Pseudo

Written in the first person, this fascinating novel unfolds like a set of Russian dolls: it is ostensibly written by Paul Pavlowitch, who pretends to reveal himself under his “true” identity, or more precisely to portray a patient writer (himself) confined in Copenhagen for treatment of a form of schizophrenia linked to a paranoid perception of the world, with its violence, wars and torture. Since the best defense is a good offense, the narrator introduces, under the transparent guise of “Tonton Macoute,” Romain Gary: an intrusive second cousin with whom Pavlowitch/Ajar maintains a relationship of love and hate. In Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar, a confession published posthumously, Gary would say of Pseudo: “I put myself into it exactly as I had been invented, and as all the critics had therefore recognized me in the character of Tonton Macoute, it occurred to none of them that, instead of Paul Pavlowitch inventing Romain Gary, it was Romain Gary inventing Paul Pavlowitch.”

The text is also of bibliographical interest, since it stages various real episodes (the journalists’ suspicions, the meeting with his editor, an original title for La Vie devant soi, La Tendresse des pierres, which nearly gave him away).

A fine copy.