Self-Portrait Abroad
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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 cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go, we take our own eyes with us...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Toussaint's (The Bathroom) slender, charming travelogue pursues the wistful impressions of a writer as he observes the random passing of time and events in foreign capitals. The narrator is a middle-aged French author, tall and very Prince of Savoie, as he wryly describes himself, touching down briefly in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Berlin, Prague, and Tunisia for meetings with friends and to attend literary functions. His wife, Madeleine, and two children appear fleetingly, but, mostly, we follow the narrator as he, among other things, holds on for dear life on a motorcycle driven by a tour guide through traffic-choked Hanoi; accompanies a passionate Francophile and skillful go-between to a Japanese strip bar; and befriends two stranded women archeologists in Tunisia, who hitch a ride with him to Sfaz, where he gives a reading of his really rather wonderful books. Toussaint is a love-him or hate-him kind of writer, and this book perfectly illustrates why: there's no plot, and the narrator can be seen as either funny, sharply observant, and perhaps ingeniously ironic, or a clueless, narcissistic windbag.
