Let us review the facts. Some six months after the disappearance of the author of the texts collected here for the first time in a systematic and critical fashion, Madame ***, one of his close acquaintances, having lost her briefcase somewhere on the way from home to her office, tries her luck at the lost and found department, Rue des Morillons in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. She finds no trace of it there, but from several unmistakable clues, she does recognize, amidst a disparate assortment of items, the expandable accordion briefcase belonging to her friend, with whom she had traveled on numerous occasions. The briefcase in question had been left behind in a taxi, and it is impossible to trace it back to the “loser” – which is how the clerks at the Rue des Morillons refer to the absent-minded. The custody period having elapsed without anyone coming to claim the item, they relinquished it to her. Once open, it turned out to contain, apart from a few articles of clothing, a small pile of books and papers (legal-size hand-written sheets, printouts, pages removed from notebooks or agendas, torn out flyleaves, envelopes, hotel letterhead stationary, postcards, the backs of maps, street guides, etc.) What the texts recorded on these disparate paper formats have in common is that they describe in minute detail a hotel room, almost the way a crime scene detective might, then go on to narrate something that happened to the author either in or involving this location.

What exactly was the architecture of the book project, whose “rooms” might represent the unassembled building blocks ? Did a book project even exist, strictly speaking? These are things we will never know for certain. As for the second question, nevertheless, I can answer in the affirmative with reasonable odds of getting it right. Otherwise, one would be at pains to explain the sustained, systematic effort at writing out such “topautobiographical” notices – the reader will forgive this neologism whereby I attempt to elucidate the articulation, quite rare in the history of literature, and to be honest, somewhat incongruous, between “a state of settings or places” (topos) and a fragmented, unfinished autobiographical narrative. That a project exists seems highly likely. What could it have been? We are reduced to mere conjecture. The author does, in fact, seem to provide answers to this query, but nothing proves it isn’t some prank meant to mislead. Doomed as we are to ignorance, the only thing we can reasonably surmise is that he placed the contents of the briefcase under the dual auspices, as it were, of the pair of quotes, one by Paul Valéry, the other by Georges Perec, which he had scribbled on the back of a Tokyo-Hiroshima train ticket dated 15 June 2003, and which for this reason we decided to inscribe as the epigraph. It is a modest, plausible assumption, albeit far from definitive.

We found no explicit indication that would enable us to establish an order among the random texts. The one posited here is therefore entirely of our own design. It made sense for a variety of reasons (relationships among characters, etc.). Yet, it still allows certain oddities, inconsistencies, and contradictions to persist, those undoubtedly inherent to any unfinished project. Be that as it may, several other ordering systems (perhaps even an infinite number) might well be possible. Needless to say, the index is also the product of my labors. We included as author’s notes (AN) bits of text that, for the most part, did not figure as such in the manuscript (or rather manuscripts, plural), but rather appeared in the margins or in another color of ink, between the lines, and seemed not so much a development of the text as a commentary thereupon. The text we have placed at the end (number 43 ) can be interpreted in various ways: one could think of it as a kind of prose poem inspired by (or modeled upon) Cendrars or Larbaud. Alternatively, and we favor this hypothesis, it might simply act as a set of notes in view of writing further “rooms”. In either case, it seemed like the proper conclusion to this collection.

Finally, we feel it our duty to mention that the rather implausible circumstances in which these papers were recovered have caused some people to suspect a hoax. It should indeed be acknowledged that several texts (notably the thirty-ninth) may well lend credence to that suspicion, appearing to function in the manner of a clue that some sardonic trickster might imbed in his sham. Nevertheless, there are numerous considerations – graphological, stylistic, biographical and even psychological – that induce us to reject this hypothesis as exaggeratedly twisted and even a bit paranoid. If we might add a wholly personal consideration, one that owes nothing to critical analysis and everything to the fictional notion we have of the world: far from being a mark of intrigue, the very strangeness of the conditions under which these pages came into our hands is the seal of their authenticity. Mirum verum: the real is wondrous.

The Editor