Running away
Like all Toussaint's books, the protagonist in “Run” feels absolutely estranged from the world, in which he lives. He is involved in events, which he doesn’t understand and which remain unrevealed until the very end. “Run” is a novel of the movement, because the action is carried out in four different places: Beijing, Shanghai, Paris and the Elba Island. Most of the time the protagonist is running from his invisible chasers, but in an abstractive way he’s running from the world, from the hopeless relationship with his girlfriend and maybe – from himself.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Jean-Philippe Toussaint (born 29 November, 1957, Brussels) is a Belgian prose writer and filmmaker. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and he has had his photographs displayed in Brussels and Japan. Toussaint won the Prix Médicis in 2005 for his novel Fuir. The 2006 book La mélancolie de Zidane (Paris: Minuit, 2006) is a lyrical essay on the headbutt administered by the French football player Zinedine Zidane to the Italian player Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin. An English translation was published in 2007 in the British journal New Formations. His 2009 novel La Vérité sur Marie won the prestigious Prix Décembre.
