Puke Everywhere

So, what no one really tells you about cats is that they are very seasonally inclined. What do I mean? Well, I mean that, as early winter descends upon us, I now have five little sweet demons in my house instead of my usually well-behaved living-room tigers. There’s been a lot of wrestling matches and loud playtimes in the middle of the night. A lot of howling for attention. A lot of puking — in nearly every room and all over the basement sofa. Poor Jabberwocky actually stepped in one of her sisters’ pukes and made the perfect face of pure feline disgust over it.

Some years are more trying than others, but you can generally count on early spring and early winter being times of little sleep and lots of scrubbing. By December, everyone should be settled into fluffy winter sleepy-mode again.

A Strange Party

The plot of Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest is a bit hard to explain, but I will try. The story proposes to be true and proposes to be so outlandish because of this. One day, Bouillier receives a phone call from a woman that left him without warning five years before and vanished forever from his life. She doesn’t reach out to offer him anything in the way of explanation or closure, but instead wants to invite him to the birthday party of an artist he has never met. This artist has a tradition of having one guest at her yearly festivities that she doesn’t know as a form of portent in regard to the year in her life to come.

It’s a strange tale and in this tale Bouillier is not trying to get us to focus on the party or even the individuals that attend it, or the woman that invites him to it. Instead Bouillier uses the party as an exploration into the fraught nature of human connections and how much they influence how we see ourselves as people of worth or insignificance.

Not Letting Go

As I said, this is not a book about a party. Instead, it is about the author himself. It starts with a tone that is mundane but bitingly humorous as Bouillier tries to convince himself that he has let go of the mystery of the end of the relationship with the caller. He does a poor job of it. Though he says that it has been five years and he is beyond needing an explanation, this is an utter lie. He wants precisely what this woman is not prepared to offer him — the why behind a rather traumatic episode in his life that ended up changing his faith in himself and how others feel about him.

It is because he hasn’t let go that he feels the need to accept this bizarre invitation. He wants to prove to himself that he has moved on. But he hasn’t. And as he stands at the celebration as a stranger at a strange cocktail party, he realizes that he maybe never will.

Also? There’s an additional commentary on the nature of performance art and the ethics of using potential subjects that have not been properly briefed on the full nature of the project or the full extent of their role in it.

Letting Go

At the conclusion of the book, the unthinkable does happen. Bouillier, who has spent most of the tiny page count of this book imagining his ex taking him back in various fantasy sequences, finally does let it go. It’s a brilliant moment in its simplicity. They just have said all they had to say — and that doesn’t mean he gets any explanations about the past because he doesn’t. Instead, he just senses an ending and he goes home. It isn’t neat. It isn’t healing. It isn’t satisfying. But there is a finality there that marks where the future departs from the past and stops carrying the burdens of unanswered questions.

The Mystery Guest is a book that is well off the beaten path, but it’s an interesting read that accomplishes that rare combination of making the reader both laugh and think. Bouillier’s willingness to be very self-deprecating is definitely an added plus.

The Holiday Season is Here!

It’s that time of year again! The holiday season has begun and I am happy this year to have a great mix of Christmas classics and some classic reprints and collections to choose from when it comes to posts. I’m also getting ready to head to the malls as the shopping list and preparations begin to get dire. More on that next week!