David Leavitt / Features / Untitled Books

What I'm reading: The Mystery Guest, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, and The Lazarus Project

David Leavitt

Author of Equal Affections, The Lost Language Of Cranes and acclaimed new novel The Indian Clerk.

The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

This very short work--an "account," according to Bouillier--defies categorization as either fiction or memoir. Years after she has left him, a woman whom the narrator once loved passionately calls to invite him to a party at which he is to be a "mystery guest." He goes--and finds himself embarking on a journey at once inward and exterior, one that takes him beyond the sun and to Mrs. Dalloway's party. Moving, funny, and unlike anything else I've ever read.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard

This is in fact a meditation on reading--its pleasures and its dangers--masquerading as a guide to surviving French cocktail parties. Along the way Bayard offers cogent and funny analyses of various works of literature in which characters pretend to have read books that they haven't. Enormously clever and elegant.

The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon

To be published in May 2008, this first novel from a gifted Bosnian-American writer is a flat-out masterpiece: funny, rueful, and profound.

Thursday, 24 April, 2008