Autoportrait

by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator—a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself—travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan’s historic Nara, gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter on the road from Tunis to Sfax. Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a strangely familiar world, Self-Portrait Abroad casts the entire globe in a cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go,we take our own eyes with us...

Genres: Fiction, Belgium, Travel, France, Contemporary, Novels

128 pages, Pocket Book

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Jean-Philippe Toussaint (born 29 November, 1957, Brussels) is a Belgian prose writer and filmmaker. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and he has had his photographs displayed in Brussels and Japan. Toussaint won the Prix Médicis in 2005 for his novel Fuir. The 2006 book La mélancolie de Zidane (Paris: Minuit, 2006) is a lyrical essay on the headbutt administered by the French football player Zinedine Zidane to the Italian player Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin. An English translation was published in 2007 in the British journal New Formations. His 2009 novel La Vérité sur Marie won the prestigious Prix Décembre.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief portraits conjure place, and by reflection, their observer, who may or may not be contiguous with the author of this book. In deft economy over changing landscapes these recall Paul Willems' The Cathedral of Mist, but with Willems' sense of the mythic and mysterious traded for an often self-directed sense of irony. Though I ultimately draw more essential things from Willems', both are finely executed to make the meandering and undirected nature of travel evocative, compelling, satisfying.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a scene in Toussaint's earlier novel Running Away in which the protagonist is riding a train in China while on a phone call to France, so simultaneously existing in two places at once yet also, somehow, in no place. Self Portrait Abroad felt like a book-length exploration of moments like that one: getting the news of one's home village while in Japan, moments of pending arrival and looming departure, moments in transit, or of having just arrived but not yet made sense of where. There's a phenomenal scene in which the narrator struggles to direct a German butcher to slice aspic to the correct thickness, and the knife moves back and forth, circling the Platonic ideal of an aspic slice, but never quite finding it. That's what the book felt like: moments of almost being somewhere, so almost being a whole someone while fending off the passage of time and approach of death through travel and near-permanent absence. The exception is a chapter subtitled, "the best day of my life," about a local boules tournament; it's the only chapter that stays focused on one place and time, without digression through travel or memory the desire to be somewhere else, yet it's fleeting—coming early in the novel, it feels more like something lost than something found, something the narrator is sadly falling away from rather than building toward as it easily could have been (had the book been a different book composed of the same scenes).

[Leslivresdudesir · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toujours la belle plume de Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

[Jeroen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The last vignette here, and in particular the last line, is great. It features Toussaint - or, let's say, "a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself" - in Kyoto closing his eyes in what he believes will become a futile attempt at crying. The stage is all set for a show of negated pathos, finding the low point in the absence, not presence, of emotional outpour, and one is reminded of the skepticism of Ben Lerner (who is, most likely, an acolyte of Toussaint) - or, let's say, an American expat in Madrid much like Lerner himself - being confronted with a "profound experience of art" in his novel Leaving the Atocha Station. But the twist is this: Toussaint does cry; or, at the very least, his "spirit" does:

I realized that time had passed since I'd left Kyoto. And if this affected me so deeply on that day, it was not only because my senses, numbed by the prevailing grayness and the alcohol in my blood, naturally put me in a melancholic frame of mind, it was also because I suddenly felt sad and powerless at this brusque testimony to the passage of time. It was hardly the result of conscious reasoning, but rather the concrete and painful, fleeting and physical feeling that I myself was part and parcel of time and its passing. Until then, the feeling of being carried along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote - until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of setting landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches.

I like and recognise this definition of the power of writing, yet it is also a very idiosyncratic one, perfectly calibrated to Toussaint's world. All the stories (or vignettes) before this last one make that clear: as he moved on in his career, Toussaint has more and more burrowed into his own personal cult of mundanity, dragging this thing along like a joke taken too far. The things he describes are so seemingly unworthy of said description, that they are elevated solely by the fact of being written about. If Toussaint's live is truly as he presents it on the pages here (a big if, surely), he needs to write about these mundanities to make them into something more.

