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A Life on Paper
We hope to be forgiven our American biases, but we expected a hoax. This collection of short short stories arrived, touting the first time French author Châteaureynaud had been translated into English and touting him as “France’s own Kurt Vonnegut.” The stories contained the same gimlet-eyed whimsy that made Vonnegut one of the 20th-century greats, and look at that book cover. The man not only writes like a French Vonnegut, he looks like a French Vonnegut.
In the end, it’s not fair to keep Châteaureynaud in Vonnegut’s shadow. In “Icarus Saved from the Skies,” the narrator sprouts wings on his back, too small and pitiful to fly but magical enough to enamor a young lady scientist, who eventually marries him. The narrator hates his wings: He looks like a hunchback in public, and they’re too small to be of any use. His refusal to view them as a gift turns his wife against him, and it’s not until she pushes him from a mountaintop—attempting to force him into flight but instead gravely injuring him—that they reconcile. In “La Tête,” a doctor is confronted by a healthy young man who comes to him seeking help for a talking human head in his pocket. The full-bodied man is a sensitive, apprentice executioner, and the bodiless head a convicted murderer.
Both classic and modern, strange and simple, Châteaureynaud’s stories remind not only of Vonnegut but of Gogol and Kafka. What’s endearing about the stories is the amount of tenderness running through them. Even in stories about bizarre cruelty (the title story tells of a father who had his daughter photographed a dozen times a day for her entire life), affection provides the glue.
