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A "frank and wry, mad and graceful" (Slate) true story about getting dumped, and getting over it.
When the phone rang on a cold November afternoon in 1990, Grégoire Bouillier had no way of knowing that the caller was the woman who had left him, without warning, five years before. And he couldn't have guessed why she was calling: not to say she was sorry, not to explain why she'd vanished from his life, but to invite him to a party. A birthday party. For a woman he'd never met.
Here is the unlikely but true account of how one man got over a broken heart, regained his faith in literature, participated-by mistake-in a work of performance art, threw away his turtlenecks, spent his rent money on a 1964 bordeaux that nobody ever drank, and fell in love again. Named one of the year's best books by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle when it first appeared in English, The Mystery Guest is a "darkly hilarious . . . odyssey . . . that wends its loopy way toward yes" (O, the Oprah Magazine).
A propos de l'auteur
Grégoire Bouillier was born in Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, and raised in Paris. A former editor of the magazine
Science et Vie, he is the author of four works of autobiography, including
Report on Myself and
Le Dossier M. Having worked as a painter and journalist, he published his first memoir,
The Mystery Guest, when he was forty years old.
Résumé
A “frank and wry, mad and graceful” (Slate) true story about getting dumped, and getting over it.
Commentaire
"By its second paragraph, Boullier's ex-who left him suddenly and apparently cruelly some years earlier-has called to invite him to her friend's birthday party . . . In the kind of perfectly ironic detail that could only come directly from real life, he decides to distinguish himself by spending more than a month's rent on a bottle of 1964 Margaux, only to learn that as part of her artistic practice, Calle keeps all of her birthday gifts in storage in their original wrapping . . . It is a tightly written portrait of the artist as a young(ish) mess, and its ingenuity lies in its positioning of the 'mystery guest' as an idealized state that exists in diametric opposition to the thoroughly unmysterious position of the ex-lover . . . His problem-much to our delight, since this dilemma is what lends the book its jittery edge-is that he cannot be mysterious to save his life." Philippa Snow Bookforum
