Monsieur Teste

Paul Valery is best known for his poetry but this "kind of novel" (as he called it) explores, with mixed success, what it would mean for the human mind to be entirely separated from the body and all contact with the world. "The stranger’s way of looking at things, the eye of a man who does not recognize, who is beyond this world, the eye as frontier between being and non-being — belongs to the thinker. It is also the eye of a dying man, a man losing recognition.”