Museum Visits

The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist ric Chevillard, published in English for the first time ric Chevillard is one of Frances leading stylists and thinkers, an endlessly inventive observer of the everyday whose erudition and imagination honor the legacy of Swift and Voltairewith 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 Hegels cap, on display in Stuttgart, is really worth the trip. Throughout, Chevillards powers of observation chime with his verbal acrobatics. His gazeinitially superficial, then deeply attentive, then practically sociopathicmanages time and again to defamiliarize the familiar with a coherent and charismatic charm. Daniel Levin Beckers 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.