Mid-way through Grégoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, the French author's second book and his first translated into English, in a moment of reading-reared epiphany, I realized it was gratifying and therapeutic to allow coincidental, fiction-like logic to permeate my life. Like the characters in the novella, which calls itself a true account, I granted meaning in whatever proportion and to whatever I events I so chose. At breakfast with the book on Wednesday, I noticed that the dining hall was serving oatmeal, which had also been offered on Monday. Absorbing this, I felt confirmed in my desire to connect this oatmeal-eating morning with Monday's, or, if I felt inclined, last Tuesday's, or to realize that I was more like my mom than I thought, since she eats oatmeal for breakfast too. In fact, I noted, there was probably a whole lineage of oatmeal-eating predecessors in whose lives I might find important parallels, not to mention a slew of literary porridge-gorgers, like Goldilocks, who might have something to add to the course of my day.

What happens in The Mystery Guest to stimulate such thoughts is this: a man left by his girlfriend of four years reluctantly lets that fact monopolize his life and become, along with Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses, the source of all his life's meaning and action, until he learns that said ex has modeled her own life after Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. After this, he decides that he will no longer stifle the impulse to seek meaning in his own life from its tangential likenesses to any number of sources, real or fictitious. This wide dispersal of sources of meaning comes to monopolize his life. If his ex-girlfriend lives a satisfying life because she likens her emotions toward the narrator to the romantic nostalgia Clarissa feels for Peter Walsh, then the narrator can flaunt the random significations he has established in his life—significations he had previously conceived of as neuroses.

The details leading up to the Woolf epiphany involve a great deal of private reflections, a bouquet of roses which resembles that which Mrs. Dalloway set out at her party, and a call from the ex-girlfriend after a long interval of no communication. The ex-girlfriend has contacted the narrator to invite him to the gathering of her quirky artist friend, Sophie Calle, who requires that one mystery guest be brought to her birthday party each year. This year it is to be our narrator. The party is agonizing for him; as he describes it, "I just stood there, feeling like a gob of spit, and now it was settled, no matter what might happen to me here, no good could come of it or make me feel better or calmer. I'd only feel diminished and ugly and vain and artistic and French and refuted, once and for all." He is a pleasant, funny neurotic, which, as a Frenchman, he of course knows. His ramblings are familiar enough to demand empathy, yet always subtle and brilliantly suave so as to remind us readers of Bouillier's craftsmanship.

Of course too much craft can grow gnawing and too many references to past geniuses can merely highlight a lack of comparable creativity. The Mrs. Dalloway comments, for one, do get repetitive until Bouillier finally admits to the obviousness of their source. All the talk of some impending party feels disingenuous: this is not just any party, but the party, and we all know that. The eventual implication of Mrs. Dalloway in the allusions feels like a breath of fresh air, and the book becomes less stiff and more pleasurable after this admission of intertextuality is made. ("Roses are the only flowers I can bear to see cut," ex-girlfriend whispers in narrator's ear as he leaves the party. Five pages of meandering thoughts and extravagantly long sentences later, he gets it: "Mrs. Dalloway!" )

And in fact the book is saturated with writers, artists, and their works, all of which situate The Mystery Guest in more general debates about art and life. Sophie Calle, giver of the birthday party, is in real life a contemporary artist whose work deals with the junction of fact and fiction; in her art, she has stalked, photographed, and filmed unknowing subjects and constructed elaborate scenarios to live out, such as spending the night on top of the Eiffel Tower, or traveling across the United States with a man she barely knew. Paul Auster used her as a model for a character in his novel Leviathan; she then took the actions of this character as models for her own artwork. Aside from inviting random guests to her party in The Mystery Guest, the Sophie Calle character also archives the gifts she received, which apparently the real Sophie Calle does as well. Bouillier, who was a journalist until he published his first novel at age forty, is friends with that real Sophie Calle, and, like her, fascinated by the meeting of fact and fiction.

In the book, one minor consequence of all the reality-fiction melding is that it stops mattering whether The Mystery Guest serves as an account from Bouillier's life or the transcription of his imaginings. The book's commendation of mixing fact and fiction sanctions the dismissal of this question.

Another, grander result is that the thin book fosters real-life connections beyond its pages. By including such wide-reaching allusions and by justifying their use within its pages, The Mystery Guest manages to prove its potential relevance to the outside world within its compact mass. In the middle of the party, for example, the narrator tries to talk about the writer Michel Leiris, who has just died:

It wasn't the moment to talk about literature. It wasn't the moment at all. And yet this answered the question. The death of Michel Leiris hadn't unlocked anything inside her. There was no connection in her mind between his disappearance and hers.

Even at moments suited poorly suited for the discussion of literature, literature continues to imbue conversations and occurrences with meaning; although he tries to slow literary incursion, the narrator cannot stop reading the interactions in his life, analyzing his interlocutors for their true intentions and their inner feelings. As such, trains of thought run even into realms most desiccated by meaning and do not slow their velocity even once the book's back cover is shut. The little book glorifies this process, quelling the discomfort that surrounds making intuitive judgments of literature and basing analysis on epiphany or emotion.

I wondered, though, as I sat down to Boeuf en Daube in the dining hall that night, whether in fact it might be detrimental to let the impulse to seek literary allusion affect my life consciously or unconsciously. Sure, I thought, as I chose a specially tender piece for William Bankes ("It is a triumph," he said. It was rich, it was tender. It was perfectly cooked), adding meaning could be satisfying, but couldn't it get obsessive? Before I could delve too deeply into such thoughts, Lily, sitting by William, tapped me on the shoulder. "The candles are lit, but there are no flowers," she said. "Oh no," I realized the misunderstanding as I spoke. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

 

Cara Eisenpress is a Literature concentrator in Adams House.