The Moustache: a review

Emmanuel Carrère’s The Moustache is dizzingly, chaotically, and beautifully twisted. Also a feature film directed by the author, the novel tells of a successful architect’s descent into madness and uncertainty after he shaves his moustache.  

His life, lulled into a serene mundanity, shifts into a mad sixth gear as his wife, friends, family, and coworkers tell him that his long-established moustache never existed: he has always been clean shaven despite material reality proving otherwise. Another short read, this novel is less tour de force, and more insane bender.  

Translator Lanie Goodman does an excellent job transposing the prose. Originally written in French, she excels at capturing the frantic nature of the novel. It is pure, absurd, psychodrama, and the language flows like blood out of a wound. It captures the readers mind, pooling into the crevices, gushing out with such intense ferocity one feels they are in the midst of the unnamed protagonist’s thoughts themselves. It is Kafkaesque without his austere language, instead utilising a more fluid approach to demonstrate what has been described by others as psychological horror.  

Carrère’s work can be read through many lenses, and its richness is formed by the sparsity of having an objective view. Nothing is as it seems, even the novella itself: it can be a meditation on the loss of normality, grief, the pain of relationships and intimacy a la Żuławski’s “Possession”, and just like “Possession”, it’s haunting and abrupt ending leaves more than a lasting effect on the reader.