Monsieur by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Monsieur Reviews

• 
  Glenn Russell

  
  
  
  There he is, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's natty twenty-nine year old Monsieur on his way to his office where he will carry out his job as a commercial director for Fiat France.
  
  If you're up for action and adventure, thrills and chills, sizzling romance, a rollicking roller coaster ride of corporate intrigue or sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, I'm afraid you must look elsewhere.
  
  One can imagine the fate of Monsieur if Georges Simenon (likewise a novelist from Belgium who wrote in French) picked out Monsieur to be a protagonist for one of his psychological novels (roman durs) - Monsieur would undoubtedly be forced to deal with a disaster that would strip him of comfortable routine and push Monsieur to the edge. Authors, really.
  
  No, no - Jean-Philippe Toussaint does not write that type of novel. Not even close. The author told an interviewer: "Nowadays, the novel is the only literary genre that is visible, available to the public. If I’d lived a century earlier, I probably would have written poetry." We believe you, Jean-Philippe! With its sparse length (100 pages) and precise, clear-cut language sectioned off into short paragraphs on small pages, Monsieur is a tiny step removed from a book of interconnected prose poems.
  
  And most definitely not that type of novel in terms of subject matter. Through character and context, Jean-Philippe Toussaint analyzes our modern, urban life in its most regular, repeatable patterns. We follow Monsieur as his moves and muses at work, in different apartments, visiting a friend, babysitting his nieces, attending a party.
  
  At his Paris office on the sixteenth floor of the Leonardo da Vinci Tower where he's been working for the past three years, Monsieur has become rather well liked within the firm. Monsieur drinks a cup or two of coffee in the morning and usually goes to the ground floor of the building in midmorning, making his way to the cafeteria "where he bought a packet of chips, paprika chips, for example, why not, which he opened while resuming his leisurely walk."
  
  Did you catch the free indirect style in the above quote, that is, the way the third person narrator dips into Monsieur's thoughts? This subtle "why not" sets the tone for the entire novella - unlike the usual deeper plunge into the interior of a character, in Monsieur, the narrator touches Monsieur's mindstream with the lightest of taps, as if patting Monsieur with a feather. And the most frequent of Monsieur's reflections? Monsieur's observation on the quizzical, unexpected behavior of his fellow humans - "people, really."
  
  Regarding Monsieur as a person and his interface with others, Jean-Philippe's presentation is understated but oh, so telling, as per one of his short paragraphs:
  
  "Since they had split up, however, his fiancée and he, it was possible that the Parrains had a few qualms about having him stay on. Monsieur, to tell the truth, would have been hard put to say why his fiancée and he had separated. He had followed the whole thing rather from a distance, in fact, remembering only that the number of things he had been reproached for had seemed to him considerable."
  
  The Parrains are his fiancée and her parents. Monsieur has been living with all three in their apartment. Following the separation, although he continues to maintain good relations with everyone, Monsieur is encouraged to find another abode. Time passes until finally Madame Parrain takes the initiative and locates an apartment in the neighborhood for Monsieur.
  
  Does Monsieur's passivity bring to mind another character from a short European novel? How about Meursault from Albert Camus' classic, L'Étranger? Actually, I can think of others novels, including a couple written by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Certainly reasonable associations since Jean-Philippe stated, "I established myself in a European literary tradition, I could even say a French tradition, which started with Flaubert and ended with the Nouveau Roman, a tradition that paid close attention to style and form."
  
  Monsieur originally published in French in 1986 and then in English in 1991 via John Lambert's fine translation. As noted above, Jean-Philippe Toussaint's literary aesthetic is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Georges Simenon but one thing the two authors share in common: the universality of European culture. This to say, although Monsieur published in the 1980s (there's even a 1990 film based on the novel directed by Jean-Philippe himself), next to nothing would change if the tale were set in either the 1960s or within the past ten years.
  
