Flashdisk

Why model the future of the world when our own lives are slipping through our fingers? An honest and upstanding Brussels official gets lost in the time window of his business trip to Asia. His personal life is empty, his work life is absurd, yet he sets out determinedly to uncover the circumstances of the crooked contracts. But everything turns against him, he loses even in the most trivial matters - getting to the hotel at night, connecting to the internet, calling home, finding a moment of peace in the toilet. Jean-Philippe Toussaint guides us through all this mysterious, Kafkaesque discomfort, just so that we can come with him to what is most essential between life and death.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint (1957) has already made a name for himself on the French literary scene with his 1985 debut, The Bathroom. Since then, he has published more than two dozen books, ranging from short prose pieces to the novel series MMMM. This tetralogy opened with the novel Making Love (2002) and closed with Naked (2013), and was published in France in 2017. Toussaint followed up the novel Flashdisk (2019) a year later with a book entitled Emotions. His latest novel, The Chessboard, is conceived as an autobiography: according to his habit, however, the writer here also updates, revises, sabotages the genre itself. In addition to his literary work, Toussaint is also involved in film, especially as a screenwriter. He has also prepared several photographic-literary installations for exhibition spaces in France (Livre/Louvre, 2012) and abroad, and has participated in theatrical productions of his texts - most notably MMMM with The Delano Orchestra (2016) or The Disappearance of Landscape (2022), rendered as a monologue by the famous actor Denis Podalydès. 

Czech edition