The Mystery Guest: An Account

Fiction for Francophiles

Obsession is a dish best served with a side of self-effacing humor. So it is, anyway, with the French novelist Gregoire Bouillier's charming and neurotic The Mystery Guest, a memoir that begins with a surprise phone call from a woman who left the author without explanation ("the way they abandon dogs when summer comes") years before. Everything that follows is related in minute, flustered detail: The ex-girlfriend is calling to invite the author to a party, and not just any party, but the birthday party of trickster photographer Sophie Calle, who always invites exactly as many people as the age she is turning, plus one "mystery guest" to signify the year to come. So Bouillier, wracked by the melancholic mania of lost love and the unexpected pressure of being the mystery stranger at an art star's birthday party, feels despair and anger ("Was she trying to destroy me? Was she bent on my complete and utter annihilation?"), and eventually commits himself to the role by spending his rent money on a very expensive, very old bottle of wine to bring as a present. Thus, "like some kind of dimestore Don Quixote," does our author charge into the minefields of unresolved emotion and cocktail party protocol. The Mystery Guest feels like a European art film, short on traditional narrative and long on atmosphere ("Everywhere men and women discussed and conversed and were generally moving around, and some went and others came, and many of the guests wore black and smoked"), and in the end nothing much more dramatic happens than the author's reawakening to the world. Bouillier's writing has that effect on the reader, too. After a few hours with this little book, one can't help but feel that every ordinary object and exchange is alive with meaning.

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