Reviews

Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

shimmer's review

4.0

There's a scene in Toussaint's earlier novel Running Away in which the protagonist is riding a train in China while on a phone call to France, so simultaneously existing in two places at once yet also, somehow, in no place. Self Portrait Abroad felt like a book-length exploration of moments like that one: getting the news of one's home village while in Japan, moments of pending arrival and looming departure, moments in transit, or of having just arrived but not yet made sense of where. There's a phenomenal scene in which the narrator struggles to direct a German butcher to slice aspic to the correct thickness, and the knife moves back and forth, circling the Platonic ideal of an aspic slice, but never quite finding it. That's what the book felt like: moments of almost being somewhere, so almost being a whole someone while fending off the passage of time and approach of death through travel and near-permanent absence. The exception is a chapter subtitled, "the best day of my life," about a local boules tournament; it's the only chapter that stays focused on one place and time, without digression through travel or memory the desire to be somewhere else, yet it's fleeting—coming early in the novel, it feels more like something lost than something found, something the narrator is sadly falling away from rather than building toward as it easily could have been (had the book been a different book composed of the same scenes).

piccoline's review

4.0

Toussaint sneaks up on you. I hope he still sneaks up on you, even when I've warned you. I was enjoying this book, finding it a little light perhaps, but enjoying it. Then he got me, in those last five pages. It all snaps tight, and he's got you. Very nice work.

_Television_ and _Making Love_ are probably better places to start with him, but I'm quite happy that so many more of his works have made their way into English.