Monday 18 May 2020

"The Moustache" by Emmanuel Carrère


The Moustache

by Emmanuel Carrère 

(translated by Lanie Goodman)

A review

Once, when I was a little boy, I put it into my head that someone had switched the position of the two paintings hanging in our sitting room. I reported this to my mum who, somewhat perplexed, assured me that the pictures were in the exact position they had always been in.  I cried my heart out in frustration, until my parents humoured me and told me that, yes, I was right and would I please stop crying.  It’s one of the most bizarre memories of my childhood and one that still fills me with frustration and unease. 

The protagonist of Carrère’s novella, a successful, happily married architect, finds himself in a similar predicament.  One day he decides to surprise Agnes, his wife of five years, by shaving off his moustache.   He waits for her reaction… which doesn’t come.  When he presses her to comment about his new look, she insists that he never sported facial hair.  At first, he is convinced that Agnes is playing some sort of elaborate joke on him, a perfectly reasonable explanation considering that she is somewhat of a pathological liar.  But when friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances also fail to notice the disappearance of his moustache, things take a decidedly disturbing turn.   The protagonist is drawn into a downward spiral of angst and paranoia, leading inexorably to tragedy.

Carrère’s The Moustache was first published in 1986 and is being reissued on Vintage in a translation by Lanie Goodman.  The novella is based on one simple, surreal premise, developed obsessively in an imitation of the protagonist’s frame of mind.  Carrère’s command of narrative tension is masterly. The story has a potential for dark comedy, but its effect is, instead, one of sheer terror.  Carrère’s Class Trip which I recently read, is often described as a horror novella and I expressed my reservations about that classification.  On the contrary, The Moustache is, in my view, clearly a horror story – its sense of existential dread a strange, unsettling mix of Poe and Camus.
 
Kindle Edition186 pages
Published May 7th 2020 by Vintage Digital (first published June 3rd 1986)

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