"A little thing happened to me. Which could have just as easily happened to you. You re on vacation in a hotel with your son in a small village and you re about to go see some friends, but something holds you back, a mysterious reticence that prevents you
The amusingly odd protagonist and narrator of Jean-Philippe Toussaint's novel is an academic on sabbatical in Berlin to work on his book about Titian. With his research completed, all he has left to do is sit down and write. Unfortunately, he can't decide
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
A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at an a
Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language lit
Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whosedaily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if notunremarkable. Meet his secretary, his nieces, his fiancée and herparents, his neighbor whose scientific reports Monsieu
In this improbable love story, Toussaint creates a character who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he might do or think otherwise. What happens?
