Customer Reviews

Report on Myself

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Frenchman Gregoire Bouillier has had a colorful and downright strange life according to his "Report on Myself." This review's titular quote, snatched from his pithy and intriguing memoir, sums up the wild, double-edged nature of his existence so far. It's worth a voyeuristic visit.

In each chapter of this short book we drop into a random stage of Mr. Bouillier's life. His supremely dysfunctional parents fight, swing, cheat, and divorce, with the hapless young Gregoire irradiated by the fallout of their actions. I suppose if this were an American family the author would've rammed himself through years of hand-wringing therapy. Indeed some traumas, like his molestation by his older brother, would've rated entire books in our culture. But here that disturbing occurrence only gets a cursory paragraph. C'est la vie, I guess.

A running theme throughout "Report on Myself" is the influence of past occurrences on Mr. Bouillier's present circumstances. For example, as a child he experienced the sudden disappearance of a friend and his family, including the beautiful matron he became smitten with after accidentally seeing her nude. Later in life, one of his loves dumps him by pulling her own vanishing act (we see the aftermath in his other memoir, "The Mystery Guest"). He links events like these together in a synergistic fashion, as if the past was a dry run that equipped him to make sense of present distress. Even certain books, such as Homer's "Odyssey," lend structure to his journey. A little weird, but then again I've coped with reality in a similar fashion, so I'm glad to see that I'm not alone.

The major angst in the author's life results from his stormy romantic relationships. His first adult relationship with a relatively conventional woman bores him, so he gravitates toward a couple of high-maintenance paramours with, ah, issues. Based on the anecdotes about his mercurial mother, a pop psychologist might diagnose a long-running oedipal complex, but I'll leave that to the experts. Whatever the state of Mr. Bouillier's unconscious mind, when it comes to his love life he exults in the highs, endures the lows, and tries to make sense of relational disintegration.

Mr. Bouillier has the ability to make interesting observations by being present in some parts of his life and removed from others. He can take a passionate or uncomfortable moment and plop us down right there with him. Conversely, the author is able to remove himself from an event and dispassionately comment upon it, leaving us to make our own judgments. I found either path intriguing. I'm glad I've avoided some of his pitfalls, but he's certainly had a number of exciting rides that trigger my envy reflex.

At any rate, "Report on Myself" is an intimate look at a man's relationships and how he uses the past to help him make sense of his present. I recommend reading this with "The Mystery Guest," which provides more detail about the aftermath of his stormiest and most affecting romantic relationship.

Gregoire Bouillier is one of those authors whose almost unbearable sensitivity took him to the edge of madness but who stubbornly refused to give in to the chaos of his inner and outer world. His parents were bohemians who made little attempt to shield him from their disordered sex lives. His mother was suicidal and his father was ambivalent about the family. But Bouillier emerged triumphant from his ordeal, even though it left him on the brink of insanity. Now he turns the sort of self-referential, paleological thinking usually associated with schizophrenic disorders into a playful, almost cheerful autobiographical game of punning with words and coincidences that he shares with us. It's a fun ride, if sometimes a harrowing one.

At times, his frank confessions are quite disturbing. Nowhere is this more true than in his description of the three months he spent on unemployment, sleeping until dawn in stairwells, listening to voices in his head that ordered him to do things, writing obsessively in the margins of newspapers. The report of his mental breakdown is quite depressing, and he could have ended up institutionalized. But Bouillier's soul is made of a sort of rubber that always returns to its natural shape, refusing to be deformed by circumstances. He characteristically bounced back after reading Homer's Odyssey in a single night. In the Odyssey, he found a frame for his own life, a narrative worth pursuing, an existence worth living.

There is one amazing line from this book that sums up his entire life: "my ambition wasn't to exist in this world, but to make a world exist." That sort of existential courage makes his entire account worthwhile.

My feelings about Gregoire Bouillier's quasi-autobiography "Report on Myself" are mixed. I was pleased with the beginning, promising a good story, and I liked his prose, full of memories appearing in a flash. The great French tradition, reminding me of masters such as Colette and Proust, seemed to continue in this little book.

Additionally, the psychological twists and complications in the narrator's family life reminded me of Woody Allen, perhaps because of the times he describes (he was born in 1960). The stories grow wilder and wilder with each page, and the descriptions of Bouillier's love life and his bizarre adventures with his girlfriends become more and more surreal.

I loved his discovery of Odyssey, and how it makes his life and the book rooted in Western Civilization; I was the more interested because of my own cathartic experience with a book, interestingly also about Greece - it was "The Magus" for me...

Unfortunately, I found the book as a whole a little incoherent, the flashes and jumps between different moments of Bouillier's life chaotic, and I was bored with last 10 pages, although the book is tiny. Maybe the problem lies in its size: I felt like it was a sketch, material for a much more voluminous and developed memoir.

This short book is more of a few sketches of a life than a coherent memoir. Most of the sketches surround the author's women - girlfriends, his mother, a mother of his best friend and a prostitute he only just met (sort of).

There are two elements to the book. There are the recollections of incidents and then his philosophical analysis of those events. The anecdotes were amusing and interesting. The philosophizing was often nearly incoherent. Frequently, I had to just accept that a sentence made no sense either structurally or in context. This may have been, and hopefully was, due to the translation. Thus, there was much lost in the translation.

The anecdotes were amusing enough to keep me plodding through the somewhat rambling material in between but in toto, this book was mediocre.

