Éric Chevillard: L'Auteur et moi | The Author and Me (2012)

Éric Chevillard's L'Auteur et moi is his eighteenth novel for Minuit, although it's more like two novels. The narrator is Blaise, who incessantly and maniacally tells (maybe harangues is more the word) a female stranger at a terrasse de café about having ordered trout with almonds (his favourite) but received cauliflower gratin (which he detests with a vengeance) instead: this is the subject of the book, and Blaise shows himself as more than a little insane by the way he obsesses about the mistake. His female victim is not known to say a single word throughout the verbal delivery.

But this is only half the story, if we can call it that: there are forty footnotes in the 299-page book written by the 'author', the person who has created the narrator, and the purpose of these are often to point out the differences between the author and his creation: for instance, the author finds him right-wing, probably homophobic and pro-death sentence, boorish, bombastic, etc. But then, the 'author' hates cauliflower gratin and trout with almonds too: there are some definite similarities between the two, er, characters.

The book within the book begins at footnote 26 (page 115) and ends on page 221: yes, one footnote lasts a whole 106 pages, more than a third of a book already containing long footnotes. Some of the footnotes apart from number 26 appear to be autobiographical, mentioning the death of Chevillard's father, the fact that he doesn't have a driving licence or a mobile phone, is essentially asocial, etc. But footnote 26 is a story in itself.

The author of the huge footnote 26 is escaping from the police, apparently, because of the absence of one Albert Moindre, who is dead, and maybe the writer of this footnote killed him: he certainly pushed a guy to his death in a canal, and then visited the Moindre parents, is welcomed by them, and starts living in the Moindre parents' house and is treated as a son until the cauliflower gratin intervenes and he's thought to be the murderer of their real son. (Albert Moindre appears several times in Chevillard's books, and the word moindre itself frequently recurs throughout his novels, as do various versions of cheville, but that's another story.)

So what can the author do for survival (a strong theme in Chevillard's work)? Obviously, go chasing after an ant (which one critic believes is Chevillard himself), and he's soon joined by a girl called Pimoe, an anteater escaped from a circus, and a young boy escaping from his mother. Does all this make sense? Well, this is all very Chevillard: humorous, puzzling, fascinating and well worth another read (or two, or three, or...).