Perhaps a love affair (The discreet pleasures of rejection)

Returning home from an ordinary day at the office, Virgil finds a rather disturbing message on his answerering machine : Clara informs him that she is leaving him. Virgil is used to women leaving him, for him it is even “more a certainty than gravity”, but he jas no recollection of this so-called Clara. He panics, wonders if he’s seriously ill or amnesiac, runs to his shrink, thinks again about one of those “reality accidents” that are always happening to him and asks his good friend Armelle, a fortune-teller in real life, for advice. Failling to get a satisfactory answer, he ends up making an unexpected decision : to win back this woman he doesn’t know…
Perhaps a Love Affair is a romantic comedy whose charm rests entirely on the character of Virgil, an off-killer, scatterbrained hero, an elegant and comical lover, a model employee but a closet rebel. He resembles the character Antoine in How I became stupid, altough he is perhaps ten years older. Martin Page channels Boris Vian in his witty, poetic writing with a hint of Brit humor. The stories he tells, miles away from the stuff of ordinary life, are fables transporting us into reverie, humor, and constant twists and turns.

Publishing house : éditions de l’Olivier, 2008.

Translation rights : Russia (Ast/Astrel), Italy (Garzanti), Brazil (Rocco), Greece (Patakis), Korea (Yolimwon), Romania (Humanitas), Germany (Thiele), Serbia (Nolit), Vicking/Penguin (USA).

Paperback rights : Points Seuil.

(the book cover is from the Penguin edition)