The Loneliness Bureau, Anne Goscinny

Six main characters in this novel of solitudes: three confide in a lawyer's office, three shy away in a psychoanalyst's office. Between the two offices, a simple landing. Behind the desk of the first and seated in the armchair of the second, the same man, the sole narrator of these shipwrecked destinies: "I must confess: I am an impostor." This tragicomedy pretends to respect the unity of time (a single day), the unity of place (a single building, with the Chinese restaurant as a vanishing point at lunchtime), the unity of inaction (since the six characters in search of elevation are prevented from acting, by judicial procedures or neurotic protocols). But the final surprise deconstructs the entire puzzle of the narrative in a masterful mise en abyme. Is the narrator a psychoanalyst who dreams of being a lawyer ("I would like to be a lawyer but I am a psychoanalyst. In the end, it's the same thing. My patients become civil parties in the accused box")? Or is he himself merely a character in the story that invents him ("I have never created anything, except you. You are the only work I leave behind")? It doesn't really matter, since in the meantime Hector Fèdre, Arlette Gide, Emma Liberteg, Cécile Hadellash, Monsieur Claude and Madame de Lothermore will have broken into your memory, never to leave...