 
|
Running AwayAuthor: Jean-Philippe Toussaint Translator: Matthew B. Smith Belgian Literature Series November 2009 120 pages, Dimensions: 5.25 x 7.5 Paperback, 9781564785671 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36 
|
Book Description
A European man arrives in Shanghai, ostensibly on vacation, yet a small task given him by his Parisian girlfriend Marie starts a series of complications. There is a mysterious Chinese man and a manila envelope full of cash. Later, he meets a woman at an art gallery and they agree to travel together to Beijing, yet when he joins her at the train station, the Chinese man is along. Events eclipse explanations, and soon he surrenders himself to the on-rush of experience.Toussaint’s latest novel pulls the reader into a jet-lag reality, a confusion of time and place that is both particularly modern and utterly real. The Chaplinesque slapstick of his acclaimed early works The Bathroom and Camera is here replaced by an ever-unfolding fabric of questions, coincidences, and misapprehensions large and small. The mature Toussaint shows himself to be no less ingenious an inventor of existential dilemmas, but with a new, surprising tenderness, and a deepened concern for the inexpressible immediacy and sensuality of human experience.
This forthcoming title is available for preorder
About the Author
|
Jean-Philippe Toussaint is the author of seven novels. His writing has been compared to the work of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Tati, the films of Jim Jarmusch, and even Charlie Chaplin. For more information, please visit his website |
 |
About the Translator
| Matthew B. Smith is currently a graduate student in the French department at UC Berkeley. He has translated Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Camera as well as Running Away for Dalkey Archive Press. |
Praise
“An original and significant writer, whose fiction can be as engaging as it is surprising.”—The Times Literary Supplement“Toussaint is a genuinely funny writer . . . small erotic moments are captured perfectly . . . makes me long for more by Toussaint.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The combination of the absurd and the conscious intellect recalls such other French-language writers as Raymond Queneau in a style that is elegant, erudite, and joyously superficial.”—Publishers Weekly