GREAT LINE:

Here was the strangest part: I completely forgot that I’d sworn never to speak to her again, and that she’d left me years before without a word of explanation, without so much as saying goodbye, the way they abandon dogs when summer comes (as I put it to myself at the time), the way they abandon a dog chained to a tree for good measure.

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In this slim memoir, the author is looking back on a dinner party he was invited to by an ex-girlfriend. The relationship with this woman had ended abruptly, and the author had never really gotten over it. So the invitation throws him into a bit of a tizzy. What does it mean? What should he do? What should he say to her? We spend quite a lot of time in his head as he deals with the existential crisis that this invitation has provoked. And although he is pathetic as only the dumped can be, he is also sympathetic and very, very funny. Just when you are afraid that our narrator has been looking for meaning where there is none, we get a lovely pay off from an unlikely literary source. As French as can be, this work is whimsical and navel-gazing but in an endearing way. You will never look at a man in a turtleneck quite the same way.

Check the BPL catalog for this title: The Mystery Guest