Arthur Mineur - La série

PROBLEM: You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. If you are Arthur Less. Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong? Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last. A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

Arthur Mineur est un auteur reconnu et un homme heureux. Mais le principe du bonheur ne repose-t-il pas sur sa fugacité ? À la mort de son amour de jeunesse, Mineur se retrouve dans une impasse. S’il ne rassemble pas très vite une grosse somme d’argent pour payer les arriérés de loyer qu’il doit, il devra quitter la bicoque de San Francisco où il coule des jours paisibles avec son compagnon Freddy. Il décide d’accepter toutes les rencontres littéraires qui lui sont proposées à travers les États-Unis et se lance alors dans un extravagant "road trip" à bord de Rosina, un vieux camping-car rouillé. Dans cet entrelacs d’aventures, toutes plus rocambolesques les unes que les autres, c’est un instantané de l’Amérique contemporaine que nous offre Andrew Sean Greer. L’humour étant, semble-t-il nous dire, la réponse à tous les maux. Rire de tout, des maladresses mineures, des bouleversements majeurs, rire jaune d’un humour noir, comme si le rire était en vérité la seule planche de salut.