Toussaint, Jean-Philippe 1957–

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Toussaint, Jean-Philippe 1957–

PERSONAL: Born November 29, 1957, in Brussels, Belgium; son of Yvon and Monique (Lanskoronskis) Toussaint; married Madeleine Santandrea, 1993; children: Sean, Anna. Education: Attended Institute of Political Studies (Paris, France), 1976–79.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Les Éditions de Minuit, 7, rue Bernard Palissy, 75006 Paris, France. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Director of motion pictures; writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Prix Medici, 2005, for Fuir.

WRITINGS:

La Salle de bain (also see below), Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 1985, translation by Barbara Bray published as The Bathroom, Boyars (New York, NY), 1989, translation by Nancy Amphoux and Paul De Angelis published as The Bathroom, Dutton (New York, NY), 1990.

Monsieur (also see below), Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 1986, translation by John Lambert published as Monsieur, Marion Boyars/Rizzoli (New York, NY), 1991.

L'Appareil-photo (title means "The Snapshot Camera"; also see below), Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 1988.

La Salle de bain (screenplay; based on the novel of the same title), Bac Films, 1989.

(And director) Monsieur (screenplay; based on the novel of the same title), Les Films des Tournelles, 1990.

La Réticence, Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 1991.

(And director) La Sévillane (screenplay; based on the novel L'Appareil-photo), Les Films des Tournelles, 1992.

La Télévision (novel), Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 1997, translation by Jordan Stump published as Television, Dalkey Archive Press (Normal, IL) 2004.

(And director) La Patinore (screenplay), Les Films des Tournelles, 1999, released in the United States as The Ice Rink, Interama, 1999.

Autoportrait (l'étranger), Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 2000.

Faire l'amour, Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 2002, translation by Linda Coverdale published as Making Love, Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

Fuir (novel; title means "Escape"), Les Éditions de Minuit (Paris, France), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a Belgian novelist and filmmaker whose works have won him comparisons to such artists as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Woody Allen, and Samuel Beckett. In The Contemporary Novel in France, Roy C. Caldwell described Toussaint's fiction as "minimalist, composed in blocks of nonsequential text, strangely comic, mixing formal and colloquial linguistic patterns, highly wrought." Caldwell summarized Toussaint's novels as "faint stories, antinarratives," and he affirmed that "very little 'happens' in Toussaint's novels, and what does happen tends to occur at the margins of the discourse."

Toussaint published his first novel, La Salle de bain, in 1985. In this work, a twenty-seven-year-old man regularly withdraws to the bathroom of his Paris apartment and reflects on the aging process. Warren Motte, writing in Romanic Review about the novel's form, noted that La Salle de bain "is animated by concrete, formal geometries, pleasantly quirky triangulations, and, more generally, by a concern for symmetry that is characteristic of minimalist writing as a genre." Pamela Erens, meanwhile, wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the novel, rendered in English as The Bathroom, is "darkly comic," and Dan Gunn, in a Times Literary Supplement assessment, praised Tous-saint's literary debut as "highly engaging." Similarly, Phoebe-Lou Adams wrote in Atlantic Monthly that The Bathroom "is highly entertaining," and Penny Kaganoff concluded in Publishers Weekly that the novel "is elegant, erudite and joyously superficial." Still another writer, Margaret E. Gray, declared in Symposium that La Salle de bain "stands in intertextual relation to Blaise Pascal's Pensees." She added that the novel's protagonist serves to "demonstrate Pascal's claim that our response to our own misery is … distraction."

In his second novel, Monsieur, Toussaint presents what Piers Burton-Page, writing in Times Literary Supplement, described as "a vague shadowy figure whose existence is made concrete only through a sequence of bizarre encounters." Burton-Page added that the novel unfolds "with comically detached reticence," and he lauded Toussaint's writing style as "deft, economical, almost cinematographic, with quick transitions." Another critic, Ginger Danto, wrote in the New York Times Book Review, while appraising John Lambert's English-language translation, that "one soon finds Monsieur's unflappable style amusing, and is seduced by [Toussaint's] deadpan sense of the absurd."

Toussaint followed Monsieur with L'Appareil-photo, a novel featuring another unlikely protagonist. "The story is quite simple," according to Dominic Di Bernardi, who related in the Review of Contemporary Fiction that "a rather sluggardly narrator, whose mysterious profession requires him to jet around Europe but who has yet to learn how to drive, wanders into a driving school office, [and] becomes attached to the somewhat narcoleptic woman director … whose uncle eventually helps them in their desperate search for the proper refill canister to a gas heater." Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Dan Gunn noted that L'Appareil-photo "moves in … protean, fluttering, humorous, touching, butterfly-like ways."

La Réticence, Toussaint's next novel, concerns a paranoid narrator who nurses an obsession with another man. Piers Burton-Page, in his Times Literary Supplement review, called La Réticence "a study in self-absorption, of the inhibiting power of the mind to place a block on action." Burton-Page concluded his assessment by acknowledging Toussaint as a "major talent."

