The Unforeseen

by Christian Oster

Written with his typical witty and delicate touch, Christian Oster's new novel pokes fun at the postmodern male's overrated sensitivity. Oster's stories are simple--at least if we mean stories that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590512650
• ISBN13: 9781590512654
• Release Date: October 2007
• Publisher: Other Press (NY)
• Length: 257 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

"I needed...to arrange for something to happen while not really having anything to do with it."

In this strange account by an unnamed narrator of a weekend in the French countryside, Prix Medicis-winning author Christian Oster explores the nature of selfhood and the amount of control we choose to assume, or not to assume, for the outcome of our lives. Here Oster's narrator is a self-obsessed and selfish master of inaction, a man who lives in his own world, a world so small that he is the only person who occupies it. Accompanied by his lover Laure, the narrator is going to the birthday party of Philippe, a friend who lives on an island off the coast of France. When Laure falls ill, she takes to bed in a local hotel, asks him to sleep in another room, and announces that she will not go to the party, insisting that he go--and that he leave the car for her. Within this simple framework, Oster examines the life of a man who must now either take some action or allow it to happen to him. As he obsesses over Laure's behavior and their failing relationship, he decides to hitchhike, getting picked up by kindly Gilles Traverse, who drives him toward his destination. Unexpectedly, Gilles invites him to spend the night at his home, where he and his wife Helene will be giving Gilles' thirty-fifth birthday party. The speaker accepts, though he is ill and has a fever, which does nothing to improve his interest in the outside world. When the party breaks up, the speaker continues on his way toward Philippe's estate, driven by a woman he has just met. A buffoon, he is the victim of accidents and surprises, a game played by the fates on someone who has not lived his life, thought beyond himself, or learned to think ahead at all. Filled with ironies and some dark humor, the novel is a challenge. The author creates wry scenes and lively peripheral characters to keep the reader going, while at the same time, presenting a main character who is so inactive that there is nothing for the reader to like or to identify with. The speaker is a cipher, so dull that one has no particular wish for either his success or his failure. Author Christian Oster has given us an existential novel of a man who floats through life, tethered to the world only by his ego, a man others pass without a backward glance. Whether he is capable of change, an idea raised by the conclusion, is an open question for each reader to decide. n Mary Whipple My Big Apartment A Cleaning Woman