Hocus bogus / Romain Gary writing as Émile Ajar ; translated by David Bellos.

"Hocus Bogus first published in French as Pseudo by Mercure de France. © Mercure de France, 1976. This translation © David Bellos, 2010. Published by arrangement with the Estate of Romain Gary."--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-197).

About this book / David Bellos -- Hocus bogus / Romain Gary writing as Émile Ajar ; translated by David Bellos -- The life and death of Émile Ajar / Romain Gary ; translated by Barbara Wright.

"By the early 1970s, Romain Gary had established himself as one of France's most popular and prolific novelists, journalists, and memoirists. Feeling that he had been typecast as "Romain Gary," however, he wrote his next novel under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. His second novel written as Ajar, Life Before Us, was a runaway success, won the Prix Goncourt, and became the best-selling French novel of the twentieth century." "The Prix Goncourt made people all the keener to identify the real "Emile Ajar," and Gary, stressed by the furor he had created, fled to Geneva. There, Pseudo, a hoax confession and one of the most alarmingly effective mystifications in all literature, was written at high speed. Writing under double cover, Gary simulated schizophrenia and paranoid delusions while pretending to be Paul Pawlovitch confessing to being Emile Ajar - the author of books Gary himself had written." "In Pseudo, brilliantly translated by David Belles as Hocus Bogus, the struggle to assert and deny authorship is part of a wider protest against suffering and universal hypocrisy. Playing with novelistic categories and authorial voice, this work is a powerful testimony to the power of language - to express, to amuse, to deceive, and ultimately to speak difficult personal truths."--Jacket.