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“... among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Born in 1957, Toussaint was out of the blocks quickly: by the age of 35 he’d published four novels. It’s the last of these, the so far untranslated La Réticence, which most blatantly betrays ...”

“... changes work well for short fiction, since the brevity doesn’t seem to involve leaving much out. Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s short and strangely enjoyable first novel The Bathroom (1986, he has brought out two more since) very noticeably returns to its point of departure by concluding with an almost exact repetition of a passage near the beginning. Its ...”

“... Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and, later, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Tom McCarthy.† In 2001 he published a sort of spy-thriller, a nouveau nouveau roman set in a ravaged postwar Berlin, but its title, La Reprise – ‘resumption’, ‘repetition’, even ‘rerun’ – captured all too well ...”