The Unexpected Man

Rating:
Summary: A book to be savored.
Review: After seeing the play and reading Yasmina Reza's 'Art' I went looking for other works by the author and found 'The Unexpected Man'. In 71 spacious pages, Reza manages to concoct a rich desert of fate, chance, fantasy, reality, past, present, and future which immediately invites a re-reading or 'second helping', if you will. I think that if you enjoyed the humor, irony, and contradiction in 'Art' you will find 'The Unexpected Man' a case where perhaps less is even more. A book to be savored.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely beautiful.
Review: I found this book, ironically enough, by an entirely freak sort of chance - just browsing the bookstore, hoping to expend my gift certificate on good, rich, lavish, read-worthy material - I have not yet arrived at the second book I purchased (being that this occured this evening), but the first among the two, The Unexpected Man, certainly affirmed my expectations. I intend to search out more of Reza's work.

"The Unexpected Man" is, quite simply (although, as The Woman says, nothing is truly 'quite simple') true. True to many things - true to life, true to the human conscious, true to emotion, true to tension, just - true. The digressions, the personalities, the ending, the million-to-one premise - all of it is undeniably true. And yet, about all of this truth their exists and underlying mysteriousness - the ambiance is not casual - it is tense, and somewhat poetic (though it does not STRETCH the truth - do I repeat myself? har har har.) - all in all, The Unexpected Man provides a conflux of many elevated elements that are difficult to intertwine - successfully. But success is so, for Reza.

Rating:
Summary: Yasmina Reza, excellent playwright and storyteller once agai
Review: I stumbled upon on a run of The Unexpected Man while in London, but it is sometimes the stories you stumble upon being the greatest. After the play I was so mesmerized by Reza's story I purchased the book right away. The magic and feeling Reza evokes through the man and the woman on the train is amazing, since the two hardly speak throughout the story. For anyone who has ever had a favorite author, the reality of what one would and would not say upon meeting him or her is perfectly captured in The Unexpceted Man. The woman's life is also revealed beutifully. Yet another wonderful play and story from Reza that captures the contradictions one feels in society and throughout life.