There he is, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's natty twenty-nine year old Monsieur on his way to his office where he will carry out his job as a commercial director for Fiat France.
If you're up for action and adventure, thrills and chills, sizzling romance, a rollicking roller coaster ride of corporate intrigue or sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, I'm afraid you must look elsewhere.
One can imagine the fate of Monsieur if Georges Simenon (likewise a novelist from Belgium who wrote in French) picked out Monsieur to be a protagonist for one of his psychological novels (roman durs) - Monsieur would undoubtedly be forced to deal with a disaster that would strip him of comfortable routine and push Monsieur to the edge. Authors, really.
No, no - Jean-Philippe Toussaint does not write that type of novel. Not even close. The author told an interviewer: "Nowadays, the novel is the only literary genre that is visible, available to the public. If I’d lived a century earlier, I probably would have written poetry." We believe you, Jean-Philippe! With its sparse length (100 pages) and precise, clear-cut language sectioned off into short paragraphs on small pages, Monsieur is a tiny step removed from a book of interconnected prose poems.
And most definitely not that type of novel in terms of subject matter. Through character and context, Jean-Philippe Toussaint analyzes our modern, urban life in its most regular, repeatable patterns. We follow Monsieur as his moves and muses at work, in different apartments, visiting a friend, babysitting his nieces, attending a party.
At his Paris office on the sixteenth floor of the Leonardo da Vinci Tower where he's been working for the past three years, Monsieur has become rather well liked within the firm. Monsieur drinks a cup or two of coffee in the morning and usually goes to the ground floor of the building in midmorning, making his way to the cafeteria "where he bought a packet of chips, paprika chips, for example, why not, which he opened while resuming his leisurely walk."
Did you catch the free indirect style in the above quote, that is, the way the third person narrator dips into Monsieur's thoughts? This subtle "why not" sets the tone for the entire novella - unlike the usual deeper plunge into the interior of a character, in Monsieur, the narrator touches Monsieur's mindstream with the lightest of taps, as if patting Monsieur with a feather. And the most frequent of Monsieur's reflections? Monsieur's observation on the quizzical, unexpected behavior of his fellow humans - "people, really."
Regarding Monsieur as a person and his interface with others, Jean-Philippe's presentation is understated but oh, so telling, as per one of his short paragraphs:
"Since they had split up, however, his fiancée and he, it was possible that the Parrains had a few qualms about having him stay on. Monsieur, to tell the truth, would have been hard put to say why his fiancée and he had separated. He had followed the whole thing rather from a distance, in fact, remembering only that the number of things he had been reproached for had seemed to him considerable."
The Parrains are his fiancée and her parents. Monsieur has been living with all three in their apartment. Following the separation, although he continues to maintain good relations with everyone, Monsieur is encouraged to find another abode. Time passes until finally Madame Parrain takes the initiative and locates an apartment in the neighborhood for Monsieur.
Does Monsieur's passivity bring to mind another character from a short European novel? How about Meursault from Albert Camus' classic, L'Étranger? Actually, I can think of others novels, including a couple written by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Certainly reasonable associations since Jean-Philippe stated, "I established myself in a European literary tradition, I could even say a French tradition, which started with Flaubert and ended with the Nouveau Roman, a tradition that paid close attention to style and form."
Monsieur originally published in French in 1986 and then in English in 1991 via John Lambert's fine translation. As noted above, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's literary aesthetic is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Georges Simenon but one thing the two authors share in common: the universality of European culture. This to say, although Monsieur published in the 1980s (there's even a 1990 film based on the novel directed by Jean-Philippe himself), next to nothing would change if the tale were set in either the 1960s or within the past ten years.
This universality also includes snippets of social commentary, as when Monsieur, a formidable player of ping-pong, encounters young Hugo who is tops in the game. "Hugo played with perfect skill, supple and agile, lifting, lifting, smashing - unstoppable. Furious, digging in his heels, Monsieur, another man, an ugly look on his face, pulled up his trouser legs and removed his watch to catch his breath." This scene speaks volumes on how much sports and games mean to us modern people. Book reviewers, really.
So, what makes this brief novel an entertaining, captivating read? A legitimate question since Monsieur is an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and mostly indifferent and distant to everything around him. As Ginger Danto wrote in her review for the New York Times back when the novel was first published, "The things that profoundly disturb others, from losing apartments to losing a would-be wife, affect Monsieur rather like mild indigestion."
Much of the answer lies in the tale's wry humor. No small accomplishment considering lackluster Monsieur. When asked: What makes funny fiction funny?, Jean-Philippe replied, "Work, work, work."
Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, born 1957
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