Reviewed by David Single
Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a writer preoccupied by space. By space I don't mean the sidereal playground that has been the setting of much science fiction (though, conceivably, it could be that), but space as extension. His first novel La Salle de Bain, 1985 (appearing in English as Bathroom, 2008) is the story of a man who chose to live in his bathtub; turning away from the world, this man (nameless) sits in his tub doing nothing while his girlfriend and others continue to go about their own business. La Télévision, 1997 (Television, 2007) again took up the theme of enclosed spaces, but this time through the ubiquity of that eponymous machine. In renouncing television, the narrator (again, nameless) turns away from his own to find they are everywhere, inescapable, a suffocating electronic surfeit, inducing a sense of claustrophobia. Space is not invoked only by its lack in Toussaint's work, but also by its abundance. International travel is something that Toussaint's characters do often, multiple times in each of his books, and through it Toussaint expresses – as he does in the novel under review, The Truth About Marie - one of the principle elements of his work: simultaneity.