But he takes it all quite far. Perhaps too far. Whereas in The Bathroom his endless description of the preparation of a fish for dinner was still offset by other, more traditionally notable developments in the story, here his whole shtick has become an endless gutting of fish for dinner. Here, too, he once again shows his predilection for singling out the most mawkish of sports - darts in The Bathroom, bowling in Running Away, and now a local petanque tournament in Corsica - and to write about them as if they were the World Cup final in football (about which, incidentally, Toussaint did write a great essay).

The whole thing reads very much like a gaff: let's go to all these exotic places but avoid the exotic about them, play them off coolly. Perhaps the author's point is to show that in the quotidian run of things, we aren't that different, culturally speaking. We all mostly eat, work, sleep, and repeat, after all. Yet I nevertheless could not escape that feeling of "why are you telling me this", especially as I turned the pages and the stories suddenly run out. Jokes without punchlines, but those, I am guessing, are precisely the kind of jokes Toussaint likes to play.

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Every time I travel," this book starts, "I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether." But the narrator's travels are often more ordinary: he's always bringing himself with him, after all. What's more, he runs into people he knows, talks about small-town European gossip, carries his usual routines around, in modified form. (In Tokyo: "Although it was pastis time, we contented ourselves with a green tea" (p 9).) He moves from airport to hotel to shop to café, but sometimes seems more focused on the in-between, on the global all-places/no-place, than on the specificities of where he is: "You arrive in Tokyo the way you arrive in Bastia, from the sky. The plane flies in a long arc above the bay and aligns with the runway to touch down. Seen from above, at four thousand feet, there isn't much difference between the Pacific and the Mediterranean." (p 7). There are times when he does experience scenes/events/people that are peculiar to a place that isn't home, but he's often flip or critical: at the On Matsuri in Nara all he says is "too bad it's raining, huh?"; in the same chapter he meets a Japanese woman who admires his work, but he just talks (to the reader, not her!) about how bad her French is—never mind that clearly he's not managing to speak to her in Japanese. This all could get old quickly, and kind of does, but then there are passages like this, which I like a whole lot:

In Hanoi, the traffic punctuates each hour of the day and almost every hour of the night. The noise of car horns never stops in the streets, it forms a permanent background noise like an uninterrupted murmur that you could almost forget if it didn't keep coming back at you, it being precisely the function of horns to attract attention, to signal and warn, to drown each other out, outhonk one another. Thousands of horns blow without a moment's silence on the streets, shrill and loud, sharp and repetitive, insistent, some quick and piercing, fired off nearby in impatient salvoes, others remote, lost, muted by their distance, mainly from mopeds and motorcycles, but also from cars and taxis, tarpaulined trucks and three-wheeled vehicles, buses and vans and sometimes even—lost in the middle of an intersection, hardly audible in the surrounding turmoil— the delicate and isolated tinkle of a bicycle bell. (pp 58-59)

At the end, though, I found myself underwhelmed/glad to be done with reading this. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood; maybe I just read this at the wrong moment. I kept wanting to like this book more than I actually did; there were moments of interest, but not enough of them.

[Plumb · Rating 5 out of 5]

It started off a little dry, though it was funny when the main character was almost strangled by the telephone cord as a Japanese man in the room lunged at the telephone beside him only to hand him the telephone and say, It's for you. I had a very big laugh though in the following Berlin section when he visits a shop. Berlin shops are very unfriendly, he says, you wipe your feet and enter and feel like a terrible burden for just wanting to buy something. He gets a slice of ham from the woman at the counter and asks for another slice of some meat but it's thin, thin like jelly on a credit card (an odd expression), and then the challenge comes. He looks her dead in the eye: dicker, he says. And then he has her, she is under the thumb. He guides her knife with his voice along the slab of meat, no, too much, a little more, no not that much, oh you had it but now it's gone! It was hilarious to read the way he played with her, this little victory in the shop. This was when I was fully won over by this book.

