Sébastien Japrisot (1931–2003)

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
STRONG CONTENT WARNING FOR ENCAVMAPHOBIA

My Review: As ever with this author, do not expect the usual, simple setting down of sentences to form beautiful images and sanguine characters, but the unsettling reversals of point of view and the sheer variety of events as told by people with different viewpoints.

Even when those people are in the same body. And no, there are no external markers of the changes. You have to work for your show more pleasures!

Pleasures there are, and aplenty, in this twisty tale of utterly unreliable narrators. Mi, Michèle, or Do, Domenica, or whoever she might be, is unreliable because her trauma...caught in a fire, either the perpetrartix or the intended victim of it, makes little difference after simply being trapped in a fire...has robbed her of her memory. Those around her are, to put it mildly, motivated by pecuniary gain and thus aren't entirely to be trusted. The doctor is no help to her in recovering her true self. But the more questions the narrator asks, the more she realizes that it's very, very possible that she simply does not want the answers to those questions.

What's wrong with simply...existing. Allowing the tidal wave of love and sympathy to sustain her. Whether or not she "deserves" it.

The concept of merit, of being worthy, of having one's just deserts, is a huge issue in this story. While there is no way that such a tale would be possible in the twenty-first century, when a simple DNA test would establish instantly and once and for all who she was, the way the plastic surgeon worked miracles for her is the primary obstacle to believability in this psychological horror story. I have seen a truly badly burned person and let me assure you they would not be passable in social settings. For the amnesia plot to work, however, there is a need to suspend this level of disbelief.

The sense of dread, of not knowing where one is in the life one is living, is a palpable horror. The idea of surviving a fire is traumatic enough...but to then realize that everyone around one is lying by omission, or directly...? How can that possibly be anything but a waking nightmare?

It is at this Rebecca-meets-Gaslight level that the book works best. Let go of the practical knowledge you possess as a 21st-century reader and travel back to 1963 (when the book first appeared in French) to allow this fearsome reality to submerge your sense of the firmess of your own foundations. Be there with Michèle...Domenica...whatever her name is.

Be there. That might very well be the epitaph of each of the people who die in this book, especially the ones sentenced to prison for crimes they might have, or did, commit. The crimes that, in the end, meant nothing...caused nothing that had not already happened. And isn't that just the awful way of crime? It's really, in the end, pointless.

Agonizing pain for pointless goals. How very, very noir. show less

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is the first published crime novel from the late monadnock of French thriller writers, seeing the light of day in 1962...sixty years ago! I'd expected to be eye-rollingly impatient with the sexual politics...I was...and to find the motive for the title crime absurd...I sort-of did...and generally to find the read a pleasant time capsule but not one I could recommend.

Wrong on that score.

What Author Japrisot, ably show more served by Translator Price, achieved was a smartly paced and charmingly observed crime novel. I want to be clear, though, that the attitude towards women and their sexuality isn't within 21st-century best practices. I don't have a positive thing to say about that, and no, I don't want to shrug it off by saying "it's of its time." I think the way to frame the attitudes that makes me least irritably impatient is to think of this as a cautionary tale...a dead, or at least dying, set of stupid and wrong-headed ways of seeing people that has very directly contributed to terrible crimes.

What sticks with me the most is the sheer, idiotic nihilism of the crimes committed, and for such idiotic reasons. There are no excuses, of course, but the reason someone deprives another person of life...the one and only thing that can't be made good or replaced when it's taken...should always at least make some twisted kind of sense. Here, though, there is nothing, not a grain of a comprehensible motive. Like those thrill-killing boys, Leopold and Loeb.

I was utterly unable to put this debut crime novel, first published in 1962, down. It's not like a modern crime novel. There's no bloat; there's very little dialogue. The whole story's narrated, in a kind of distancing tactic, a lot like the voiceover narration of Double Indemnity, albeit it isn't the same narrator. Just the strategy, the way of telling that makes it feel like showing. And, in the end, the framing device works very, very well for the final summation of the crime.