In 1997, six years after issuing La Réticence, Toussaint produced La Télévision, a novel wherein an anonymous academic becomes acutely preoccupied with the presence of television after he abruptly ends his own indulgence in the medium in order to write a monograph during a summer vacation in Berlin. In the following days, the narrator finds himself absorbed with newspaper listings of television programs, and he grows increasingly aware of televised images beaming from windows and public places. His interactions with others, such as a neighbor who asks him to water his plants, become mini-television shows in themselves in which the narrator only passively participates. "His life," wrote an Economist reviewer, "is slowly transformed into a duel with the illusions emanating from the set." Warren Motte declared in a French Review critique that "La Télévision takes its place in a droll and highly original body of work that is beginning to look like an epic of the trivial," and he observed in a Neophilologus essay that the novel is "sharply focused on the little vexations of everyday life." Max Winter, writing in Booklist, called the narrator's tone "charmingly flat, with bursts of drollery."

In addition to issuing various novels, Toussaint has written and directed several films, including La Patinore, a motion picture released in the United States as The Ice Rink. This film relates the high jinks that ensue when a filmmaking crew begins making a movie about ice hockey. Dennis Harvey charged in Variety that Toussaint's film "skates by on increasingly thin inspiration." But New Republic reviewer Stanley Kauffmann deemed The Ice Rink "fresh and funny," and he contended that "the idea of lifting the whole process of filmmaking and setting it down on a slippery surface was a wickedly apt idea." Likewise, New York Times critic Stephen Holden called The Ice Rink a "deft comedy." He conceded: "There is a sadistic pleasure to be gleaned from the spectacle of adult professionals trying to maintain their dignity while clumsily slipping and sliding."

In Making Love, originally published as Faire l'amour, Toussaint examines the end of a seven-year love relationship, giving the story his typical twist of wry humor and pathos. Once again, the narrator of the story is an unnamed man, and his lover is Marie, a high-maintenance Parisian fashion designer. While he is inextricably drawn to her personal charms and magnetism, he is also repelled by her flamboyant displays of selfishness. At issue in the beginning of the story is the fact that the narrator carries a vial of hydrochloric acid in his pocket, which he assures her he will not throw in her face, even as he continues to contemplate doing so. As their relationship disintegrates, finally coming to a crashing halt, the couple visits wintry Tokyo, a city Toussaint paints in apocalyptic and foreboding colors that reflect the soullessness of the couple's relationship, complete with earthquakes that symbolize the instability of their union. As the couple increase the distance between themselves by going their separate ways in Japan—she to the museums where her work is to be featured, and he to Kyoto to visit a friend—the story is imbued with "a Sartrian flavor" and "large helpings of existential alienation," wrote Janet Evans in the Library Journal. The book contains "edgy prose that elegantly distills a disturbing take on love," wrote a critic for Kirkus Reviews. In the end, noted Warren Motte, writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, "if the earth moves when people make love, it can move just as powerfully when love is unmade, too," which, for the story's narrator, at least, culminates in finding a solution for the hydrochloric acid in his pocket.

In 2005, Toussaint won France's prestigious Prix Medici for his novel Fuir ("Escape"), which has not been translated into English.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Thompson, William, editor, The Contemporary Novel in France, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, April, 1990, Phoebe-Lou Adams, review of The Bathroom, p. 109.

Booklist, December 15, 2004, Max Winter, review of Television, p. 709.

Economist, June 21, 1997, review of La Télévision.

French Review, December, 1997, Warren Motte, review of La Télévision, pp. 322-323.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2003, review of Making Love, p. 1250.

Library Journal, April 1, 2004, Janet Evans, review of Making Love, p. 125; November 1, 2004, Lawrence Olszewski, review of Television, p. 78.

Neophilologus, October, 1999, Warren Motte, "TV Guide," pp. 529-542.

New Republic, February 21, 2000, Stanley Kauffmann, "Dying Early."

New York Times, February 11, 2000, Stephen Holden, "Moviemaking on the Ice: Lights, Camera, Zam-boni," p. E15.

New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1990, Pamela Erens, "Strange Sanctuary," p. 38; October 16, 1991, Ginger Danto, "No Zeal, Please," p. 13.

Publishers Weekly, February 2, 1990, Penny Kaganoff, review of The Bathroom, p. 79; May 24, 1991, review of Monsieur, p. 47.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1990, Dominic Di Bernardi, review of L'Appareil-photo, pp. 298-301; spring, 2003, Warren Motte, review of Making Love, p. 144.

Romanic Review, November, 1995, Warren Motte, "Toussaint's Small World," pp. 747-760.

Symposium, spring, 1997, Margaret E. Gray, "Pascal in the Bathtub: Parodying the 'Pensees.'"

Times Literary Supplement, April 28, 1989, Dan Gunn, "Catching It on the Wing," review of The Bathroom and L'Appareil-photo, p. 452; November 1, 1991, Piers Burton-Page, "Dangerous Delusions," review of La Réticence and Monsieur, p. 20.

Variety, May 10, 1999, Dennis Harvey, review of The Ice Rink, p. 64.

World Literature Today, September-December, 2005, David Houston Jones, review of Television, p. 94.