It really is very funny at times. I love the way he has his little asides in brackets, like at the end of the chapter where he is learning how to cut sushi in Japan and he has royally messed it up and he adds (raw fish is also good grilled), or when he meets a fan who speaks terrible French in Japan and she tells him his books are like Chinese medicine and give her a vague sense of well-being (a Chinese doctor, that's what I was at heart), and in that same chapter he believes this Japanese fangirl might be falling in love with him and she tells him in a hushed voice, You are not at all like I imagined you, and he adds (what did I tell you?) like a little wink to the reader, and then he goes on to describe how he was suavely stroking a deer's chin as he listened (she deflates him after this and tells him she imagined him being more intelligent and more blue - she had of course mispronounced blanc as bleu). It had me in hysterics, honestly. Such a wonderful humour, and when it's not funny it is tender, or light like a Summer day is joyous. His favourite day of his life was when he won a bowls tournament and won a prize ham! Canoodling with his wife on a train and they see the rivers and hills lit up by the sun! So many fantastic moments, all written beautifully.

It ends on a very melancholy note as the author laments the passage of time, the changes that take place in the locations he was once so familiar with and loved. It was a stark change in tone, but welcomed, and masterfully done, a beautiful end note to a fine book. I really did love this.

[Pumbie Boulotte]

De très belles locutions, un peu d’humour et de jolies réflexions sur l’autoportrait et le voyage ; cependant, le livre est selon moi scindé en deux avec une première partie bien meilleure que la seconde. C’est court donc ça va, mais je ne sais pas si j’en lirais d’autres de l’auteur. Pas de traductions des mots en allemand du coup je me sentais un peu privilégiée mais ça reste une forme d’exclusion ?
Lu pendant la canicule et les maux de têtes étaient gratuits

Édit : euh c’est quoi ton pb JP avec le passage dans le taxi ?

[Federica Merino · Rating 2 out of 5]

This autobiographical travel collection didn’t quite work for me. The book follows Toussaint through various trips and experiences, but I found the approach felt more like personal memoir than engaging literary fiction. While I can appreciate the deliberate choice to focus on everyday, mundane moments during travel, the execution felt somewhat unfocused and the narrative voice didn’t draw me in the way I’d hoped.

The structure consists of disconnected vignettes from trips to Tokyo, Berlin, Prague, Vietnam and other places, but I struggled to find a connecting thread between them. The focus tends to be quite inward-looking - whether he’s dealing with a German butcher or wandering through Nara, the observations feel more self-referential than exploratory of the places themselves. The everyday moments he captures are deliberately mundane, which I understand is intentional, but I found it didn’t quite hold my interest. I was hoping for more insight into the places he visited or a stronger narrative thread to tie the experiences together. It’s not a bad book, just not the right fit for me personally.

[Violet · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has to be the most boring and pretentious book I have read in a long time.

[maddie middleton]

0 stars.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

fun and funny book. travel is about what one remembers of the trip and not necessarily the history of the place, its museums or the other 'intellectual' things.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toussaint is probably one of the funnier writers I've encountered recently — sometimes that goes a long way !

[kasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mocno średnie, przetłumaczenie jej nie będzie ani przyjemnością, ani żadnym kreatywnym wyzwaniem niestety.

[abcdefg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second Jean-Philippe Toussaint read, and while I liked "Camera" better, I still enjoyed the simplicity of his words in this book.

The narrator, a cosmopolitan author who travels the world, makes his way through Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Prague, Berlin, Nara, Hanoi, and Sfax describing his encounters with associates, friends, and strangers. Reading somewhat like a travel log or journal, the novel appears to be light and straightforward. The narrator is seemingly unaffected by the passage of time, which turns out to be a central theme of the novel, but only discreetly, that is, until you come to the very last pages.

That's another point of interest. What starts off as a journey through place becomes simultaneously an inner journey of sorts. As we see with this character, a certain revelation of one's own relationship with location and time rises from the subconscious to the surface. While the narrator enjoys his ride in a rickshaw in Hanoi, he describes it with unconcerned fluidity:

"I made no effort to hold time back, I consented to get older, accepted the idea of death with serenity."

This attitude changes when the novel ends. In fact, there's quite a shift when the narrator reaches Tunisia and a premonition of his own death seizes him.

Toussaint is quite a philosopher as his characters seem to, at one point or another, become conscious of their place in reality. I think that's what makes his novels eye-opening in a sense, with all their sparseness and stripped language.

