Between Monday 16 in March (Day 1) and Monday 20 in April 2020 (Day 35), Wajdi Mouawad held twenty-five chronicles on the website of Le théâtre de La Colline that were widely followed and occasionally taken up by other European theatres. These texts, written in one go in the evening and at night and then recorded in the morning, are gathered in the present collection.

Confined like millions of us within the four walls of his house in Nogent-sur-Marne, Wajdi Mouawad undertakes an odyssean dazzling interior journey from his own microcosm — home schooling, his Japanese maple tree, house cleaning, his disconcerted cat, pacing in the alley ; the subjects are varied — to the cyclopean eye of the Big Bang where dead stars shine. He takes us to Peter Handke's office and his father's retirement home, to the banks of the St. Lawrence River, to Montreal, to Greece, to Greenland, to the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, via French phonetics and the Apollonian temple of Delphi, he waltzes the madness brought on by the pandemic on the razor's edge, sharing the same dream as the members of the human tribe, making the sleeping brutality of the everyday roar. In so doing, he grinds away the darkness and manages to find bright solace at the end of a long tunnel. His incomparable writing traces the map of a fantastic territory, the beasts of a new mythology, the singular letters of a new Wajdian alphabet.

Wajdi Mouawad writes at night. His plays, novels and essays all go through some form of darkness, some opacity, a fog, that dissipates as the words take shape. In the nights of this confinement, which has become the confinement of his nights, in the depths of the abyss explored, beyond the dazzling darkness, the writing of these chronicles has allowed him — has allowed us, by listening to them — to cure some of the blindness which has struck us.