The Infinite Castle

By: Renaud Contini

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

"Perhaps, as a punishment for my crime, I have been condemned to exist."

A man wakes up in a glass cube hanging above a big city. The laptop screen shows 4 pm, but the sky is strangely black. All the man remembers is that he has committed a serious crime, and that the cube must be his prison. Of the deed itself, he has no recollection.

Sleep, it turns out, is the key to reconstructing his memories. To sleep, to sleepwalk, and to write unconscious words on the laptop screen, so that his visitor, a genderless creature shrouded in darkness, can do the interpreting for him.

Yet as time unfolds and history itself slowly emerges from the void, the shadow of the infinite castle sketches itself in the distance, never too far, never too near. The key to the man's crime must be hidden somewhere in the castle, if it is anywhere at all.

But where is the castle?

Renaud Contini is a writer based in Dublin. He is the author of The Interview, a psychological novella, and The Ecstatic Soul, an essay in psychological nonfiction. The Infinite Castle is his third book. The novel blends the angst of Dostoyevsky, the absurdism of Kafka, and the magic of Murakami in a post-existentialist chronicle of madness, redemption, and love.