Museum Visits - Eric Chevillard

The daring, mischievous micro-essays of award-winning French humorist Éric Chevillard, published in English for the first time n Éric 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. n n 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.

n n 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.n