Customer Reviews

The Mystery Guest: An Account

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I found myself reading this memoir as if it were fiction. Not because the author was making any Frey-like implausible, grandiose claims, but because I felt "the story" was very much in the hands of a "shaper," someone who knew what he was saying and where he wanted to take his readers. The story, such as it is, is simple: the narrator (Gregoire?) has been invited to a birthday party for someone he doesn't know by the woman who had walked out of his life years before without so much as an explanation. The party is for an artist, a woman who invites as many guests as years of life she is celebrating. To this number she empowers someone to invite a "mystery guest," a person who represents the unknown/unknowable year to come. Gregoire is that guest. But the simple (silly?) invitation triggers an enormous amount of questions and self-doubts and spawns hope (that he will meaningfully connect with his ex, or at least come to understand why she left him).

It is not surprising that the author finds parallels in two seminal 20th century stream-of-consciousness writers (Bouillier's only bit of grandiosity in this otherwise self-deprecating story)--Joyce's ULYSSES and Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY. Like those two substantial classics (which also blurred the lines between reality and fiction), THE MYSTERY GUEST seems to find profound meaning in the trivial (even in the trite); and it unfolds like a riff on the musical observation, "What a difference a day makes." Big, human issues are at stake in this little story. Microcosm intersects macrocosm. (Be warned, the story actually has a spaceship in it!) What could easily have devolved into an amusing "French Woody Allen" scenario is really a thought-provoking affirmation of life, literature, and the power (and mystery) of human connections.

This little book was purchased as a result of a review in a recent NY Times Sunday Book Review. At first odd, it takes you deeply into your own life and feelings through this remarkable French memoirists' candor and insight into himself.

Gregoire Bouillier shows rare honesty in his portrayal of his human frailty when he is invited to a party by a woman who had dumped him years before with no explanation and no parting. He has carried this burden ever since and takes it with him to the party determined in the most childish way to either get her back or make her sorry she left him. In the end, the book is not about that but about the act of writing itself and its power to show us our insignificance and our importance all at the same time. I hope you can find yourself in this book, as I did.

At first I thought this book sounded great but some books don't translate well. That was not the case here. I found the translation excellent. As the reviewer before me said, it definitely blurs the line between fact and fiction which is what made it even more interesting. It's a slim book that can easily be read in a couple hours. I found myself wanting to pick up Mrs. Dalloway again ASAP and enjoyed the cameo appearances of Sophie Calle.

"The Mystery Guest" is a trip, an unforgettable one which involves any reader as was said by others. Someone wonderful simply handed this slim memoir-novelish to me and said, "You will love it." I rarely let others select books for me but it was by far the best read of this month and one I highly recommend.

In the stream of consciousness, this author and his translator, manage to involve anyone who has ever loved and lost and then continued on to the next adventure. I found most brilliant:

the way the narrator resolves why the woman who left him did. That is the turning point and so original and so amazing. Go buy this book. Honestly, unless you've never loved someone or lost someone I cannot imagine that any reader will be disappointed. let us know.

The odd thread, that opens and closes the book, is how publicly shared events (the death of a famous person, the path of a satellite) pick up iconic meaning for us. But the idea which drew me in is this:
What is the interaction between story and our lived lives? Are we living the stories we read? What book is on your bedstand? (I mean to ask that question more often now.)

The premise strains credibility but drives suspense: who is the "she" and could someone have really committed such an abandonment with so little explanation? The central event is the party where we will meet the mystery woman of the mystery guest. But the narrator becomes more precarious by the minute. Might be a wild goose chase, but you can't look away. Wondering too if you know some similar real life character, a casual acquaintance who is not as drunk as he seems, who interprets your daily hello not as classroom/workplace/cafe camaraderie but as a code to express your fanatical adoration. But I digress.

Our unnamed narrator has a distinct Humbert Humbert sensibility, so no surprise when "Lolita" is mentioned in the narration. The freighted half-submerged streaming prose tries to evoke Woolf, and then "Mrs. Dalloway" figures into the story. (Hmm...!) I felt reminded of a character in a Nabokov short story about parents traveling to visit an institutionalized son who is easily frightened because he sees portents in the clouds and in the branches of trees, so that after much agonizing they settle on a basket of jellies as the gift least likely to derange him further. In "Mystery Guest's" party scene I wondered if someone would send our protagonist off with his own basket of jellies. I suspected that an early draft had a Proustian layout of one long solid paragraph until an editor kindly suggested the Unicode bullet breaks. And of course there is the inward spiraling hyperawareness of Poe. But really - there I go again.

Bouillier is probably what some call a writer's writer, although more to the point, that is what he likely calls himself. Perhaps "Mystery Guest" isn't the best introduction to Bouillier, but although the prose is unexpected and textured, the novel felt more derivative than original. There is some awkwardness in the translation (the heavy peppering of phrases qualified with "as they say" being an example). But its worst flaw is that the writing does not feel honest enough for any investment of belief.

This is a great read and moves right along. As the jacket quotes Beckett, "There is nothing funnier than unhappiness". The funniest line in the book is when the narrator says none of this would have happened if a certain person hadn't walked out on him.
Having been in that space myself at one time, and having a close relative going through it right now, the book precisely documents total narcissism, double think, self-absorbed as the narrator describes. Building and inventing these layered scenarios in the mind and acting as if they were real.
In this case, a happy ending seems to result; I hope my close relative will somehow evolve past it.