Obituary for Egolf

I'd never heard of the young writer Tristan Egolf till I read his obituary online today. He certainly seemed to have everything to live for. A writing career that had taken off: he had two highly acclaimed novels under his belt (his writing had been compared to Faulkner and Hemingway) and a third completed. A fiance and a baby daughter.

But Egolf shot himself, aged 33.

The story behind the publication of his first novel Lord of the Barnyard (described by Publishers Weekly as "a wild ride of a book") is almost the stuff of novels in itself. According to a report in the LA Times:

After 76 publishers had rejected the novel, Egolf was playing guitar for money on a bridge in Paris when a young woman noticed his cold, sockless feet and invited him for coffee. Her father happened to be a prize-winning author, Patrick Modiano, who took Egolf's book to his French publishing house, which agreed to publish it.

"You hate to think so, but suicide helps to sell books," Walker Percy once said, and I'm sure it's going to happen in this case too.

Would we ever have heard of John Kennedy Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces if the poor man hadn't gassed himself?

But what a sheer bloody waste! Who knows what even greater works these writers might have produced further down the line.

I found this essay on the subject very interesting. Earnest contends that "... we are but sadistic voyeurs who transform a writer's pain into a reader's pleasure." Perhaps true.

Some lost souls who did not handle life's difficulties well enough.