Did Martin Fissel-Brandt murder his wife? His cat accuses him of foul play, as does his lover, Anna, who after his wife's death leaves both Martin and France for Asia. Later, while on vacation, Martin coincidentally finds an undelivered letter addressed to the apartment where he and Anna used to meet. His discovery prompts the decision to find her again. He transfers his job to Asia, where he is immediately caught up in a local rebellion. His search for Anna takes him deeper into the violent unrest. Is it now too late for them? Is Martin Fissel-Brandt hallucinating, or is it his destiny to find Anna again under these circumstances?

Christian Gailly is often cited for his experimental approach to narrative, and his work is characterized by a fascination with coincidence and often fantastic chance encounters or near encounters. Born in Paris to a working-class family, Gailly's education was cut short at the age of fifteen. He worked as a jazz saxophonist, taught himself the literature of psychoanalysis, and while in his forties, began his literary career. The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt is the first of Gailly's novels to be translated into English.

Melanie Kemp is a translator and has taught French literature courses. Brian Evenson is the author of Contagion: And Other Stories and Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella, available in a Bison Books edition.

"This exquisitely fascinating experimental novel, written in fragmentary sentences as terse as its chapters, unreels like some enigmatic movie."—Booklist

"Experimental minimalism comes with a decidedly Gallic twist in this brief romantic fiction, a noteworthy book that marks the first English translation of an author who has built a reputation in France based on eight novels. Here he deals with the odd fate of Martin Fissel-Brandt, the middle-aged protagonist who begins a quest for his former lover, Anna Posso, after he finds a hidden letter addressed to the apartment where they used to meet. The author's prose flits here, there and everywhere over the course of incredibly short chapters, introducing coincidences, plot twists and unexplained characters with barely a whiff of logic. The more intriguing turns include Martin being whisked away to Asia by the demands of his profession to quell a local rebellion, along with a seemingly random attack on him and some of his co-workers at a construction site. As for the erstwhile romance, the normal pining is replaced by some diabolical hints that Martin may in fact have murdered Anna as well as several other former girlfriends, with one of those hints entertainingly delivered by a cat. Despite the absence of conventional narration, Gailly's prose has a certain whimsical rhythm and a unique sense of rhyme and reason, which makes reading this novel not unlike perusing the script of a Buñuel film. Gailly's work is definitely an acquired taste and demands a suspension of linear thinking, but readers who like to be surprised won't get shortchanged here."—Publishers Weekly

"Several unusual and mysterious occurrences either do or do not take place in this engaging 1999 jeu, the ninth novel (and first in English translation) by a critically esteemed member of the generation of minimalistes that also includes Annie Ernaux and Marie Redonnet. Whether the eponymous Martin actually murders his wife, participates in a revolution in a remote Asian country, and survives terrorist violence to live happily in sin with his mistress Anna, or only imagines these extremities, matters much less than Gailly's mastery of outrageous coincidence and brisk short sentences arranged in meticulous melodious patterns, not to mention his habit of chatting amiably with the reader about the difficulty of sustaining a coherent narrative. This attractive volume is further graced by both Kemp's fluid, artful English translation and writer-critic Brian Evenson's fine introduction (where he says some unfashionably sensible things about minimalism and metafiction). An excellent introduction to a very entertaining writer."—Kirkus Reviews

"Gailly creates a stunningly spare prose line, fragmentary sentences within brief chapters, a demanding line marvelously translated here to preserve its jazzy syncopations. . . . Gailly freely assaults the expectations of both the mystery genre, exploiting questions and avoiding resolution, and the romance, braiding the erotics of passion and violence. . . . Given the outrageous twists of a mock-plot that may indeed be entirely the conjurings of a bored automobile engineer, we are intrigued rather by the vehicle of its delivery, a harshly melodious prose that reads like the hard, steady improv lines of a Charlie Parker sound."—Joseph Dewey, Context

“In The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt the reader is so involved in untangling the sundry ambivalences of the text as to become a character in the novel. The University of Nebraska Press is certainly to be praised for bringing Christian Gailly to the attention of the Anglophone world in the excellent translation by Melanie Kamp, and Brian Evenson’s essay on literary minimalism deserves attention in its own right.”—South Atlantic Review