Museum Visits

by Éric Chevillard, Daniel Medin (editor), Daniel Levin Becker (translator)

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

Genres: Essays, Short Stories, France, French Literature, Art

138 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 2, 2024

About the author

Éric Chevillard is a French novelist. He has won awards for several novels including La nébuleuse du crabe in 1993, which won the Fénéon Prize for Literature.

His work often plays with the codes of narration sometimes to the degree that it is even difficult to understand which story is related in his books, and has consequently been classified as postmodern literature. He has been noted for his associations with Les Éditions de Minuit, a publishing-house largely associated with the leading experimental writers composing in French today.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

A frequently chucklesome selection of whimsical fictions masquerading as “micro-essays”, the crowning piece of comedic absurdity being the tale of the man who threw moles into Sam Beckett’s garden in Ussy-sur-Marne. Chevillard’s riffs at their worst can lapse into smirking whimsy, and these moments tend to pad out an otherwise riotous selection of singularly barmy fictions brimming with the erudite prankster’s customary furor scribendi.

[Celine Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime feats of linguistic inventiveness and humor (actually found myself laughing at a number of lines!), perfectly translated from French by a member of the Oulipo collective. Each essay is quite short, maybe 2 to 5 pages, and takes in some concept (a man creates a private museum, a narrator rages against the oppressive everywhereness of the sky) in some funny, unexpected direction.

Genuinely so delightful and fun to read, especially if you’re a fan of César Aira or Italo Calvino.

[Mia Pattillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

silly witty funny I laughed out loud. reminds me of chekhov or kafka or even lydia davis

[bradb42 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never bother writing Goodreads reviews. I always let the stars do the talking. But I am obsessed with this collection of “comic miniatures” (as the blurb on the back cover calls them) and now want to read everything by Éric Chevillard. I could have finished it in a day. But the best way to enjoy this book is to reread, digest, and sit with each piece, even though most are only two pages long.

Chevillard has a wit that makes chaotic hilarity out of the mundane. But this book is really a testament to the art of translation. Daniel Levin Becker’s ability to make the punchlines, for lack of a better word, land is no small feat and requires a special mastery of language. Kate Briggs called Becker “a virtuoso translator,” which is all the recommendation that anyone who’s familiar with her work needs to know.

10/10, will read again.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny, serial micro-essays.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

hehe’d and haha’d more than I have for another book…he looks at the world in a way that makes me wanna crawl into his mind n then sit there for like one day max

[Hein Matthew Hattie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, inventive, playful, preposterous. Neither essays nor prose-poems, perhaps they’re “exercises.” I usually sell or give away books when I’ve finished them, but not this one. You can’t have it. It is mine.

[OGEE Substack · Rating 3 out of 5]

the american term is "silly willy"

[Cameron_Asao · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it's funny it's absolutely hilarious. Maybe some humor lost in translation. Witty guy.

[Olga Zilberbourg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way these stories combine things and feelings in very idiosyncratic ways. Quintessential to this collection is a story called The Sky, in which the narrator seems to take offense at the mere fact that the sky exists -- "I suppose we're damned to have the sky over our heads at all times" -- and advocates for more ceilings so that we don't have to be facing the sky all the time. I imagine that the stories might be political or at least topical in their original context, in translation, taken out of their time and place, they carry strange fascinations with the commonplace, estranged by the narrating consciousness to the point of unrecognizability. Or, perhaps, to take the reader's journey even further: once I stop recognizing the sky, I return to it in another way and start questioning the history of my own engagement with it, and wondering, how come I'd never asked these questions of the sky before. This was very entertaining and intellectually provocative.

[Vincent Eaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, from a well-regarded French author, contains relatively brief (2-3 pages) of musings/analysis/freeform satires of daily life, whether going to museums, making soup or the purpose of stones. Amusing in its taking the usually trivial very seriously, lending such matters to close intellectual perusal. A rare treat. This book was a gift to me, from Eric Angelini, who died 15 months ago in his early 70s. I have been reading it for two years, small gulps, on the tram, on a bus, on a bench in the sun at a park. I did not want to finish it as it meant that this very last gift this dear friend gave me would be over, and my occasional visits to this book's contents read in his memory would be complete. On this day, it is no complete.

[Alejandro Ramirez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cute vignettes based on taking an absurd premise, and follow through the full consequences with a serious voice.

For example, what if chairs were wild and aggressive animals? what if the most attractive part of a museum is not the art, but the floor?

It's clever, it's cute. Reminds me a bit of Italo Calvino, perhaps Monty Python, but definitely not what I needed to read now.

[abbey lakey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quippy short stories that feel like elongated and in depth intrusive thoughts. Actually made me laugh out loud a couple of times. Really clever, somewhat absurd and definitely intelligent writing.