Monsieur Teste

A defining work of twentieth-century modernism, now newly translated--a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness, all centered around a character who is composed of absolute brain and intellect, a character of pure mind.

In 1892, during an intense thunderstorm, the great Symbolist poet Paul Valéry underwent an existential crisis. For the next twenty years, he wrote no poetry, devoting himself instead to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and language--and to the creation of his literary alter ego, Monsieur Teste, who first appeared in the 1896 novella The Evening with Monsieur Teste, and about whom Valéry continued to write for the rest of his life.

Middle-aged Monsieur Teste lives on modest speculations on the stock market. He resides in a greenish room smelling of mint, takes a daily stroll with his wife, and would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the fact that he is a being made up of pure consciousness, a Cartesian creature of pure rationality, intellect, and self-control. Teste is old French for ＂head,＂ and detached from senses and emotions, Monsieur Teste feels skepticism for all received wisdom while also refusing to hold any opinions of his own. What would such a man make of his own thought processes? And what would he make of human relationships and the world?

Standing in counterpoint to Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Monsieur Teste is without a doubt one of the most enigmatic and searching manifestations of the modern imagination. A genre-defying exploration of the nature of language and consciousness, Valéry’s full body of writings on Monsieur Teste is presented here in a stunning new translation by Charlotte Mandell.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. Nominated twelve times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he did not begin writing full-time until he was nearly 50 years old, having worked secretarial and administrative jobs for the majority of his life. A hugely popular public speaker and intellectual figure during his day, Valéry is now best known for his intellectual diary, the Cahiers, and his poetry, which influenced contemporaries and later luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.

Charlotte Mandell is a French literary translator of more than 40 books, including Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child (NYRB Classics; co-translated with Jeffrey Zuckerman) and André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields (NYRB Poets). In April 2021 she received the honor of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the poet Robert Kelly.

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel and a book-length poem, Context Collapse. His essays and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry, and New Left Review, among other publications. He lives in Berlin.