Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud - A Life on Paper: Stories

A collection of short stories from across this French fabulist's more than thirty year career, A Life on Paper reminds me a bit of Borges, a bit of Calvino, a bit of Kafka, and a bit of John Collier; Chateaureynaud shares with all of them the ability to take the everyday - the ordinary - and introduce an element of the strange to disconcerting effect. The stories are short and have a fable-like air, an effect arising as much from the elegant, epigrammatic style of the prose as from the stories' subjects, which range from a man who one day finds the word 'mortal' ineradicably emblazoned on his chest, to an antiques broker with a supernatural ability to source anything his dealer's clients can conceive of, to a small island community where sirens have survived to modern times, to a man who stumbles across a museum dedicated to entirely to him and his life. And there's a strong metafictional streak running through, too (just like in the work of seemingly every other French writer ever)...there's much to like here.