  This universality also includes snippets of social commentary, as when Monsieur, a formidable player of ping-pong, encounters young Hugo who is tops in the game. "Hugo played with perfect skill, supple and agile, lifting, lifting, smashing - unstoppable. Furious, digging in his heels, Monsieur, another man, an ugly look on his face, pulled up his trouser legs and removed his watch to catch his breath." This scene speaks volumes on how much sports and games mean to us modern people. Book reviewers, really.
  
  So, what makes this brief novel an entertaining, captivating read? A legitimate question since Monsieur is an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and mostly indifferent and distant to everything around him. As Ginger Danto wrote in her review for the New York Times back when the novel was first published, "The things that profoundly disturb others, from losing apartments to losing a would-be wife, affect Monsieur rather like mild indigestion."
  
  Much of the answer lies in the tale's wry humor. No small accomplishment considering lackluster Monsieur. When asked: What makes funny fiction funny?, Jean-Philippe replied, "Work, work, work."
  
  
  Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, born 1957
• 
  Kelly

  A quiet little book, Monsieur is a series of vignettes that describes a brief time in the life of an introverted, quiet man. Monsieur is a man of set habits, mild speech, and socially awkward worries. Over the course of the story, several things occur that Monsieur seems to passively agree to let happen to him, with intermittently amusing results. Topics as diverse as the scientific properties of crystals, a lycee in Chartres before the war, physics and time and the soothing capacity of stars are addressed in spare, somewhat disconnected and isolated prose that shows a clear admiration forthe French existentialist masters of the 1950s.
  
  However, this book is far too slight to be compared to those works in anything other than it's clear stylistic heritage. Yet it does have its own virtues. There is an improbable flow to this book despite its disconnected, seemingly somewhat random nature. Toussaint has a way with syntax that allows him to create instantly vivid pictures in the reader's mind with a minimum amount of words. Finally, Monsieur's awkward innocence can be occasionally affecting:
  
  "At Saint-Sulpice Square they sat down on a bench and stayed there for a long moment one next to the other, in perfect silence. The mind's eye, said Monsieur after awhile, the mind's eye. I'm sorry, said Anna Bruckhardt, a bit surprised. No, nothing, said Monsieur. Yes, something, said Anna Bruckhardt. Sight, said Monsieur. The mind's eye, yes. In the opinion of science at least, he added for the sake of honesty, and included with a vague hand motion the Copenhagen interpretation, the Tutti Quanta theory and all that. According to Pirgogine, in fact, quantum theory destroys the notion that physical description can be accurate and that its language can represent the properties of a system independently of observational conditions. Well, well. Beside him on the bench, in perfect evidence, was Anna Bruckhardt's hand."
  
  Didn't that make you smile, just a little bit? This is a book that can and should be finished in one setting on a lazy Sunday afternoon just before the time comes to get up to start dinner. While I don't think that I will, ultimately, find the work itself very memorable, I will remember the mood of still introspection that it induced and may revisit it just to find that again, with Monsieur.
• 
  Nathanimal

  There's something strange going on in Toussaint. I haven't quite put my finger on it yet, but I love it. Is it the accumulative effect of reading three of his books now, or is it this particular book — I find myself not just a happy reader anymore; I've become infected by Toussaint's peculiar turn of mind, and I need to get a little closer to understanding the main crisis at work in his stories. (Is there a main crisis?) My theory is that this book is a reaction to the mundane rituals and language and objects that eat up so much of our lives, that leave us feeling, somehow, vaguely compromised. Monsieur is not going to take it lying down, though, not him. There's a cheeky aloofness to him that may or may not be a well-veiled contempt for modern living. . . . But then again I don't know. Probably the take-home lesson here is not to make to big a deal of it.
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  A charming story evoking
  The Stranger, with more whimsy and less existential meat.
• 
  Greg

  Very French. Cold and impersonal for most of the book, but interesting it it's strangely disinterested manner of delving deeply into the life of a person only known in the book as Monsieur. Like Beckett in someways, but with science thrown in, which I think is supposed to be important, but I just didn't spend enough time thinking about the ramifications of quantum theory on the narrative structure of the book. My loss I'm sure.
• 
  Adam

