The Encyclopaedia of the Fall

In 2,580 alphabetically arranged entries, Marc Kregting serves up to the reader a veritable waterfall of insights, facts and factoids, jokes and pranks, in which seriousness and profundity are organically integrated with irony and nonsense. The book’s common thread is the idea (and the image, word and syllable) of the ‘fall’.

Kregting has a great deal to say about falls. Throughout this book the focus is on people who make the most diverse downward movements. Everyone potentially qualifies for inclusion in his encyclopaedia: cyclists who crash (Isaac Galvéz) or knock over opponents (Steve Bauer), singers who jump to their deaths (Herman Brood) and previously worshipped heroes who fall off their pedestals (Jan Fabre, Diego Maradona).

To an equal extent, this is a book about the expressions that allude in all kinds of ways to the core concept. But the encyclopaedist also provides interpretations of ‘black hole’, ‘cancel’ and ‘forced landing’.

Nobody escapes gravity. Planet earth is governed by laws that pull us down, ultimately into the grave. Desires meet with an equally inauspicious end. In the Bible, hunger for knowledge leads to the Fall, while Icarus’s urge to fly finds its fulfilment on the seabed.

In this brimful book, farce and tragedy alternate at great speed. A journey through the encyclopaedia starts everywhere, all at once. Or you can make your way from A to Z. Every route involves experiences that are light as a feather and heavy as lead. The jokes, the sorrow and the miracles collected here offer material for countless novels.