M HKA Ensembles

Book, 19.2 x 14.1 cm, 185 p., language : French, publisher : Éditions Buchet/Chastel, Paris.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/152).

Literary synopsis

Roland Topor's Le locataire chimérique is a mundane and horrific example of the most depressive strains of horror. As the novel opens, Trelkovsky learns of an apartment just vacated by a suicide. Nominally in order to pay his respects, and really to ascertain if she'll die so he can move in, he visits her in the hospital. Semi-conscious at best, the former tenant opens one eye to see a friend and Trelkovsky, and she responds with an "unbreakable scream". At the time, neither Trelkovsky nor the reader can understand her terror. By the end of the book, both will know all too well, for Topor's world is one where all of humanity is at once utterly absurd and grotesquely terrifying, and there is no escape.

- Nathaniel Katz

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Le locataire chimérique was adapted to film by Roman Polanski in 1976 with the title The Tenant. It is the last film in Polanski’s “Apartment Trilogy”, following Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby and it was entered into the 1976 Cannes Film Festival.