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Jean-Philippe Toussaint (born 1957) is a Belgian writer, filmmaker, and photographer whose distinctive minimalist style has made him one of the most original voices in contemporary French literature. He has received numerous awards including the Prix Médicis (2005) and Prix Décembre (2009), and his novels have been translated into over twenty languages.
La Salle de bain, published in 1985 by Éditions de Minuit, won the Prix littéraire de la Vocation the following year and established Toussaint as a major literary talent. The novel tells the deceptively simple story of an unnamed narrator who begins spending his afternoons in his bathroom, eventually installing his entire library there and conducting his life from the bathtub. What follows is a dryly comic journey from Paris to Venice and back, involving his girlfriend Edmondsson, two Polish painters, and various encounters that seem simultaneously absurd and profoundly meaningful.
The novel became an unexpected publishing phenomenon and cult classic, later adapted for film. La Salle de bain has been praised by critics as a work that quietly revolutionized French literature, proving that the most profound insights about contemporary life can emerge from the most ordinary circumstances—even from the confines of a bathroom.
