Bibliograph

Running away, Jean-Philippe Toussaint ; translated by Matthew B. Smith

Type

Label

Running away, Jean-Philippe Toussaint ; translated by Matthew B. Smith

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

fiction

Main title

Running away

Oclc number

320801254

Responsibility statement

Jean-Philippe Toussaint ; translated by Matthew B. Smith

Series statement

Belgian literature series

Summary

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

Classification