I really enjoyed this book, especially compared with a couple other memoirs I've read lately. I'm not going to lie, Gregoire's life has certainly had it's share of tragedy (which is a good thing - some other recent memoirs seem to be making tragedy out of nothing, which is annoying and just not a good read). But unlike other recent memoirists I've read, Gregoire doesn't take himself too entirely seriously. True, he does ruminate on his women in the form of staph infections and Ulysses characters, but still - he has a refreshing sense of humor about it all. Also, I liked that he covered the events in his life that were really meaningful and changed something - he didn't cover every bowl of cereal he's ever eaten.

Note that the story is told in non-chronological order. We actually get the most recent snippet near the beginning, and it jumps around repeatedly after that. This didn't bother me though. They are ordered in such a way that you get certain revelations at an appropriate time.

The only reason for the minus one star is that I feel that because it's a translation, you do lose a little bit. This is a wonderful translation, but because a lot of stuff (mostly in the beginning) is based on wordplay, you do lose a bit until you remember that this wasn't written in English.

A quick read, and well worth it. I may be checking out his The Mystery Guest now.

I think I would have liked Bouillier's book well enough if the translation were less obtrusive. Bruce Benderson, the translator, tries to stay as close as possible to the original, so much so that he does not bother to take into account the rules of English grammar, style, and usage - which is unfortunate. Bouillier, has a odd take on life, an aspergerian slant maybe, and his expression is unique, yes, but I doubt he writes like a uniquely clumsy non-native speaker in the orginal French.

This is an extremely fast-reading, hilariously subversive little book. In form, nearly every paragraph stands as a self-contained, self-inverting little nugget that reads pitch-perfect for the performance notes of a brilliant stand-up comic. The remarks and observations are as concise and darkly hilarious as Nabakov's famously terse description of the death of Humbert Humbert's mother: "Picnic. Lightning." Loosely organized as a chronological autobiography, the subject matter jumps freely forward and back with a topical range as broad as the comedic impulse is specific: racial and familial entanglements; sex during wartime; being the odd boy; meaningless numerology; terrorism and the state; concocted nonsense about human physiology -- an exhaustive list that results in a book impelled forward by more ideas and observations than any one writer should have. The reading experience is highly charged, entertaining, innovative in form, charming in its subversion, brief and to the pointlessness.

Gregoire Bouillier's REPORT ON MYSELF provides the harrowing back-story to his highly original and amusing THE MYSTERY GUEST. REPORT opens with an eye-brow raising account of his being conceived when his parents invited an second man to their bed. Gregoire's coloring (dark) suggests that the Algerian intern at the hospital where his mother worked (the invitee) is his real father. This fact is but one clue Bouillier has to work with in his life-long struggle to establish his identity and place in the world. For another dozen pages Bouillier lets his readers believe they are in for a rather outré tale of a wild and unconventional life lived beyond the boundaries, something along the lines of Sterne's TRISTAM SHANDY. But the darker side of his life's story soon emerges. His mother repeatedly threatens suicide, his parents separate for significant periods of time, he is sexually molested by his older brother, and he succumbs to numerous fits of blinding aggression that are clearly more than attention-seeking episodes of acting out behavior. As an adult he experiences a period of homelessness . The intimate relations he attempts as an adult are primarily with damaged and narcissistic women specializing in meting out contempt.

Bouillier does not wallow in his miseries or beg the reader's pity. Neither does he anesthetize himself to their profundity. He is quick to read meaning into events, coincidences, details, and names that would pass most "normal" people unnoticed. The reader is tempted to think Bouillier is being led on by the kind of infantile magical thinking that many powerless and traumatized people take solace in. But his observations are striking and his interpretations cannily believable. Making no reference to God, Bouillier seems to be immersed in a coherent if inexplicable reality that few of us ever get to (or allow ourselves) to see. Bouillier does not see himself as caught in a spiritual struggle, yet it would not be hard to posit that there is a Higher Power who watches over him or that he has experienced many miracles in his life. As he recounts of his time living on the streets and in the doorways of Paris, "I remember a sentence that I tirelessly scrawled on everything I came across, like a talisman I would put up everywhere: `The way was lost along the road; well, then there is a road'" (p. 97). And elsewhere he writes, "Events don't end by themselves as I thought they did but prolong themselves through their consequences, which in turn become events, and so on" (p. 120). What Bouillier has given his readers is French existentialism at its most personal--scary, and inexplicably hopeful.

One of the most interesting memoirs I have ever read. Bouillier captures our minds' unconscious interpretation of the world as literature, our lives as the plot by using Homer's Odyssey as an allegory for his own experiences. Yet, this memoir is very accessible, not convoluted or puffed up as it could have been. A good read for the deep or casual reader, it is sure to make you think.

I'm not a big memoir reader beyond the occasional dip into it through David Sedaris and others. I recognize its popularity as a genre in general, but also as a specific kind of creative nonfiction. With this comes several complications such as an insistence of it being completely true, as the sworn truth of a text separates it from a work of fiction. (Remember the James Frey explosion)

I don't particularly care about that, nor do I need to be told every moment of the author's life, I assume Bouilier chose what to not include in this book, but also to retell it nonlinearly, which keeps the book from dragging. Just take the opening section that begins with "I had a happy childhood" only to immediately undercut with his Mom asking him and his brother "Children, do I love you?" before trying to jump out a window. This is the first of many disturbing moments in "Report on Myself."

I am more interested in the basic elements of a narrative, interesting moments, people(characters), lines, thoughts. These are what pulled me through "Report on Myself" This is a challenging, thoughtful, and literate memoir.