A Life on Paper: Stories

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Born in 1947, Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud is the author of nearly two dozen books, and winner of the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Goncourt. He has been translated into a dozen languages but never, until now, into English. He has been publishing for more than thirty years: his fourth book, Mathieu Chain, appeared in 1978. In that novel, the author Mathieu Chain hears someone speaking of one of his books, a book that he is certain he never wrote despite it appearing in his bibliography. This small mystery and Chain's attempt to unravel it end up leading the character out of the known world and in entirely unexpected and compelling directions-not dissimilar to the way the simple act of shaving turns the life of the main character upside down in Emmanuel Carrere's novel The Mustache.

One of the great achievements of such a novel is that it feels at once oddly real and shot through with the fantastic: the twisty little passages of the everyday crosscut the billows and swirls of the imaginary. The real seems always to be threatening to unravel. Such complex interaction doubly characterizes Chateaureynaud's stories, which offer not only a subtle tension between the real and the imaginary, but also a tension between the calm and the severely odd. As Michele Gazier has suggested, "These stories are haunted by the twin graces of simplicity and mystery… beneath their almost too seemly exteriors, they burst with madness, strangeness, a sensuality that their prose veneer conceals only the better to reveal."

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