[Recai Bookreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

As usual, a fine read from JPT. What gives his books that unique taste is his choice of things he finds worthy to talk about. Quite mundane actually but combined by his bright prose, that creates an ASMR-like effect, where we (and many times story characters as well) focus on rather mundane aspect of life while more serious things going on in the background. Many times it's more than taking a break from the life, it's more like worship of a fetish, as if this is the more important thing in life, not the "serious" stuff that made you travel there. So it's not that important what Jane Birkin said but how she was forced to sing by that odd group of writers. It's not important what was discussed in the conference but the bubbles pouring out of that mineral water bottle. Wherever possible laziness is preffered to dutifulness. Sometimes I get chills when he gets you to take a closer look into this ultra selfish aspect of human existence that Haneke enjoys showing us.

[Elena Tomorowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meandering book, chaptered by the cities the narrator was visiting, with a confident voice. It has a similar style to Edourd Leve's book, "Suicide", perhaps due to the translation. I wouldn't have said that this book touched me in any way, until I read the last two pages. Beautiful. He writes, "Until then, the feeling of being carried along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote--until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of settling landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches". In here I can almost sense the distant voice of Kundera, and it gives me the shivers.

[Lukáš Palán · Rating 3 out of 5]

V Autoportrétu je paradoxně víc děje, než ve všech ostatních Toussaintových knížkách dohromady. Útlá knížečka skáče ze země a světadílu na další a v miniaturních výsecích ukazuje, kdo Toussaint je, nebo, možná a asi, kým chce být. Svým způsobem je to daleko lepší forma portrétování než nějaké zaprcané memoáry na 1800 stran - a to především proto, že přesně v těchto nepatrných detailech vlastně vynikne naprosto celý charakter. Snad jen trochu škoda, že Toussaint nevybral žádné momenty a střípky, ve kterých by byly tanky, gangbangy, heroin nebo řeckořímské zápasy dětí s Downovým syndromem - kniha by tak byla ještě o chlup lepší.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw this one in a library display of international authors' books, so figured I'd check it out after leafing through it; I read a lot of travel narrative books, so was interested in how a fictional one would turn out. We spend 80 pages following a somewhat neurotic, self-absorbed Corsican protagonist as he travels to various countries (Japan several times). There didn't seem to be much of a "plot" as such, more vignettes of his character - can't say as really liked, but enjoyed reading about him. If you're into quirky, you'll love this one. I plan to read more of Toussaint's work.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toussaint sneaks up on you. I hope he still sneaks up on you, even when I've warned you. I was enjoying this book, finding it a little light perhaps, but enjoying it. Then he got me, in those last five pages. It all snaps tight, and he's got you. Very nice work.

_Television_ and _Making Love_ are probably better places to start with him, but I'm quite happy that so many more of his works have made their way into English.

[Shivaji Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightfully light touch that takes away the glamour from travel. Toussaint talks about dealing with rude customer service, going to a strip joint loaded with several bags of Christmas shopping, walking around a cramped Japanese shop while having severe back ache and therefor risking knocking of some porcelain. The tone is only serious for the last chapter when the writer suddenly experiences panic over temporality of everything including his life.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quaint (fictional) travelogue comprising playful vignettes of a writer abroad who finds himself reveling in the cultural and lingual disconnects that seek to assail him—too quaint, perhaps. The brisk novella only arrives at fruition in fleeting passages of a narrator coming to terms with his place in the world, reaching its apex in the closing rumination on temporal and spatial displacement, where the committal of thought to pen inscribes Being in the passage of time.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the fourth book I've read by JPT so far, and definitely my least favorite. There were certainly some nice parts to this one - particularly the Berlin butcher scene - but nothing about this book really makes it a must-read. I haven't yet read Televison, which everyone seems to like, but even after Camera and Bathroom, nothing has been early as good as Reticence.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toussaint and I shared a fun little interview that we certainly would not have were it not for the efforts and abilities of John Lambert, his translator: http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2010/...

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quintessential Toussaint.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring and short. A few good paragraphs that made you want to travel, but otherwise...didn't get the point.

[Abeka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Le récit de voyage par Toussaint: forcément une réussite.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfect gem. Slight, sweet, whimsical, well-written.

[Elusive.Mystery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Small slices of the author’s life and impressions during his trips abroad.

In French.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of Toussaint's Englished fictions, filled with wonderful vignettes of traveling and consciousness...