ABSTRACT
A fact as droll as his prose is that Charles-Albert Cingria—one of most inventive stylists of the French language— was born of a father who was Turkish and Yugoslavian, and of a mother who was Picard and Polish. Raised in Geneva, Cingria later spent much of his life in France, especially in Paris, where he led an impecunious existence in a garret on the rue Bonaparte. Cingria is a seminal mentor. First and foremost, the details of his prose can be savored like a buffet of rare delicacies. The idiosyncratic orality of his writing energetically rejuvenates classical French and dismantles its grammatical strictures. Cingria once punned that he could not write short stories since nothing "new ever happened". Despite the radiant freshness of his perceptions of daily life, this remark usually holds true. Several first-person narratives consequently delve into marginal, deceptively insignificant details within potentially much more dramatic contexts.
