Fantasy/adventure novel where the world turns out to be a man taking a bath, read in French around 2012
Some details are fuzzy but the central premise stuck with me. Hoping someone here recognizes it.
- It’s an adventure/fantasy novel with characters living in what they think is their normal world
- They live in or around enormous “trees” that turn out to be giant towers stretching upward
- There’s a quest element where the characters are trying to reach the realm/kingdom of the gods
- At some point they pass through a pyramid with a portal that leads to the gods’ realm
- The gods in this world only exist as long as people believe in them, if belief in a god fades, that god slowly disappears
BUT im not 100% sure it’s the same book for people reaching the gods realm and the one in which they live in a world that where they live in the trees WHICH has a big plot twist at the end : the “world” the characters live in is actually a human man taking a bath. The “trees/towers” are his body hairs. The wind that sometimes blows one direction and sometimes the other is his breathing through his nose. Islands sinking into the sea are explained by the giant lowering his knee into the bathwater. The characters are tiny beings living on/around him without realizing it.
I cant find it using LLMs which seems crazy to me because this detail is so distinctive that it should be easy to find.
Anyway if anyone recognize this or these books, i’m really down to find both if there are two of them, I’ll be forever grateful. Coming back to reading after almost 15 years and I want to read these again.
Maybe it can helps but I read them while being abroad 4 months in Fribourg, Germany.