"Le cas Ajar" became headline news in France with the publication of Ajar's first book, Gros-Câlin, in 1974; a year later he refused the Prix Goncourt for his second, La Vie devant soi. Both books were almost unanimously praised by the critics, but most reviews began: Who is Emile Ajar?…

[His third book, Pseudo, later attributed to Romain Gary], on one level, is the result of the author's finally agreeing to reveal at least some "facts" about himself. He writes it in the first person, as Paul Pavlowitch, one of the names he answers to in private life…. He describes, from the point of view of the quarry, the manhunt he was subjected to; he tells what it is like to be told that you don't exist, that you are "pseudo". He gives what is ostensibly an account of his love-hate relationship with his ever helpful cousin/uncle Romain Gary (here always referred to by the unkind sobriquet of "Tonton Macoute"), and he invents a version of how he came to write the present book….

In all his books, however fantastic, Ajar paints an acute, anguished, and often very funny picture of the modern world. In Pseudo, Paul Pavlowitch is judged to be unbalanced because he takes the sins of that world upon himself; he identifies, for instance, with the leaders of states where terror and torture are practised….

One of Ajar's basic themes is freedom of thought—and not merely its suppression in the countries generally recognized as being dictatorships. In the apparently desultory stream of observations, images and non-sequiturs of Pseudo, he frighteningly illustrates the pressures exerted on "one-off" citizens in "free" societies. Paul Pavlowitch stands for those who by temperament or philosophy wish to live their own lives in their own way…. Pseudo is written in the same fresh, inimitable and unimitative style as Ajar's previous books: casual, fluent, graphic, and funny with a kind of Marx Brothers or Hellzapoppin cocasserie. You have to have read Gros-Câlin and La Vie devant soi in order to savour Pseudo to the full—but these are two of the best and most moving books to have come out of France in recent years…. The last words of Pseudo are: "Ceci est mon dernier livre." It would be a real loss if Ajar were to keep to this decision.