GROUNDBREAKING OULIPIAN FICTION

“…while the writing itself is full of compelling emotional depth, the artistic conceit that makes the novel so unique is in Arias-Misson’s regular appropriation and repurposing of famous literary characters and important passages from literature.” —Rachel Greenberg, SEIN UND WERDEN

A NEW EDITION OF ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON’S EXPERIMENTAL NOVEL

Discover what happens when famous fictional characters surface in the life of a writer. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHARACTER FROM FICTION is an extraordinary work of Oulipian imagination.

Alain Arias-Misson has produced an indecently literary novel about a thoroughly picaresque Character. Passages have been plagiarized from a score of great Modernists — from Kafka and Stendhal to Joyce, Austen and Proust, from Strindberg, Constant and Mann to Michaux, Sterne and Beckett, and are woven seamlessly, unidentified, into his “autobiography.” For the Character — a budding author — is the product of those authors whose novels he has been nourished on. Characters step out of their fiction to advise and interfere with his life and he appears on stage in theirs. Where ‘le petit Marcel’s’ nocturnal terrors begin and the Character’s end, or how the Character’s boyhood lusts lead him into the Brussels labyrinth of ladies of the night and how he meets young Daedalus there, already sated in a lady’s embrace, is an open question. The autobiography ends at the age of twenty-one, when like most authors he has read his own most important authors — yet the rest of his life has already been plotted.