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The Mystery Guest
 
 
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The Mystery Guest [Paperback]

Gregoire Bouillier (Author), Lorin Stein (Translator)

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Book Description

September 12, 2007
One gloomy Sunday afternoon, Grégoire Bouillier answers the phone only to hear the voice of the woman who left him, without warning, five years before. She isn’t calling to apologize or explain the way she abruptly vanished from his life, but to invite him to be the “mystery guest” at a birthday party for a woman he’s never met.

Here is the true story of how a bottle of Bordeaux, a nonconsensual work of conceptual art, and a seemingly innocuous comment at a dinner party enabled one man to unravel the mystery of his being dumped, to explore how literature shapes and gives meaning to our lives, to let go of his heartbreak and his dependence on turtlenecks, and to -- in the most unexpected of ways -- fall in love again.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

In this slim and lyrical memoir, French writer Bouillier tells of the moment when he received a phone call in his Paris apartment in the fall of 1990 ("It was the day Michel Leiris died"). Bouillier was 30 years old and asleep in all his clothes, and it had been years since the unnamed woman on the other end of the line had left him "without a word... the way they abandon dogs when summer comes." Rather than calling to reconnect or explain, she called to invite him to a party, several weeks hence, at the artist Sophie Calle's apartment, where he was to serve as the "Mystery Guest." What Bouillier (his untranslated Rapport sur moi won the Prix de Flore in 2002) makes of this simple setup is pure Gallic magic- a mix of hapless obsession, sophisticated abstraction, unearned righteousness and hyperarticulate self-doubt-as he tries to guess the woman's motivations and get a hold of his own feelings. The book's four short parts (beautifully rendered by Stein)-phone call, preparation, party and aftermath-are small miracles of Montaigne-like self-exploration. Reading as Bouillier moves through the light and dark of love, through its forms of "maniacal sublimation" and through its mystery, is arresting. (Pjublishers Weekly )

About the Author

GR���GOIRE BOUILLIER is the editor of a scientific magazine and author of The Mystery Guest. Originally a painter, he published his first book at age forty. He has one daughter and lives in Paris, France..

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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
mystery guest
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Michel Leiris, Virginia Woolf, Peter Walsh, Clarissa Dalloway, The Gift, Sophie Calle
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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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