Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie -- the story switching deftly between first- and third-person as the narrator continu[...]
The hero, Monsieur, is a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life is examined with precision. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Here, he muses on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. And he is very funny.[...]
Simply, put, Jean-Philippe Toussaint is one of the most original novelists working today, and will almost undoubtedly go down as one of the great comic writers of our era. Toussaint has been likened to some diverse artists (Jim Jarmusch, Samuel Beckett, Nicholson Baker), but perhaps the most apt com[...]
Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dos[...]
First published in France in 1985, The Bathroom was Jean-Philippe Toussaint's debut novel, and it heralded a new generation of innovative French literature. In this playful and perplexing book, we meet a young Parisian researcher who lives inside his bathroom. As he sits in his tub meditating on exi[...]
Lorsque jai commenc? ? passer mes apr?s-midi dans la salle de bain, je ne comptais pas my installer ; non, je coulais l? des heures agr?ables, m?ditant dans la baignoire avec le sentiment de pertinence miraculeuse que procure la pens?e quil nest nul besoin dexprimer.[...]