gallo-Roman antiquity, focusing on a place or artifact. Archival curiosities invite inquiry and speculation: artefacts are read as realia, and history as an uninterrupted sequence of object lessons.

Bits of late Roman coinage, the mutilated torso of a marble Venus, blue debris from an early medieval glassworks, and the powder rasped from the reputed tomb of Mary Magdalene-these tantalizing mementos of human history found scattered throughout the landscape of southeastern France are the points of departure for Gustaf Sobin's lyrical narrative. A companion volume to his acclaimed Luminous Debris, Ladder of Shadows picks up where the former left off: with late antiquity, covering a period from roughly the third to the thirteenth century. Here Sobin offers brilliant readings of late Roman and early Christian ruins in his adopted region of Provence, sifting through iconographic, architectural, and sacramental vestiges to shed light on nothing less than the existential itself.

Drawing on the life of Greta Garbo, Gustaf Sobin spins a masterful tale about the enigmatic nature of idolatry.