  Toussaint's unassuming hero--known only as Monsieur--embodies what Taoism terms the "uncarved block." Apparently simple-minded and utterly passive, he nevertheless keeps his head above water without effort and comes out of even the worst situations displaying a mystifying sense of contentment. He's a little bit Winnie-the-Pooh, a little bit silent film comedian, and all enigma.
• 
  Burak Kuscu

  Ne zaman başladı, ne zaman bitti, ne anlattı anlayamadığım bir kitaptı. Mösyö karakteri gerçekten tam bir anti-kahraman. Hiçbir ekstra özelliği yok fakat yine de "bizden biri" hissini vermeyecek kadar toplumun da dışında. Mösyö'nün arka kapakta modern Oblomov çağrışımı yaptığının söylenme sebebini ise anlayamadım. Oblomov'la ilişkisini yakalayamadım açıkçası. Bir kere hareket etmekten ölesiye kaçınan bir tarafı yok. Sadece kayıtsız bir karakter o kadar.
  
  Baskısı olmayan, pek de satmamış bir eser Mösyö. Metni okuyunca gölgede kalmaya devam eder hissi peydahlandı içimde.
  
  Pek beğenmedim.
• 
  S̶e̶a̶n̶

  
  For some reason this sent me into an unforeseen spiral of despair over the futility of the star rating system. So no stars for you, Monsieur. (But I did like you.)
• 
  Justin Evans

  C'est la vie. It's actually refreshing to have a novel where the lack of a gimmick is the gimmick.
• 
  belisa

  hafif kitaplar daha kolay okunuyor...
  
  bana yeni bir şey söylemiyor yani benim daha önce okuduklarımı okumamışsanız Mösyö size ilginç gelebilir...
• 
  Yiğit Mobidillian

  Yalnızlığı kovalayan, çeşitli monoton yaşantılardan sıkılan bir adam Mösyö. Ne eski sevgisi ne de eski yaşama ve iş üstünde uğraşma isteği... o bir aylak. Sıkılgan tavırları suratından akan, kendini anlayacak birine rastlamayı kurtuluş olarak benimseyen bir adam. Kendisinin en iyi dostunun kendisinden başka kimsenin olmayacağını, rahat ve gezgin yaşantısıyla kendisini tatmin edeceğini bilen: cebini boş tutmayan âlâ bir işe sahip, terasta her gün özlediği rahatlığa gece ulaşan biri.
  
  Süregelen basit ve duygusuz hayatında en ufak bir sevgiyle karşılaşınca, sevginin değerinin "altın" kadar değerli olduğunu hayatıyla anlatan bir adam Mösyö.
• 
  Jim

  
  (This review originally appeared on the literay weblog The Elegant Variation on June 16, 2008 aka Bloomsday, which is why it repeatedly references
  James Joyce's Ulysses.)
  
  Although June 16 is called Bloomsday after the chief protagonist of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, you could be forgiven for forgetting about poor old Leopold.
  
  After all, Ulysses’ first hundred pages or so are dominated by Stephen Dedalus, a stretch so stylistically baroque many readers skip ahead to Molly Bloom’s saucy monologue at the end of the book, which most regard as the novel’s most accessible chapter. Then there are those who will tell you that the true central figure of Ulysses is none other than Dublin herself.
  
  Joyce’s chief objective in Ulysses was to create the most complete character in all of literature. Part of the reason why there are so many parallels with Homer’s The Odyssey is because Joyce viewed Odysseus as the man Bloom must surpass if he was to stand the test of time—an Everyman for the ages.
  
  In Monsieur, which was published in France in 1986 and has been brought back into print in English by Dalkey Archive Press, Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint has created an Everyman who is every bit as quirky and compelling as Leopold Bloom—only we know a considerably less about Monsieur than we do about Bloom. Indeed, we don’t even know his name.
  
