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Adult Books - Fiction - Crime Fiction - Mystery
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The Best Thing that Can Happen to a Croissant.
Tusset, Pablo (author).
Sept. 2005. 496p. Canongate, hardcover, $23 (1-84195-715-1).
REVIEW.
First published August, 2005 (Booklist).
Pablo Miralles, rotund scion of a wealthy Barcelona family, is intelligent, belligerent, profound, profane, and, above all, lazy. He sleeps late, drinks and drugs, hires hookers, and spends his spare time arguing online with the other members of the Metaphysical Club. He scorns his serious, hardworking brother, whom he calls “The First,” but when The First disappears, Lady First thinks Pablo is just the man to find him. Pablo takes the case--sort of. Tusset’s novel is a mystery in the same way that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a report of a motorcycle race. Croissant is more coherent, but Tusset treats the quest as simply an excuse to let us spend time with his fantastically funny (and insanely quotable) hero, who is less interested in finding The First than in testing the limits of his bank card. It drags just a bit at the end--when it’s finally time to solve the mystery--but every party has a lull before lights-out. Pablo, the overweight, indignant solipsist, comes from good literary lineage, bearing a strong resemblance to both Joey Tallon in Patrick McCabe’s Call Me the Breeze (2003) and Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces (1980) . Unforgettable. — Keir Graff
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