Katie Assef is another of Susan Bernofsky’s students who very kindly offered to write reviews for Three Percent. Here’s the opening of her review:

In The Truth about Marie, Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint takes us on a journey from Paris to Tokyo, with a sensuous detour to the island of Elba. It’s a book that begins with a thunderstorm and ends in massive forest fires, a love story examined through the lens of a tumultuous breakup. When the novel opens, Marie is spending a night with her new lover, Jean-Christophe, in the apartment she and the unnamed narrator formerly shared. At the same moment, in his apartment a few blocks away, the narrator is making love to a woman about whom we learn only that she, too, is named Marie. A drama will unfold this evening, bringing the ex-lovers back together, if only long enough to move a dresser out of a bedroom.

Readers familiar with Toussaint’s œuvre will recognize these characters: though the book is not exactly a sequel, it is narratively linked to the 2005 novel Fuir (published in the U.S. in 2009 as Running Away, also translated by Matthew B. Smith). The earlier book focuses on the disintegration of the couple’s relationship during a trip to Japan, and The Truth about Marie begins months after their breakup proper. Toussaint beautifully renders that period—for some of us, indefinite—when a relationship has ended, but we continue to live in its atmosphere. The “truth” he describes has little to do with Marie herself; rather, it speaks to the idea that the only stability in love is instability. “I loved her, yes,” the narrator tells us, “It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.”

Click here to read the entire review.

Readers familiar with Toussaint’s œuvre will recognize these characters: though the book is not exactly a sequel, it is narratively linked to the 2005 novel Fuir (published in the U.S. in 2009 as Running Away, also translated by Matthew B. Smith). The earlier book focuses on the disintegration of the couple’s relationship during a trip to Japan, and The Truth about Marie begins months after their breakup proper. Toussaint beautifully renders that period—for some of us, indefinite—when a relationship has ended, but we continue to live in its atmosphere. The “truth” he describes has little to do with Marie herself; rather, it speaks to the idea that the only stability in love is instability. “I loved her, yes,” the narrator tells us, “It may be very imprecise to say I loved her, but nothing could be more precise.”

When the narrator does focus his attention on Marie herself, it’s often in frustration: “. . . Marie always left everything open,” he says, “windows, drawers—it was exasperating, she’d even leave books open, turning them over on her night table next to her when she was done reading.” He wants closure. Toussaint, on the other hand, seems more interested in narrative possibility. The novel follows its own associative logic, and the plot has less of an impact than the dream-state the language creates. On several occasions, the narrator imagines the most intimate details of Marie and Jean-Christophe’s relationship, describing entire scenes he could not possibly have witnessed. It is the tension between the thrilling immediacy of these scenes and the frequent reminders that they are all “made-up” that gives The Truth about Marie its haunting quality. The narrator—like so many people who love and dream—revels not only in his fantasy of the other, but also in the knowledge of his self-deception.

This might give the impression that he is insufferable, but fortunately, the narrator has a sense of humor about his own unreliability. As Beckett once wrote, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” and unhappiness is as familiar to this narrator as weather. It is the particular unhappiness of the scorned lover who clings to his version of events, often willingly obscuring reality. For example, about a third of the way through the novel, the narrator learns that Marie’s new lover’s name is actually Jean-Baptiste, but he continues to refer to the man as Jean-Christophe, providing a comically self-reflexive explanation:

I even suspect I’d done this intentionally so as not to deprive myself of the pleasure of getting his name wrong, not that Jean-Baptiste was a better name, or more elegant, than Jean-Christophe, but the latter simply wasn’t his name [. . . this] jab, however small, however simple, gave me great pleasure (had his name been Simon I’d have called him Pierre, I know myself).

In an interview with Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation, translator Matthew B. Smith discusses Toussaint’s use of humor:

This is one of the main reasons I wanted to translate his work. I think it’s also what sets him apart from other writers. Toussaint uses a certain type of situational humor whose operating principle is actually quite simple. It consists of relating a comic act or absurd situation [. . .]in a markedly flat or unassuming way. Although it sounds simple, I think to actually pull it off and make it funny takes a tremendous amount of skill. After reading and rereading Toussaint, it still remains somewhat of a mystery to me how he makes it seem so effortless.

