Monotobio par Èric Chevillard (review)

Beginning with his first novel in 1987, Chevillard has carved out a niche as one of the most imaginative, idiosyncratic, and prolific authors writing in French today. His quest to explore, exploit, and explode the conventions of every variety of literary genre that he can get his hands on has led him to engage with forms as varied as travel narratives, children's tales, literary criticism, and blogging, among many others. In Monotobio, his twenty-third work for Minuit, Chevillard takes on the genre of autobiography. While autobiographical elements appear in several of his other works, particularly in L'auteur et moi (2012), Monotobio breaks new ground with the directness of his approach. For a seasoned reader of Chevillard's fantastical fiction, it can be surprising to find signs of our shared and often mundane world portrayed so directly in his writing, from encounters with authors Antoine Volodine and Yasmina Khadra at a literary festival, to vacations with his children, to his literary column in Le Monde. The curious title is explained on the back cover: "Monotobio plutôt que Mon autobio, avec quatre O comme quatre roues bien rondes, car il s'agit de ne pas traîner." Perhaps not surprisingly, the narrative jumps around from moment to moment and theme to theme, for as Chevillard notes: "Les souvenirs peuvent être inscrits n'importe où très opportunément dans le récit d'une vie" (148). One of his aims is to destabilize the tidy and overly simplified narrative structures we tend to impose on the experience of both history and our daily lives, mocking the notion "que tout se tient, comme dans une biographie à l'américaine, l'effet des effets qui précèdent devient la cause de ceux qui suivent" (45). Playing explicitly on our desires for narrative coherence and causal relationships, Chevillard undermines the teleological structures that underpin the autobiographical genre, but the cumulative effect of so many unconnected fragments is ultimately enervating, even monotonous. One aspect of Chevillard's project is the quest to exhaust the possibilities of literature, but after 23 books for Minuit, 15 works for other publishers, and 12 volumes (thus far) of Chevillard's collected writings from his daily blog L'autofictif, even Chevillard's fans might begin to feel a bit exhausted. Unlike the short fragments of Chevillard's blog, a form that lends itself to chronicling his observations on daily life, in Monotobio, the author's desire to push the form to its limits, according to "la logique dont je démontre dans ces pages l'implacable déroulement" (68), becomes exhausting. Frequent readers of Chevillard know that one of his most potent techniques and particular pleasures is the use of metaphors or comparisons pushed far beyond their usual limits. Some passages of Monotobio do shine brightly, yet, as is the case in our daily lives, other moments are less worthy of our attention. While this autobiography is in some ways a case of diminishing returns and not the best introduction to Chevillard's universe for new readers, it remains of interest to his longtime aficionados.