Museum Visits
Published on 26. March 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
152 pages
978-0-300-25411-2 (ISBN)
Description
The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Eric Chevillard, published in English for the first time
Eric Chevillard is one of France's leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire-with some good-natured postmodern twists.
This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel's cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip.
Throughout, Chevillard's powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze-initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic-manages time and again to defamiliarize the familiar with a coherent and charismatic charm. Daniel Levin Becker's translation deftly renders the marvels of the original, and a foreword by Daniel Medin offers rich contextual commentary, making a vital wing of French literature and humor newly accessible in English.
Eric Chevillard is one of France's leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltaire-with some good-natured postmodern twists.
This ensemble of comic miniatures compiles reflections on chairs, stairs, stones, goldfish, objects found, strangers observed, scenarios imagined, reasonable premises taken to absurd conclusions, and vice versa. The author erects a mental museum for his favorite artworks, only to find it swarming with tourists. He attends a harpsichord recital and lets his passions flare. He happens upon a piece of paper and imagines its sordid back story. He wonders if Hegel's cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip.
Throughout, Chevillard's powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gaze-initially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathic-manages time and again to defamiliarize the familiar with a coherent and charismatic charm. Daniel Levin Becker's translation deftly renders the marvels of the original, and a foreword by Daniel Medin offers rich contextual commentary, making a vital wing of French literature and humor newly accessible in English.
Reviews / Votes
"In Museum Visits, Chevillard is at his best, spewing anxious observations of the everyday in shortform. . . . While deliriously funny, Chevillard's short prose also palpitates from one anxious cogitation to another. . . . In his fluid translation, Daniel Levin Becker matches the minute tonal shifts. . . . The reader is elevated, planted in Chevillard's unordinary perspective and given access to an inside joke told by an author of extraordinary wit."-Bridget Peak, Asymptote"A spellbinding essay collection that is as funny as it is unclassifiable. The brief pieces offer winking, curmudgeonly commentary. . . . Chevillard's humor is a mix of Seinfeldian observation and Monty Python-esque zaniness. . . . These beguiling and genre-defying pieces elucidate the strangeness of the everyday."-Publishers Weekly
"Museum Visits is a book of sheer exuberance, a delicious ten-course meal whipped up out of Chevillard's fizzing, capacious, elegantly controlled delight in the world."-Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
"These improbable, oblique, razor-sharp and often hilarious miniatures seem to be about nothing very much. Don't be taken in by appearances. Chevillard's gem-like pieces, superbly translated by Daniel Levin Becker, bring to life a whole world, and its gently squinting observer."-David Bellos, author of Is that a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything
"Daniel Levin Becker is a magician, an innovator, an engineer: a virtuoso translator. I am in awe of what he has achieved here."-Kate Briggs, author of This Little Art
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 193 mm
Width: 125 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
168 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-25411-2 (9780300254112)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Eric Chevillard (b. 1964) is an award-winning French writer. His many books include The Valiant Little Tailor, Prehistoric Times, and Palafox. Daniel Levin Becker is the author of Many Subtle Channels and What's Good and a member of the Parisian literary collective OULIPO. Daniel Medin is professor of comparative literature and English at the American University of Paris and a director of its Center for Writers and Translators.