Grégoire Bouillier
L'invitato Misterioso

One Sunday five years earlier she had left him without an explanation. One Sunday five years later she calls him to invite him to a party: a well-known artist friend of hers is celebrating her birthday by inviting as many people as the years she is turning, plus a mysterious guest, who serves as a physical metaphor for the coming year. He is offered the possibility of taking on the extravagant role. Grégoire accepts with a somber tone, devoid of enthusiasm, but meanwhile, his mind explodes with conjectures and interpretations, because this must be, inevitably, the occasion on which she will finally clarify those five years of abandonment. Grégoire finds the explanation, but it is enigmatic, a mental puzzle that gives a novelistic hope to the sad reality.

It's 1990, late September, or perhaps it's already October, anyway on the day of Michel Leiris' death, an important writer for the French, all the more for a French aspiring writer. The phone call that awakens the astonished Bouillier unleashes an avalanche of words that roll frantically, rest occasionally, then resume their run and drag the reader into a sarcastic glimpse of daily life. The story is static in its simplicity, almost nothing happens: it's the story of a mental awakening after a long period of inertia or indolence, the opportunity to resolve those five years spent without a reason, an omission sufficient to leave behind an unspecified absence of charisma, of little, if not entirely absent, self-regard.

There's a bit of reluctance, the invitation has its fair share of bizarreness, a party of strangers at the house of an artist who seems well-known to others, but not to him. But Grégoire is a writer and must use simple occasions to create literature and not only that, at a certain point he realizes that his story seems like a transposition of Mrs. Dalloway, he is experiencing the same things as the protagonists of that book. Perhaps it's not true, perhaps it's just a device to give his life the flavor of an exemplary novel (and to pay homage to Virginia Woolf). But Bouillier follows the convoluted instincts of his emotions and finally arrives, along with that expensive 1964 Margaux, the gift for the artist, to give a happy twist to his apathetic existence.

It's a simple, entertaining book, with a lot of delicious jokes and an original and captivating style. If you like Woody Allen, you can't go wrong, and if you have a slightly retro taste, you will also be captivated by the typographic appearance (in a pocket edition, don't worry) that Isbn gives to this little pièce d'auteur.