I should have read Jean Philippe Toussaint fifteen years ago, when I was reading Queneau, Butor, Perec, Robbe-Grillet. Reading his novels now (The Bathroom, 1985: Monsieur, 1986; Camera, 1989) has a double effect on me. Everything feels old, but I am also loving it and recognizing it as an important part of me. In Toussaint, I find the reason why writers should write, or at least the reason why I want to write: to make something new happen, in language, space, time, and to break the division line between what is worth to be told and what is not.
Toussaint reminds me why I don't care much about a well crafted story. I would never spend hours in front of a screen, desperately trying to put together sequences of words, only to write a well crafted story.
With Toussaint, I share the love for digressions. There is no MFA or creative writing manual that teaches the power of digression. They tell you to never digress, never.
Toussaint is also a filmmaker, and film is in every sentence: not only Keaton, not only Beckett (as a writer/filmmaker), but way back, Dziga Vertov, the cinema of origins, the Lumieres, Edison.
The incipit of Camera, in the translation by Matthew B. Smith: "It was about the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that two events coincided, events that, taken separately, were of hardly any interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way."
