Robert Pinget was born in 1920 in Geneva. His first collection of stories, Between Fantoine and Agapa, was pubished in 1951. Pinget has written more than 30 books: novels, plays, and "notebooks." His last book, Taches d'Encre came out in 1997, the year he died.

In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Raymond Queneau's The Flight of Icarus, Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, a lazy man who may be a character in his friend Latirail's failing novel, which is taken over by characters invented by Sinture, yet another writer. The latter half of the novel consists of Mahu's strange and hilarious musings on everything from belly dancers to how he catches ideas from other people in the same way he catches germs. Mahu is Pinget's funniest novel, featuring a mix of dark humor and manic word-games, and is as inventive and energetic now as when it was first published.