I would like to thank Mitzi Angel for bringing me to Faber and Emmie Francis for making it my home in the UK, and for her brilliant editing; my agent Laurence Laluyaux and the team at RCW; my French publisher Olivier Cohen and his collaborators at les éditions de L’Olivier, especially Violaine Faucon – and everyone who has, in their own way, helped me to write this novel, as well as the Centre National du Livre for the grant it awarded me, and the Villa Médicis, where this book was begun and abandoned, before being picked up again elsewhere, and finished at the Faber Residency in Catalonia. Many thanks to the French photographer Raphaël Dallaporta who shared his stories about drones, in connection with his Ruins series (2011). The lecture titled ‘The Astronaut in the Rosebush’, attributed to Amelia Dehr within these pages, is drawn from a text that was initially published in Le Ciel vu de la terre (Éditions Inculte, 2011), and includes a quotation from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979). Documentary poetry owes a great deal to my own mother and her work, and its continuation by other means. For the earliest writings of Nadia Dehr I took some inspiration from an article by the American art historian Jennifer L. Roberts titled ‘Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán’ (The Art Bulletin, vol. 82, no. 3: Sept. 2000). Regarding the war in the former Yugoslavia, the works of Peter Andreas were an immense help during my writing of this novel. Most valuable of all were the direct and indirect accounts that were shared with me in Sarajevo during multiple trips.
Anton Albers is, of course, a fictional character; her life and her work comprise elements and notions adapted from intellectuals Giancarlo De Carlo, Jean Delumeau, Eric Hobsbawm, Saskia Sassen, and others. However, her spirit is a tribute to activist Mira L., without whom I might not have been born in Paris.
As for actual events that readers might be tempted to recognise in this story, it should be noted that they were frequently altered or amended intentionally. Consequently, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Except perhaps when it concerns myself.
The Elisse hotel chain does not exist.