The Author and Me

by Éric Chevillard, Jordan Stump (Translator)

Eric Chevillard here seeks to clear up a persistent and pernicious literary misunderstanding: the belief that a novel's narrator must necessarily be a mouthpiece for his or her writer's own opinions. Thus, we are introduced to a narrator haunted by a deep loathing for cauliflower gratin (and by a no less passionate fondness for trout almondine), but his monologue has been helpfully and hilariously annotated in order to clarify all the many ways in which this gentleman and Eric Chevillard are nothing alike. Language and logic are pushed to their farthest extremes in one of Chevillard's funniest novels yet.

Genres: France, Fiction, Novels, Humor, French Literature

146 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2012

About the author

Éric Chevillard is a French novelist. He has won awards for several novels including La nébuleuse du crabe in 1993, which won the Fénéon Prize for Literature.

His work often plays with the codes of narration sometimes to the degree that it is even difficult to understand which story is related in his books, and has consequently been classified as postmodern literature. He has been noted for his associations with Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing-house largely associated with the leading experimental writers composing in French today.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

1) Preheat oven to 200C/Gas Mark 6. Butter a 1.4 litre gratin dish and set it aside.

2) Make the sauce. In medium saucepan, heat the milk with the onion, bay leaf, and thyme to just below the boiling point. Set aside. In another medium pan, melt 30g of the butter over medium heat, and then sift in the flour. Cook the mixture, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon in a figure-8 motion, until it lightens in colour, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and cool slightly.

3) Gradually whisk the milk mixture into the flour mixture. Bring to a boil over medium high heat, whisking to prevent lumps. Reduce heat to low, and simmer, whisking occasionally, until the sauce is thickened, about 10 minutes.

3.5) Pause to read a 42-page footnote about an ant.

4) While the sauce simmers, bring a medium pot of water to a boil, season with salt, and add the cauliflower. Cook until tender, about 4 to 5 minutes. Drain and pat dry. Arrange the cauliflower, florets-side up, in the buttered gratin dish.

5) Strain the sauce and season it with a teaspoon salt, pepper, nutmeg, and cayenne to taste. Whisk in the cheese, 15g of the butter, and the Cognac until smooth, taking care not to over mix. Pour the cheese sauce over the cauliflower.

6) Melt the remaining 30g butter in a small saucepan. In a medium bowl, mix the bread crumbs with the butter to coat evenly. Sprinkle the top of the cauliflower with the buttered breadcrumbs. Bake until the top of the cauliflower gratin is golden brown and bubbly, about 20 to 25 minutes. Let rest for 5 minutes before serving. Serve hot.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UzA7...

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fantastic and frequently funny french novel about the author/character duality... and the vileness of cauliflower gratin. éric chevillard's book (replete with a footnote novella) is beautifully written and doesn't so much dissect the notion of an author projecting his/her own personality and experiences onto a character as it does send it up. i cannot think of another work of modern literature in which an anteater (or, tamandua, to be precise) figures so prominently into the plot. if there is, in fact, such a book, it can hardly be as humorous, lively, or reflexive as chevillard's the author and me (auteur et moi).

...his vitriol spices up the world's insipidity to the same degree that a sugar cube dunked in the atlantic alters the salinity of the seven seas. what's happening to literature is what happened to painting: no one gives a damn. it has no more reason to be. the talent is still there - just as you would surely find some excellent stagecoach drivers, if you wanted to go to the pointless trouble - but the written word has had its day: mallarmé's disabled bauble of reverberant vacuity. surely there's no lack of masterpieces, but no ones gives a damn, that's the thing, what do we care about masterpieces? the very idea of a masterpiece seems faintly ridiculous today, as outmoded as the codpiece. it no longer belongs to the world. are there not already monuments enough to keep us bored for all eternity? the writer is a sort of ghost who sometimes finds a few readers, ghosts themselves, who cannot recognize, lest they dissolve completely, that the castle they haunt is uninhabited, or at best converted into a museum, that their culture has become a chimera with no future, that the world wants nothing more to do with it - could not possible care less - and is preparing to do without it entirely, that the schoolboy's yawn is an abyss into which all books disappear, that the new brain, still as capable to be sure, has developed other aptitudes, incompatible with reading, circuits of thought in which the heavy-freighted train of language derails. how still to believe that the circumstances propitious for the birth of a reader of mallarmé or blanchot might ever again come about? literature no longer bites, no longer grips, no longer grabs - or still grips a little, grabs a little, like a shipwreck victim to the railing; but it's too heavy, it's worn out its welcome, feet crush its fingers. no longer does literature invade the real world like a hammered spike; rather, it begs to hold on to its place, it strives to take up as little room as possible. its time has come and gone, all its attempts to adapt and make nice with its age work against it, hasten its death throes; any violence, revolt, and irony it had left fade into those bows and curtseys. how to go on believing in it? the author stubbornly keeps at it, he's too far in to give up, now more or less incapable of any other trade, but his literature is without illusions, sabotaged, suicidal. his homemade bomb fizzles in his hands, a dud bottle rocket. he writes as people immolate themselves when their goose is already cooked. and needless to say, he will refuse to grant that his desperately clear-sighted analysis of the situation betrays only his own weariness.

*translated from the french by jordan stump (queneau, modiano, balzac, ndiaye, fabre, et al.)

[Kaden Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This felt like waiting for a bus at a bus stop but theres no bus coming and no bus stop

[Tonymess · Rating 3 out of 5]

In early June I reviewed Eric Chevillard’s “Prehistoric Times” from Archipelago Press, “postmodernist literature”, “France’s foremost absurdist” were the quotes at that time. From a different publishing house (Dalkey Archive this time) but the absurdist things have not changed. "The author and me" is due for release tomorrow.

Our protagonist is a first person (un-named?) narrator who is not the author (as he goes to great pains to point this out in the numerous, well 40 to be exact, footnotes), or is he?

The theme of the work is a gentleman having lunch with Mademoiselle and being enraged by being served cauliflower gratin instead of tout amandine.

For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very French and very hilarious.

[Ryoko · Rating 2 out of 5]

random find at the abbey bookshop. abandoned halfway bc lack of energy but hilarious writing

[Sallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really surprised me. I giggled. I rolled my eyes. I smiled. I fell in love with the characters. Love, love, love this book.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cannibalism too wasn't wiped out in a day - if it had been, what would they have done with the leftovers?

[endrju]

I don't feel up to purely intellectual exercises right now. I suppose it is due to finishing up my PhD in a couple of weeks so I really don't feel like untangling another person's thoughts - I'm pretty much fed up with my own. But as an intellectual exercise from what little I've read from this it seems interesting - "His vocation as a writer is thus easily explained. He finds in that exercise the opportunity to make an unholy mess without upsetting the order of things. Up to a point, he pretends to believe that literature is reality, and he works to deconstruct it, to shatter it in his disorderly fictions, knowing nonetheless that there is no blowback to be feared, that everything will still run perfectly smoothly, and that the space of dreams remains hermetically sealed." I just may get back to it at some point, but not right now. People who like po-mo (meta)textual meshes of authorial voices might find it rather exciting.

[Davida Chazan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an attempt to prove that characters are not necessarily the mouthpieces of their authors, Eric Chevillard takes us on a highly controversial journey, where the lines of reality and fiction are constantly blurred. Read my review of this unusual novel here https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2014/09/0...

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5