If it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how Toussaint’s writing makes us laugh, it is even harder to render that humor, with all its nuances, into another language. Grammatically, Smith’s translation keeps the idiosyncrasies of Toussaint’s style intact. In Marie, the most prominent of Toussaint’s stylistic features is the long sentence. Like Proust’s, these sentences can run on for pages, and some translators might be tempted to “smooth out” certain passages by breaking them down. To do so, however, would be a disservice to readers; these sentences are often carefully constructed to mirror the cadences, the rises and falls, of the narrator’s inner voice. Consider one of my favorite passages, in which he describes Marie’s failure to locate her passport at a checkpoint near Tokyo’s Narita airport :

But Marie could never find her passport when she needed it, and, suddenly roused from her reverie, as if caught off guard, her face already betraying the tiresome futility of the search to come, she was overcome by a mad frenzy, that strange mix of panic and goodwill she displays when looking for something, desperately digging through her purse, turning and shaking it in every which way, taking out credit cards, letters, bills, her phone, dropping her sunglasses on the ground, trying to stand in the limousine and twisting around to check her skirt’s back pocket, the pockets of her leather coat, of her sweater, positive she had it with her, that damn passport, but not knowing in which pocket she’d put it, in which bag it could possibly be, twenty-three bags exactly (without counting the plastic sack with the fugu sashimi, in which she also glanced just to be sure)—all in vain, the passport was nowhere to be found.

The breathlessness within these clauses reproduces the narrator’s (and, ostensibly, Marie’s) mental state. We get the sense that, while the narrator is poking fun at Marie here, the franticness of the passage actually reveals his own instability at this moment, as he searches for Marie and is unable to find her. The length of the sentence allows us to experience the way in which sentiment can, without warning, throw a moment into terrible relief. The image of Marie glancing in the plastic bag containing her lunch is funny, but it’s also poignant. And perhaps this is what is most remarkable about Toussaint’s work: it is always driven by compassion and deadpan intelligence, but neither quality upstages the other. His prose is exacting and buoyant, and it never flags. I don’t know how he does it, either, but I do know that this story of love regained and lost is moving and utterly true.

Before the story even begins, Self-Portrait Abroad presents us, for better or worse, with a statement of themes. Departures, arrivals, mingled dread and elation, death, sex, and a modest tone of bemusement, distance, and irony all constitute Toussaint’s mode of apprehending his existence in the world. Place-names give Toussaint his chapter headings: Tokyo, Kyoto, Cap Corse, Tunisia. Our narrator travels from airport to airport; cars drive him from place to place; conference organizers present him with things: flowers, telephones, wine . . . He wanders through a festival in Japan; he plays petanque in Corsica; he has sex in a train in the Czech Republic; he is aroused in a humid car in Tunisia; he sits back in a rickshaw in Hanoi . . . Places exist in this novel only insofar as they give rise to Toussaint’s thoughts on himself. He arrives in Tokyo by plane: “Seen from above, at four thousand feet, there isn’t much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean.” Indeed, from the elevation of Toussaint’s head, there is little difference between the sweat of Hanoi traffic or the amusements of lazing petanque competitors in Cap Corse.

As an author, Jean-Philippe Toussaint is known for the just-so observation; he attempts to sustain this style throughout this latest work, albeit with considerable difficulty. Words which surprise, it seems, have left him: “Taking off our coats we walked side by side in Tokyo under the island sun before stopping at a modern, insipid, and impersonal café.” Even in this single sentence lie clues to the author’s deeper problems. Toussaint tries, in Self-Portrait Abroad, to find meaning in the impersonality of cosmopolitanism by diverting all far-flung experience into his own personal fountain of self-illumination. In doing so, however, he reduces his writing—as opposed to his life—to an even greater insipidness than can be found in any modern café. And yet, Toussaint is not a poor writer; rather, his difficulty in Self-Portrait Abroad, presents itself slowly and, ultimately, reveals itself as the difficulty of a man writing, who has lost, by the end, his need to write.

The author finds himself in Hanoi where “the traffic . . . is like life itself, generous inexhaustible, dynamic, in permanent motion, constant imbalance and slipping into its midst and become one with the chaos gives you an intense feeling of being alive.” He tells us that, “very often, seated in the back of a cycle rickshaw, I let myself be carried along the streets of Hanoi for hours at a time, abandoning myself to the random succession of crossroads and avenues.” Toussaint drags himself everywhere, but never sees the people and places that make up the world; rather, he is concerned only with painting his self-portrait, so to speak. Thus, the novel’s scenes are jarring: the author, of course, can afford to abandon himself, to let himself go with the flow of traffic in which he sees life. The rickshaw driver, however, whom Toussaint barely perceives, cannot abandon himself so easily: the driver can see what he likes in the flow of traffic, but unlike our author, he has no choice whether to flow or not. If the traffic in Hanoi is chaos, it is only because Toussaint refuses to distinguish, to give name and understanding to the logic of the crossroads and avenues, to the undiscovered logic of the human lives around him. Instead, Toussaint sits stunned by a realization of his own inner logic.

