Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Carrère, Emmanuel - Oliver Conant (review date 17 April 1988)

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Oliver Conant (review date 17 April 1988)

SOURCE: "Is This Paranoia, or Am I Nuts?," in The New York Times Book Review, April 17, 1988, p. 36.

[In the following negative review of The Mustache, Conant asserts that Carrère's novel is flawed by "improbable ingredients, implausibly combined, [and] an excess of gimmicky contrivances."]

To have and enjoy a mustache, to rather pride oneself on one's mustache—a fine, thick, dark mustache of 10 years' duration, and then, suddenly wishing to see oneself differently, to shave off this mustache. Then to discover that not only do one's acquaintances fail to observe any change in one's appearance, but that one's wife of five years (half the lifespan of the mustache, consequently a woman who has only known one with a mustache) appears oblivious to the change and declares positively that one has never worn a mustache!

This is the modest premise of Emmanuel Carrère's short,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Philip H. Solomon (review date May 1987)
   2. John Gross (review date 1 April 1988)
   3. Oliver Conant (review date 17 April 1988)
   4. John Updike (review date 4 July 1988)
   5. Irving Malin (review date Spring 1989)
   6. Publishers Weekly (review date 25 May 1990)
   7. Richard Eder (review date 22 July 1990)
   8. Scott Winnett (review date November 1990)
   9. R. R. K. (review date November-December 1990)
   10. Faren Miller (review date December 1990)
4. Copyright