Scan barcode
A review by dukegregory
The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier
5.0
Stressed me out! A glacially paced thriller that surprised me. The plot is lovely. Very Funny Games without being totally like Funny Games. Mauvignier is a sadist. Or I'm a masochist. Because the deluge of information as told via hefty multiclausal sentences piles and piles and piles on until it feels unbearably heavy, like being buried alive. Mauvignier rarely lets you come up for air. The novel evades expectations by fixating on its characters' interiorities and describing an abundance of external detail. Just an amazing time. Made my heart rate quicken.
Mauvignier makes a novel that so easily could be simply about class into something more dynamic. Class hierarchy collapses and becomes more of a shorthand for a character's background rather than an essential trait. The Birthday Party is about the manner in which we live our lives: constantly pondering an uncertain future and concretized past. So much is going on here regarding perception, subjectivity, self-loathing, identity, art-making, assumptions about French fly-over country, cinema's effect on the way action is conceived in literature, marriage, love and lust, and, probably the most important, the plausibility of liberty (or lack thereof?).
Mauvignier makes a novel that so easily could be simply about class into something more dynamic. Class hierarchy collapses and becomes more of a shorthand for a character's background rather than an essential trait. The Birthday Party is about the manner in which we live our lives: constantly pondering an uncertain future and concretized past. So much is going on here regarding perception, subjectivity, self-loathing, identity, art-making, assumptions about French fly-over country, cinema's effect on the way action is conceived in literature, marriage, love and lust, and, probably the most important, the plausibility of liberty (or lack thereof?).