Jean-Philippe Toussaint, writer who loves Italy

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Italy is often present in the multifaceted production of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, yet the fruitful author of Belgian origin is still little known in our country. Toussaint frequented the cultural effervescences of Paris from an early age, choosing it as his publishing capital. In the 1980s, he will begin a long association with Jérôme Lindon’s Éditions de Minuit, where he will publish various titles: The Salle de bain (1984), Monsieur (1986), The Apparel photo (1988), La Reticence (1991), La Télévision (1997), Fuir (2005), La Melancolie de Zidane (2007).

Nouveau Roman

Taking his first steps in the wake of the Nouveau Roman, the writer will take an increasingly experimental and subjective path, following long trips to China and Japan during which he will approach visual culture, specifically photography, a passion like cinema , which never ceases to be alive in him. His cosmopolitan vein is also known. Many short films, videos and films directed by him and in which he sometimes takes part together with other actors: The Salle de bain (1989), Monsieur (1990) La Sevillane (1992), Berlin 10 hours 46 (1994), The Patinoire (1999).

Minimalism

To return to his work, Toussaint ventures to the margins of literature, using a minimalism that associates him with early Beckett or with the novels of Claude Simon, when the binomial writing-seeing is at stake, visible for example in Mes bureaux. The lesson of the Nouveau Roman can be seen in Toussaint’s novels, in which the stories are never written according to the traditional order of development, but through totally atypical expedients of novelistic narration, such as the bathroom in which the homonymous book is set. Salle de bain. If Italy is often present in his production, it has never given too much importance to his works: few publishing houses have translated it, recently only one to deal with it, the Venetian Amos editions with some new translations (like The Salle de bain, The bathroom, translated by Roberto Ferrucci), Toussaint could be said to have had “a critical success and a lack of success with the public”, explains Margareth Amatulli, who has been studying his work for many years. After all, not being a commercial writer and not having – yet – an affiliation with a single Italian publishing house, it is complicated “to remedy that editorial dispersion which has certainly not contributed to making Toussaint’s fortune in Italy”.