The Mystery Guest: Come and Gone

Upon reading about Maud Newton’s thwarted attempt to finish Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, I promptly ordered the book online. And as soon as it arrived, I plunged in, plunged into the narrator’s incredibly funny, rueful, bitter, baffled, and somehow hopeful voice, and I read at high speed, or really, I suppose, the whole thing simply whirred along of its own accord. Speed, though, is overrated in this case because then it was all over.

In any case, I was in the mood to walk. I wanted to be alone and take my time and move through space at my own tempo, not the forced pace of a car or mass transit, yes, I needed to feel the distance, the physical, mental, and personal space, that separated me just then from my own house, and for once I’d lost the craving for speed, with its bland reassurance that nothing happens while you pass from one point to another–as if the points themselves were all that mattered and were not in fact part of a single, identical, self-same, monotonous place, a place you can never leave.

Interview with translator Lorin Stein
NY Times book review