This is his only novel I've read, and I'm unsure what to make of it so I'll suspend my judgement until I've read a few more of his books, which should give me a fuller picture of his worldview. I would certainly classify Quand je suis devenu fou lit. So that is categorically clear. Quand je suis devenu fou is more about obsession than madness, the obsession of the narrator for the male prostitute Nick in Amsterdam. Interestingly this expression is also the title of Donner's last novel, which concerns acting, and I learn that this is a quotation from Orson Welles, although for some reason โ maybe because it's a misquotation?
But prostitution is certainly and no doubt correctly depicted as a branch of the acting profession in this novel, which reminds me of a particularly brilliantly acted scene by Jane Fonda in Pakula's Klute.
But I digress. The French-speaking narrator, a number of whose biographical details are a lot like Christopher Donner's, is desperate to 'rescue' Nick โ who is of Italian origin but speaks English and holds a UK passport โ from the 'Boys [ sic ] Club'. Nick himself says the narrator doesn't know him, and anyway how is the narrator going to, er, pull off such a coup when his beloved isn't exactly wild about him and the whole crazy thing seems doomed to failure before it starts?
But pull it off he does โ at the beginning at least: they both make it to San Francisco, but they don't get on, they start leading separate lives, they row, and the narrator pays for him to return to London or wherever.
Pierre Autin-Grenier died in April this year. He divided his life between Lyon and Carpentras Vaucluse , and was incapable of writing novels, preferring instead tiny stories of just a few pages, such as this book which has exactly one hundred pages but contains thirty-three stories. His erotic gay novel Le Supplice d'une queue lit. Alibert's second gay novel โ Une Couronne de Pines lit.