  Monsieur, we are told, is one of the top Commercial Directors for Fiat France. What that means is irrelevant for what Monsieur does best is escape notice, avoid attention, and work as little as humanly possible. “Monsieur displayed in all things a listless drive.” Ergo Everyman—at least from nine to five.
  
  If Monsieur is invisible at work, he has a knack for getting into trouble once he leaves the office. Scrupulously polite and honest to a fault, Monsieur gets pulled into scenarios he’d rather avoid. He detests confrontations but is blind to the ways he provokes them and Toussaint is remarkably adroit at mining this territory for its comic possibilities.
  
  For instance, when Monsieur moves into a new apartment, he is shanghaied by his neighbor into taking dictation for a treatise on, of all things, mineralology. Initially, Monsieur throws himself into the work so as to be done with it as quickly as possible and the narrative is peppered with the occasional, if not inscrutable, paragraph about geological specimens; but as the project drags on and on, Monsieur’s dictation becomes both stilted and literal:
  
  The interpretation of Greek terms employed to identify the exterior forms of crystals—yoo-hoo are you listening—is in point of fact easy, if not immediate, and presents no difficulty, even for the layman.
  
  No, no difficulty at all for Monsieur but, like Bartleby before him, he’d prefer not to. For Monsieur the only thing worse than working on the book is the prospect of telling his collaborator that he doesn’t want to do it anymore. So he does the only logical thing: he moves.
  
  Like Monsieur, Toussaint’s prose is confounded with contradictions. The writing is stark but dense, elegant yet strangely choppy. It's almost as if Toussaint doesn't want to provide the reader with an unobstructed view of his subject. Even though Monsieur comes off as hapless, he’s imbued with a weirdly magnetic charm the reader is powerless to resist. We never know what Monsieur wants, but we hope he gets it.
  
  One reason for this is Toussaint’s predilection for quandaries of the quotidian. In the afterward to Television, a book that explores the implications of a writer’s decision to stop watching television, originally published in 1997 and re-released in English (again by Dalkey) in 2004, Warren Mott writes:
  
  The fictional worlds that Jean-Philippe Toussaint creates are pleasantly quirky ones, worlds where hopelessly benighted humans struggle with the small vexations of everyday life and where those struggles, described in lavish (and indeed obsessive) detail, gradually assume the proportions of an epic.
  
  As for the accusation that Toussaint traffics in slow motion slapstick and literary situational comedy, he stands guilty as charged; however, he pulls it off with an economy of language one wouldn’t think possible given the unrelenting banality of his subjects and his stories never fail to surprise. Indeed, after Toussaint the work of other so-called stylists seems predictable, labored, and bare.
  
  Joyce would have bristled at such a comparison, but Bloom would have found in Monsieur a fellow practitioner of the art of avoiding conflict.
  
  
• 
  Agoaye Martin

  Fragments de vie d'un homme ordinaire, parfois même insipide et lâche... En fait il ne se passe pas grand chose dans ce roman pourtant plutôt bien écrit.
  Bref, un petit côté vide mais joli quand même, comme un oiseau empaillé...
• 
  Peter Zuppardo

  Afuckingmazing. "At the office, when things weren't busy, Monsieur went downstairs to the cafeteria and read the paper. Across from him in the glass entrance hall, here and there, small flower pots boasted benjamina or papyrus, and two or three receptionists, quite another matter, talked on the telephone behind the circular counter. Often, before going back up to his office, Monsieur, going round the counter, good afternoon ladies, stood for a while in front of the aquarium and watched the fish with his hands in his pockets, never tiring of contemplating the inaccessible purity of the trajectories they traced with such languor."
• 
  Laurent De Maertelaer

  Knappe, minimalistische vertelling over een slome moderne man zonder wil of wilskracht. Er gebeurt weinig of niets in deze roman, maar Toussaint slaagt er op wonderlijke wijze toch in de aandacht van de lezer vast te houden. Ik zag ooit - met plezier - de film die Toussaint maakte van zijn eigen roman: dus toen ik een tijd terug tijdens het boekenjagen de roman in handen kreeg, graaide ik die meteen mee. Boek en film, dik in orde.
• 
  Adam Dalva

