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Publisher Description
The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first time
Éric Chevillard is one of France’s leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire—with some good-natured postmodern twists.
This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel’s cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip.
Throughout, Chevillard’s powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze—initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic—manages time and again to defamiliarize the familiar with a coherent and charismatic charm. Daniel Levin Becker’s translation deftly renders the marvels of the original, and a foreword by Daniel Medin offers rich contextual commentary, making a vital wing of French literature and humor newly accessible in English.
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French novelist Chevillard (The Valiant Little Tailor) delivers a spellbinding essay collection that is as funny as it is unclassifiable. The brief pieces offer winking, curmudgeonly commentary on such mundane topics as the sky ("Nothing good comes from the sky; not hail, that little buckshot of iceberg... nor the lightning that roasts us where we stand") and staircases ("What a dim opinion we must have of our own wits to cede to the staircase the responsibility of bringing us up!"). In the surreal "Moles," Chevillard's narrator recounts listening to a high school teacher brag about how as a child he used to throw moles into his neighbor Samuel Beckett's garden. "Autofiction" uses masturbation as an extended metaphor for writing to reflect on the eponymous genre: "The main challenge is to forget the way we were taught to ejaculate and recapture the innocent joy of that first stroke." Chevillard's humor is a mix of Seinfeldian observation and Monty Python–esque zaniness ("A frying pan, imperturbably a frying pan, as though we were about to go on frying and indeed do nothing but fry, never stop frying again!"). These beguiling and genre-defying pieces elucidate the strangeness of the everyday.
