The Deep Murmur: Preceded by Elegy for Enoch Powell

The author of over 150 books in various genres, the French writer Renaud Camus is perhaps best known as the man who coined the "Great Replacement," his phrase to describe the sweeping demographic changes now transforming Europe and its diasporas throughout the world. In The Deep Murmur, Camus explores one source of our societies' heedless embrace of a post-European future: the prohibition on the word "race" and all that it has connoted over its long and storied history, now seen as irrevocably tainted by the experience of Nazism. Without the word, the thing ceases to exist. Thus gradually recedes, in the words of Bernanos, "that deep murmur in which the race cradles its own" - and, with it, the very possibility of transmission, of a place in the world that is nothing other than a place in time.

The volume opens with Camus' "Elegy for Enoch Powell," written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Powell's (in)famous "Rivers of Blood" speech. Powell foretold our present; Camus is its chronicler.

A native of Chamalières in the Auvergne region of central France, Renaud Camus (b. 1946) is one of France's most brilliant stylists and the author of more than 150 books. Tricks, his first and only work to be translated into English until now, appeared in 1979 and was prefaced by Roland Barthes, one of twentieth-century France's greatest literary critics and Camus' mentor. In addition to the political essays collected in Enemy of the Disaster, Camus is also known for works of fiction, philosophy, travel writing, art criticism, and the extensive diary he has kept and published for over forty years. He lives in the Chateau de Plieux in the village of Plieux in southwestern France and is the president of a small political party, the Party of In-nocence, which advocates immigration and education reform and the promotion of civic peace.

Ethan Rundell is a translator, journalist, and alumnus of UC, Berkeley, and Paris' School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). Rundell has translated over a dozen books as well as scores of academic articles. He lives in North Carolina.