Grey Souls (2003)

transferring information from 2006 spreadsheet

A young girl is murdered by the banks of a river, and a policeman spends the rest of his life trying to solve the mystery of her death. The novel begins years after the murder, as the policeman writes his memories of the crime into journals, but to him it seems like yesterday. As the narration moves between the past and the present, not only does the mystery unfold, but also the psyche of an entire French town in the years during the First World War.

The plot revolves around the prosecutor in the town, an important man whom the town respects but doesn't necessarily like. Pierre-Ange Destinat lives a remote and isolated life moving between his large but empty chateau and the courtroom, where he always gets a conviction and most likely a head. His one social concession is lunch in a town pub, a routine that is as unvarying as it is boring. His nemesis, the judge, is a greedy man who acknowledges him from a nearby table, but seems above talking with him. The two are waited on by the publican's young daughters, the youngest of whom is known affectionately as Morning Glory.

When Morning Glory is found dead, strangled on the banks of a river, the judge performs a summary investigation, but doesn't seem interested in pursuing the case or finding the truth.

The strange thing about the inquiry was that it got assigned to everybody and nobody. Mierck made a mess of it. The mayor stuck his nose in. The policemen sniffed the pile of shit from a distance. But taking the lead was a colonel who showed up the day after the crime and used the state of war and our being in the front-line zone as an excuse to give us orders.

The judge and the mysterious colonel convict two young deserters of the crime and declare the case closed, forbidding the policeman narrator from investigating further. But he can never let it go. In part because of its iniquitous nature, in part because the girl's death is tied up with his memories of the apparent suicide of a beautiful young teacher in Destinat's house and with the tragic loss of his own wife. As he relates his memories of the crime, the policeman also beautifully brings to life a small town struggling to deal with industrialization and the horrors of war and its casualties. Nothing is black and white, not the war, not its victims, not the crime, and not the souls of those involved in the crime investigation. Only little Morning Glory is innocent, and she is dead.

I love the works of Philippe Claudel and was not disappointed in this one. Like [Brodeck], the novel is set in a place and time that are part of the story itself. Small town life is depicted as both intimate and as isolating for the outsider. Like [Monsieur Linh and His Child], this novel has a surprising twist at the end, but smaller and without the emotional impact. For [By a Slow River] is emotionally restrained, powerful yet subdued. Although this may not be his strongest novel, it by no means detracts from the author's body of work. ( )

An enigmatic, possibly unreliable narrator tells a tale of sorrow, suspense, tragedy and ironic justice set in a small village in France during WWI. I found reading this novel frustrating and rewarding in approximately equal parts. The non-linear narrative kept me slightly off-balance, while the underlying mysteries kept me reading with a sense of some urgency. A few translational glitches threw me out of the moment from time to time, and I wish they had kept the original title, Gray Souls, which seems so much more appropriate. ( )

Excellent, in many ways better than Brodeck, this earlier novel is set during World War I and follows a similar non-linear tale of a village filled with archetypes and surprises. It centers around "The Case" -- the murder of a young girl -- which is just one of many terrible events in this town near the front lines of World War I. Not a mystery novel, but there is some suspense and surprise as the story unfolds. ( )

The crux of the events told in this story take place during WWI in a small French town. Our narrator, a retired policeman relates three different events having occurred during this period; the discovery of the body of a 10-year-old girl murdered by strangulation, the arrival of a new schoolmistress to replace the former teacher who has gone insane, and the death of his own beloved wife during childbirth. At first, he jumps from one seemingly unrelated event to another, until it becomes clear that all three have occurred within a short period of time and that they are somehow interconnected.

In the original French version, Claudel's prose is sublime and also filled with sadness. The policeman has never gotten over his wife's death and still mourns her, and the story he tells fills a series of notebooks which he intends only as a form of communication with her, because, as he explains, he has never stopped talking to her over the years, and has told her almost everything, but for one story which he intends to keep for the end.

Filled with pathos—two days after finishing it, I'm still a little bit blue every time I think of some of the events and characters from the book—this is a story about suffering and the painful side of love. It lingers for a long time and for all it's sadness, it is also almost unbearably beautiful—much in the same way there are some painful experiences in life which help our souls grow and expand. ( )