Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Naked, the final book (so far) in his “Marie” tetralogy, is now available from Dalkey Archive Press. I had a wonderful time on residency at Belgium’s Chateau de Seneffe with eight other translators from different countries all working on the novel, and the author himself. I am grateful to them all for their curiosity, inspiration, and assistance.
Earlier over the summer, part of the book’s prologue was excerpted in Tin House‘s Summer Reading issue as “The Dress of Honey.”
“To write of her that which has never been written of any other woman.†And with these words from Dante, Jean-Philippe Toussaint sets out once more to deepen and broaden his depiction of one of contemporary fiction’s most fully realized female characters: haute couturière Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte. Having traced the ups, downs, ins, and outs of Marie’s relationship with the unnamed narrator through three previous novels, Toussaint brings his customary nuanced rumination and nimble wit to this concluding volume, which takes us back to the Tokyo of Making Love and the Elba of The Truth About Marie, through jealousy and comedy, irony and tenderness, and the meticulous accretion of details that engross and distract us even as life’s larger changes shift the assumptions by which we live.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint is the author of nine novels and the winner of numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Décembre for The Truth about Marie, which is available from Dalkey Archive Press. His writing has been compared to the works of Samuel Beckett, Jacques Tati, Jim Jarmusch, and even Charlie Chaplin.