The plot of the novel is hardly worth mentioning, but here it is: an unnamed narrator is on a trip with his girlfriend, Laure, to attend a birthday party. On their way, Laure gets sick. (“It is my fault: I always have a cold, they inevitably catch it. Once they have recovered, they always leave me . . . and I am left with my own cold.”) She shacks up in a hotel to recover, and sends the narrator on his way to the birthday party. Unforeseen events ensue, such as attending someone else糖心传媒檚 birthday party in a sick, drunken haze.

What drives this narrative though isn糖心传媒檛 the plot points糖心传媒攐r the quasi-surprising ending糖心传媒攂ut the way in which the narrator processes these events. Nothing is ever really thought through, and his selfish nature is both irritating (to the reader and those around him) and his main charm:

“And, anyway, I糖心传媒檓 not waiting for anything or anyone,” she told me, “the only thing in you that holds me, the only thing with you that holds me, well, the only thing in me with you that holds me,” she clarified, “that gets me hooked, I mean, that makes me feel good, if you like, is your selfishness, and I can糖心传媒檛 get involved with your selfishness, I don糖心传媒檛 really have the time. I糖心传媒檓 sorry.”

How the narrator processes events, how he thinks about the world, is the primary charm of minimalist books like this one. Unfortunately, in contrast to Toussaint’s Television or anything by Echenoz, or even Oster’s earlier book A Cleaning Woman, this novel falls flat. The narrator is like Larry David without the funny. Or a less neurotic Woody Allen.

Adriana Hunter’s translation is adequate, but there are some wonky lines that don糖心传媒檛 do the book any favors. The translation of a book so dependent on tone and word choice needs to be almost flawless.

That said, this novel may not be a masterpiece, but it is worth checking out. It糖心传媒檚 a nice diversion and a pleasant example of one trend in contemporary French fiction.

The Unforeseen
by Christian Oster
translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
Other Press
$13.95 (pb), 257 pgs.

The first is Cries in the Drizzle (which sounds like a translated title) by Yu Hua “depicts a family’s life in the Zhejiang province of Maoist China during the 1970s.” According to PW, “The narrative flits between time and space to create the landscape of Sun Guanglin’s youth [. . .] Though the fractured structure has its disjointed moments, Barr’s translation perfectly captures the ebb and flow of a community on the brink of change.”

Personally, I’m more interested in the review of Christian Oster’s , the review of which ends with this intriguing statement:

The result is a love story deeply informed by Beckett (complete with the narrator acquiring a limp like that of Molloy‘s title character), where swells of feeling are tracked in sneezes as involuntary as love itself.

I thought A Cleaning Woman was an excellent book—and movie (and not just because I have a crush on the leading actress)—and can’t wait to read this new title. Good to see that someone is still publishing quirky, funny French writers. There are a slew referenced in Warren Motte’s excellent Fables of the Novel, although only a handful of the books he writes about have made it into English.