Sitting in his little rickshaw, Toussaint comes to grips with time and death; the traffic is like water in a torrential riverbed, never meeting any obstacles, always avoiding them, sweeping them around and continuing on its way, ever curving, always find new directions and advancing without resisting or forcing anything, imposing on nothing and nevertheless irresistible, imperious, with the force of the wind, the necessity of the tides.

The description, as it starts, could easily describe Toussaint himself: avoiding all hardship, never resisting, only taking advantage of his own freedom for some momentary pleasure, never confronting the world as it is. Toussaint apologizes, in a sense, for this state of affairs: his non-committal bystanderism is as irresistible as the tides. And yet, although even great art cannot solve crises, art can nevertheless bind us together by its own force; it can reveal new truths about the world and the self which can lay the foundation for existence in the world. Toussaint, however, perverts this aspect of art by stealing the possibility of revelation, through travel, for himself—his travels don’t illuminate us or the world, but rather only provide a weak glow, as from a space-heater, that he can purr beside, without ever opening his eyes.

At times, Toussaint’s writing retains its former charm:

I suddenly became aware looking out the window that it was neither day or night outside, but simultaneously day and night, and that to the right of the plane I could see the moon, shining in the sky in-line with the wing, as well as the sun, far out in front of us, which for the moment was still just a blurred pink and orange glow similar to the cottony contours of a Rothko, lighting up the horizon of the immense sky divided evenly into day and night, into Europe and Asia.

The rest of the passengers in Toussaint’s plane are asleep; the buzz of globalization cannot conquer the hum of a peaceful sleep. Toussaint’s grappling with this paradox of time and place in the face of globalization, however, never comes to fruition. Toussaint ignores the essential paradox of globalization, that while one group of people have become stupendously mobile, losing their ties to time and place, scouring the globe for the least sign of self-discovery, another, larger, group of people have become even more immobile, tied to poverty, to whom Toussaint’s self-portrait would present a laughable enigma. Toussaint retreats further into himself rather than confront the mingling of Europe and Asia; the sky suggests a Rothko, but only insofar as Toussaint can delude himself into an appreciation of nature, one not informed by a willing opening up of the self to new experience, but to the channeling of novel experience into long eroded paths.

So what are we to make of this series of half-funny impressions, muted realizations, and cut-off narratives?

By the end of the novel, Toussaint reveals that in his past, writing had indeed been a way of resisting time, a way of making scratch marks on the river-bed. But that time, he tells us, is over. Now, he realizes how fully powerless he is against time; he is as impotent to slow his progress downstream as his writing is impotent to move us. For a novel cannot allow itself to be carried forward, the novel is that which carries us forward. The tragedy of Toussaint is that he has convinced himself that writing, in the face of death, can only be brief amusement and dry anecdotes, questioning, to the point of self-destruction, its own importance. He has lost in the river of time the knowledge that all writers must possess to continue on, that writing is not important in itself but that writing grants its own importance, by the breadth of its scope, by the abysses it reveals, the pleasures it denies, the joy it hints to, by the moving secrets that echo in the throat of the author and in the stomach of the reader. Writing which doesn’t believe in itself is always insipid.

Yet the failure of Toussaint the novelist is a victory for Toussaint the human being. His novel is a record—for those who read it—of the self-discovery that Toussaint does not need writing to live; that the appreciation of life is enough for him. In that sense, Self-Portrait Abroad, is, at times, moving, but only in the way a conversation with a man finally content with himself might be, not in the way of great art. Its value lies in staging the tension, which all artists must deal with, between life and art. Indeed, although the writer is dead, the man lives on.

On a random note, assuming I finish writing my review of Patrik Ourednik’s Case Closed by Friday, we’ll have reviewed three Dalkey books in two weeks . . .

Anyway, most (in English) are available from Dalkey and I’d highly recommend and

Matthew Weiss is a new reviewer for us and will hopefully be writing more in the near future. Here’s the opening of his review:

“Every time I travel I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether).”

