Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud drives an old, navy, four-door Mercedes C220, which was easy to spot among the Renaults and the Opels massed in traffic at the RER station on a rainy Wednesday rush hour. We shook hands when I got in, and he warned me not to slam the door. In an attempt to pry the passenger side mirror off years ago, a would-be thief had damaged the housing, which a series of mechanics had never managed to re-attach more lastingly than with masking tape.
Châteaureynaud had just come from signing 300 press copies of his latest book, a memoir of his early life from Grasset, entitled La vie nous regarde passer [Life Watches Us Go By].
“I lost fifteen copies,†he said. “I left them in the metro. The stockroom did a good job sealing the box up really tight, so instead of trying to open it, the police have probably blown it up by now.â€
“It’s one way to spread the word… or words,†I said.
“Yes… you could say that book really burst onto the scene!â€
Châteaureynaud’s latest work of fiction, Résidence dernière [Final Residence], had come out a few weeks earlier from Les Éditions des Busclats, a small press founded by poet René Char’s daughter, Marie-Claude, and her partner, critic Michèle Gazier. Since 2007’s De l’autre côté d’Alice [Through a Looking Glass Darkly]—three adult meditations on popular children’s heroes Alice, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio—Châteaureynaud had been experimenting with thematically linked triptychs of short stories. The tales in Résidence dernière, featuring a decrepit sphinx, a magic mirror, and a nightmarish limbo, revolve around writer’s retreats, examining such typically Castelreynaldian themes as solitude, the anxiety of creation, and the writing life. I thought the final, title story among the finest he’d written. In it, a number of aging writers, worrying over posterity, find themselves on a bus headed for a mysterious residency. » Read the rest of this entry «