  Not my favorite of Toussaint's - it lacks the romance and wanderlust of his best novellas - but, as ever, his writing is hypnotic and his eye toward crafting scenes is excellent. There are some charming surprises in this lean narrative, which is a bit like The Mezzanine mixed with Bartelby the Scrivener, though not quite as thrilling as that combination sounds. For the completionists.
• 
  Christopher

  Toussaint is my favorite discovery this year. When I was working in a Tower Records and was duelling with some other guy to see who could be the most pretentious retailer, they brought in a book by a guy I'd never heard of. It looked ridiculous. It was someone only a fucking cool kid would have liked. I was steaming. He played Toto and Brian Wilson on continuous repeat. He was anti-cool. I knew he had won.
  
  For nearly 20 years I have struggled to remember who it was and what book it was when I stumbled on a funny review on one of my favorite books so far this year. I creeped on that person's account, clicked 'follow' and scanned recent reads. And there it was, a book they had just finished had an author who caught my eye. I couldn't quite place the name. The last name started with a 'T' and was French-y. I looked at their bibliography and there it was: THE BATHROOM. I couldn't believe it - this was it. I had found it. This is my third book by him this year and they have all been a treat.
  
  Makes me wish I was friendlier to that other guy back in the day. Would love to talk to him about Toussaint. Youth...
• 
  François

  Ik hou erg van de stijl van Toussaint, ook al gebeurt er weinig in zijn romans.
• 
  Jimmy Jones

  Ok so nothing happens the whole book and not in a good way like Beckett. Maybe it’s all lost in translation.
• 
  Jayden gonzalez

  i liked when he would just get up and leave
• 
  edmondegreen

  Good book
• 
  Memed Koz

  Kötü.
  Bir iki durum komedisi an ve diyalog var, fena olmayan. Ama kitabın bütününü sevemedim, okurken pek keyif alamadım. Bu kitaptan 45 dk'lık absürt Fransız filmi çıkar, o kadar. Filmi seyredersin belki ama kitap benim açımdan iyi değil.
  Bugüne değin hep beğeneceğimi bildiğim kitaplar aldım, burada da yıldızlar verirken bonkör davrandım o yüzden. Bu kitabı Ayrıntı Yayınları'nın indirimli kitaplar kampanyası içinde 1.5 TL olarak (yazıyla birbuçuk) gördüğüm için almıştım.
  İsteyene kargo ile hediye edebilirim.
• 
  Matthew Thompson

  The distinctly uneventful narrative of a nameless protagonist's day-to-day-to-day routine. Monsieur, who stumbles into situation after situation without control or ill-will is a kind of silent comedian here as he somersaults through the storyline, each tumble more absurd than the last. Major plot lines include a bruised arm, some serious ping-pong playing, and inadvertently co-authoring an unfinished book on mineralogy. For fans of Jim Jarmusch, Talking Heads lyrics and Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot
• 
  Tom

  A dead-pan comedy about an apparently affectless man, Monsieur, a cipher who seemingly is buffeted along the course of his life, often passively giving in to demands placed upon him by strangers, family members, and his employer. But Monsieur is intelligent, if befuddled by the need to speak and act. His work has been apparently compared to that of Beckett and Jarmusch, and rightfully so: all is absurdity. And yet, for Monsieur, in the end, once can still find melancholy joy.
• 
  Pelin Okumuş

  Kendi küçük dünyasına sıkışmış bireyın yavaş ve yalnız ilerleyen yaşamından bir kesit anlatıyor kitap.
  Herşey olması gerektiği gibi ...İşi evi nişanlısı ...Dayatılan seylere pasif direniş ise sandalyeye oturup oylece durma süresinin atması ile oluyor.
  
  
• 
  Whodunnit

  quaint, secretly (touching?) quirky
• 
  John

  an elegant souffle.