The narrator is a young dynamic Parisian architect. One morning, as a joke to his wife Agnès, he decides to shave his moustache since she has never seen him without it. She doesn't notice anything and he wonders if she's not the one playing a bad joke on him that goes on too long for his taste. Tension rises but she stands firm: he has never worn a moustache. She even takes friends as witnesses. At work, nobody notices anything either. Is it a vast plot organized against him? Soon, he panics and paranoia looms. Something has gone wrong in his quiet life and he loses his footing completely.

In this celebrated novel, written in 1986 and adapted in a movie in 2005, Emmanuel Carrère (born in 1957) wrote a psychological thriller about a daily and insignificant madness that grows little by little, and triggers a quest for one’s own identity. Emmanuel Carrère has received numerous literary awards and is considered as one of the best contemporary French authors.

We read this book in the spring of 2021.