Self-Portrait Abroad (Netherlandic and Belgian Literature Series) - Softcover

Toussaint is a genuinely funny writer . . . small erotic moments are captured perfectly . . . makes me long for more by Toussaint.

[E]legant, erudite, and joyously superficial.

An original and significant writer, whose fiction can be as engaging as it is surprising.

Eleven funny, clever, and light stories. The twelfth one, on how human beings are carried away and destroyed by the passage of time, is magnificent.

In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator—a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself—travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan’s historic Nara, gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter on the road from Tunis to Sfax. Tales of a cosmopolitan at home in a strangely familiar world, Self-Portrait Abroad casts the entire globe in a cool but playful light, reminding us that, wherever we go,we take our own eyes with us...