One would be hard-pressed to find in a novel a character who examines the nature of his existence as scrupulously as the protagonist of Camera. Improbably, it’s a love story.

The affair commences when a man with a “propensity not to hasten matters” becomes smitten with a woman named Pascale Polougaïevski, who works as a clerk in a driver’s-education office. (While Toussaint’s narrators are habitually nameless, the women are saddled with ungainly handles.) The romance proceeds in disarmingly oblique fashion:

“We made small talk while I was catching up with current events and, when her tea was ready, she asked me, yawning, if I would like a cup. Without putting down the paper, still reading, I told her no, God forbid, what’s the world coming to? But a cup of coffee, on the other hand, I said, putting down the paper, I wouldn’t turn down.”

Aside from the suitor’s fascination with Pascale’s “natural and fundamental languor,” we never find out why he thinks it’s a good idea to accompany her to pick up her son at school, or to whisk her away on the ferry for a one-night excursion in London. Motive, Toussaint seems to be telling us, is entirely beside the point, especially in the early “flu-like state” of romantic love.

Camera has no narrative thrust; its energy is frittered away in endless asides, discursions, parentheticals, etc. Yet there is an undeniable tension at work, as the protagonist moves “from the struggle of living to the despair of being.” These hypercontemplative periods invariably follow a burst of frenetic activity and restless motion. He’ll confine himself to a service-station restroom, a photo kiosk, or telephone booth and wait for the “thinning ruins of exterior reality” to give way to “a different reality, interior and peaceful.”

What is it about these slender, yearning novels that makes them so charming and compelling? How do books with almost no dialogue but obsessed with weighty topics, sound so breezy? Why do these vague and laconic yet relentlessly specific narratives penned some 20 years ago feel timeless and new?

Perhaps Toussaint’s infatuation with the quotidian is a mask for his true subject: what it means to be a human being. Though his judgments are rendered in existential fashion, they are expressed as comedies that are “purposeless and grandiose” — like life.

Read an interview with Toussaint's translators here.