Before the story even begins, Self-Portrait Abroad presents us, for better or worse, with a statement of themes. Departures, arrivals, mingled dread and elation, death, sex, and a modest tone of bemusement, distance, and irony all constitute Toussaint’s mode of apprehending his existence in the world. Place-names give Toussaint his chapter headings: Tokyo, Kyoto, Cap Corse, Tunisia. Our narrator travels from airport to airport; cars drive him from place to place; conference organizers present him with things: flowers, telephones, wine . . . He wanders through a festival in Japan; he plays petanque in Corsica; he has sex in a train in the Czech Republic; he is aroused in a humid car in Tunisia; he sits back in a rickshaw in Hanoi . . . Places exist in this novel only insofar as they give rise to Toussaint’s thoughts on himself. He arrives in Tokyo by plane: “Seen from above, at four thousand feet, there isn’t much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean.” Indeed, from the elevation of Toussaint’s head, there is little difference between the sweat of Hanoi traffic or the amusements of lazing petanque competitors in Cap Corse.

As an author, Jean-Philippe Toussaint is known for the just-so observation; he attempts to sustain this style throughout this latest work, albeit with considerable difficulty. Words which surprise, it seems, have left him: “Taking off our coats we walked side by side in Tokyo under the island sun before stopping at a modern, insipid, and impersonal café.” Even in this single sentence lie clues to the author’s deeper problems. Toussaint tries, in Self-Portrait Abroad, to find meaning in the impersonality of cosmopolitanism by diverting all far-flung experience into his own personal fountain of self-illumination. In doing so, however, he reduces his writing—as opposed to his life—to an even greater insipidness than can be found in any modern café. And yet, Toussaint is not a poor writer; rather, his difficulty in Self-Portrait Abroad, presents itself slowly and, ultimately, reveals itself as the difficulty of a man writing, who has lost, by the end, his need to write.

Click here to read the full review.

Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Matthew B. Smith. (France, Dalkey Archive Press)

is one of three Dalkey Archive Press titles that made the Best Translated Book of 2008 list (along with I’d Like and Homage to Czerny), and one of four Jean-Philippe Toussaint books that Dalkey currently has in print (the others are The Bathroom, Television, and Monsieur, with Running Away due out in 2010).

Toussaint is a strange, affecting writer. Nothing really happens in any of his books, or at least no “exciting” events like you find in a lot of plot-heavy books—in this one, a self-obsessed man falls in love with the woman from a driver’s ed office, they fall in love, they go on vacation, he finds a camera on a ship—but that’s sort of the point. The focus of his novels is more on the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind (workings which are usually a bit off, in a captivating, humorous sort of way), rather than external events that befall him.

In the afterword included in Camera, Toussaint describes this novel as “the description of a condition, the condition of someone’s place in the world. The book progressively shifts from the ‘struggle of living’ to the ‘despair of being.’ “ Sticking with the theoretical (sic) for a moment, Toussaint then goes on to explain the underlying program of this novel:

Yes, you’re right, it’s a manifesto, a program. I don’t know how aware of this I was. But still, it took me over a month to write the first paragraph. [. . .] It’s a very impertinent opening. I’m responding very offhandedly to Kafka’s famous aphorism: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world,” with “In the fight between you and reality, be discouraging.” So yes, it’s a manifesto, but it isn’t a theoretical essay or piece; it’s there, in the book itself, int he opening paragraph of the book, as a theory in action. Underlying my novel is, although it isn’t express theoretically, an idea of literature focused on the insignificant, on the banal, on the mundane, the “not interesting,” the “not edifying,” on lulls in time, on marginal events, which are usually excluded from literature and are not dealt with in books.

Don’t let this emphasis on the “uninteresting” dissuade you though—Camera, like all of Toussaint’s books, is a very funny, very charming novel. That first paragraph that Toussaint alludes to is a great example:

It was about at the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that in my immediate horizon two events came about, events that, taken separately, were of hardly any interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way. As it happens I had just decided to learn how to drive, and I had barely begun to get used to this idea when some news reached me by mail: a long-lost friend, in a letter composed with a typewriter, a rather old typewriter, had informed me he was getting married. Now, personally, if there’s one thing that terrifies me, it’s long-lost friends.

Over at editor Martin Riker explains his view of Toussaint and why Dalkey brought out three books by Toussaint this year:

There’s something very exciting about publishing several of an author’s books together. Instead of putting a single work out into the world, you’re putting into the world a whole way of seeing. You’re saying: This is not just about a book. Here’s a writer who is doing something beyond mere temporary curiosity. This is the real thing, an actual innovation, literature finding a new way to relate to life.

This is why, in the jacket copy for Camera, I refer to Toussaint as a “comic Camus for the twenty-first century.” It isn’t because Toussaint’s writing reminds me of Camus’s stylistically, but because Toussaint offers something that Camus once offered: a new way to think about the experience of being. Though both comic and compelling, Toussaint’s “being” is also quite strange, and at times disorienting. Something often seems to be missing, and indeed something often is.