Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Meet his secretary, his nieces, his fiancee and her parents, his neighbor whose scientific reports Monsieur unwittingly types out. What will happen? This and that. Monsieur will attend a party. He will babysit. But most of all, Monsieur will muse, and so will you muse, on everything from the night sky to a Rotring pen. And it will be very funny. Here Toussaint turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, an unremarkable anti-hero into a deadpan...
Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if not unremarkable....
In "Self-Portrait Abroad," our narrator--a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself--travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan's historic Nara, gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter on the road from Tunis to Sfax. Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a strangely familiar world, "Self-Portrait Abroad" casts the entire globe in a...
In "Self-Portrait Abroad," our narrator--a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself--travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere wi...
