Jean-Philippe Toussaint

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 Moving through a variety of locales and adventures, The Truth about Marie revisits the unnamed narrator of Toussaint's acclaimed Running Away, reporting on his now disintegrated relationship with the titular Marie—the story switching deftly between first- and third- person as the narrator continues to drift through life, and Marie does her best to get on with hers. Like all of Toussaint's novels, The Truth about Marie's plot matters far less than its pace and tempo, its chain of images, its sequence of events. From pouring rain in Paris to blazing fires on the island of Elba, from moments of intense action to perfectly paced lulls, The Truth about Marie relies on a series of contrasts to tell a beguiling, and finally touching, story of intimacy forever being regained and lost.

 

Later on, thinking back on the last few hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain moment in the night—during a sudden heat wave in Paris, for three straight days the temperature reached thirty-eight centigrade and fell no lower than thirty—Marie and I were making love in Paris in two apartments a mere half mile apart, as the crow flies. We couldn't have imagined at the night's start, or later, or at any time for that matter, it was simply inconceivable, that we’d see each other that night, that before sunrise we’d be together, even for a brief moment in each other’s arms in the dark, staggering hallway of our apartment. Seeing that Marie made it back home (to our place, or to her place rather, since it had been more than four months since I’d moved out) at almost exactly the same hour I made it back to my small one-bedroom apartment where I’d been living since our separation, not alone, I wasn’t alone—but who cares who I was with at the time, that’s not what matters—we can almost pinpoint the moment, at one twenty, one thirty at the latest, Marie and I were making love at the same time in Paris that night, both of us slightly tipsy, our bodies sweating in the half-light, the air heavy and stagnant in the room in spite of the open window. Thick, stormy, almost feverish, the heat weighed down our bodies, made our movements sluggish. It was a little before two in the morning—this I’m sure of, I looked at the time when the phone rang. But I prefer to be cautious as to the exact chronology of the night’s events, as we’re dealing with one man’s fate, or rather his death, though it would be a while before we would know if he’d survived or not.

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