»Class Trip / The Mustache

Two novels by Emmanuel Carrère: "Class Trip" and "The Mustache". The former has an uneven balance between development, climax, and denouement; despite its marvellous premise, the quantities of prose devoted first to the exposition and then to the development threw me off, and I felt disengaged from the first half of the novel while reading the second.

The latter of the two novels, The Mustache, however, bowled me over. Wow. This novel combines a phenomenal exploration of a marriage with a existential drama, all wrapped in a powerful narrative with small and muscular plot developments. This is certainly one of the few novels that has so gripped me, and amongst the most haunting. Lighter than Kafka, but sharing the aspects of an increasingly confused narrator, The Mustache focuses very strongly on the character at its core.

Starting with the innocuous decision of shaving his moustache, the protagonist falls into an increasingly opaque confusion. He struggles first with his wife and his friends, who swear that he never had a moustache, and slowly descends into a state of ambivalence about whether he had the moustache or not, whether he is who he thinks he is, and whether he can return to his pre-barbered condition.

This second novel, The Mustache, is fantastic. It is one of the most thrilling stories I have read, as full of intrigue and plot as a Dashiell Hammett novel; as thoughtful and langourous as a Haruki Murakami story. The author adapted it for the screen a few years ago; the novel itself he wrote in 1985.

Although the book does not explore it fully, it touches on a theme I consider essential to the modern urban gentleman: facial hair is a fantastic ornament. Moustache contests! Beard competitions! A man's cheeks and chin are a palimpsest, n'est pas? The book also has a particularly stirring and amusing passage set around Place de la Republique, dear to my heart.