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 Edition, 186 pages
Published May 7th 2020 by Vintage Digital (first published June 3rd 1986)
No comments:
Post a Comment