The Novels of Antoine Laurain

I’ve been enjoying working my way through the novels of Antoine Laurain. He’s a French author who puts out works that I’d describe as romantic fantasy — but not in a “falling in love with a knight kind of way”. It’s about wonderful and life-changing things happening in France, often Paris, so it’s more like “finding your true self by visiting the Eiffel Tower”. Maybe it’s magical realism, but without any actual magic, just luck and whimsy and maybe a little fate.

Anyway, here are some of his books (available in English translation) you’d want to check out:

• The Red Notebook — a bored bookseller finds a woman’s stolen purse, with a red notebook inside, and sets out to find her, intrigued by what she’s written there
• The President’s Hat — In the 1980s, a lost hat owned by François Mitterrand changes the lives of several people who wear it
• The Readers’ Room — an award-nominated novel is blind-submitted to a publisher; while the deaths described in the book start happening in real life, the editor has to find the unknown author



• Vintage 1954 — Four people (including Bob from Milwaukee, a Harley-Davidson enthusiast, and the man whose family has owned the apartment building they’re in for decades) drink a wine from 1954 and wake up the next morning in that year
• Smoking Kills — a black-comedy caper where a man, hypnotized to stop smoking, discovers murder brings back the pleasure
• The Portrait — in what I think was his first book, a man buys a picture at an antique auction house and becomes someone else while searching for the man in the portrait (although I thought The President’s Hat was more accomplished and handled the theme better)

I haven’t read French Rhapsody, An Astronomer in Love, or his latest, French Windows.

I liked his theme of artifacts changing people’s lives by giving them a new way to look at the world. His emphasis on smoking is very French, as is the way his characters, given this life-changing moment, end up leaving relationships that had become boring. His short chapters and evocative descriptions make for entertaining reads that are both escapist and thought-provoking.