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 stage 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, its wars, its tortures. And since the best defense is attack, the narrator brings in, 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 said 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 restages various real episodes (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 very fine copy, in a full, immaculate binding by Patrice Goy.