Japrisot wasn't a hugely productive writer, having written a dozen fiction works of different lengths between 1950 and 1999. He translated works by Salinger, among others, into French; he worked in the advertising industry; he was, in short, a jobbing writer with a gift for economical storytelling. His strength lay in constructing the angle of repose for his story; he knew the slightest shift in perspective would destroy the equilibrium that a work of fiction relies on. When the shift inevitably occurs, the entire story flows out of its resting state and becomes something entirely other, a new resting state that doesn't resemble the constructed story but is all the same colors and most of the same shapes.

It is a pure pleasure to read this level of craftsmanship. By all means procure it and enjoy it for all its afternoon-filling worth. show less

Five men worn out by the carnage of the Somme take the drastic decision to shoot themselves in the hand. Each man is found guilty at court-martial and rather than lined up in front a firing squad are sentenced to be abandoned at night with their hands tied in no-mans-land between the opposing trenches. The five French soldiers are reportedly killed in battle but after the war, a dying solder raises doubts about their demise and suggests that at least one of them may have survived.

Mathilde show more Donnay, confined to a wheelchair after a childhood accident and the fiancée of the youngest victim, Manech, sets out to discover the truth about what happened that night. The book consequently isn't really a war story (although it is obviously written with that as it's backdrop) but rather one about the determination and resolve of a young woman to uncover the facts.

The novel was initially written in French before being translated into English contains a large cast of characters each adding a fragment to the whole rather like a jigsaw puzzle. As a reader you must either really concentrate or simply go with the flow in the hope that you get the gist of it. Yet despite the complex nature of the plot it ticks along at a decent pace.

The mud and fear that pervaded the trenches in France also pervade this novel. Readers can understand why a few soldiers thought that shooting themselves in the hand might be their ticket out of the madness. As Mathilde traces their stories and meets their families and friends, she shows us that memories that exist after such life changing events are not always totally trustworthy, the so called 'fog of war'. The depictions of the battlefield horrors are pretty graphic as are the psychological effects on the soldiers who were there and the resilience of people who must rebuild their lives in its aftermath. However, each topic is covered sympathetically and are lightened by interludes of subtle humour.

“A glass of wine taken with dinner makes doctor’s purse a little thinner.”

As stated previously there is a large cast of characters some of whom, like Tina and Celestine, are memorable but the weight of the book rests on Mathilde's shoulders and its here that I have a few minor gripes. I just couldn't make my mind up about her. At times I found her plucky and sympathetic but at others demanding and spoilt but I think that everyone can admire is her determination and will root for her as the tale nears its conclusion.

On the whole I found this a thoroughly enjoyable book from and author of whom I previously knew nothing about. Perhaps the over-riding message of this book is that hope and despair are often the flip sides of the same coin both for those who go off to fight but also those who must stay behind. show less

CONTENT WARNING FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE—STIGMATIZING MENTAL ILLNESS

This is a more or less unusual project...it's a novelization of a film script that Author Japrisot wrote for a wildly successful French film. The DNA of the script is still here, in the copious dialogue tags; quite a few stage directions have survived the trip to novella-ization, too. What also shows is the very, very dated sexual politics of the day...far more horrifying than in the older Japrisot novel reviewed below.

Consider show more that Charles Bronson plays the male lead in the film. That the film was made in 1969, and came out in 1970. I don't think I need to get too deeply into the, um, action.

So with that warning in place, to the plot. Again its film-script DNA is on display. It is taut; it is not in the least bit deep. Its surfaces are glossy and its politics aren't particularly liberal. It has a lovely woman being abused by damned near everyone who spends even a few seconds onscreen. Americans are violent, nasty brutes; Italians are shouty abusive men; French people are supine and ineffectual.

Author Japrisot wasn't any kind of a patriot....

What's on offer here is a deeply angry story of revenge and of the toll an abusive world can extract. It's never going to be easy to read something written over fifty years ago by a bitter, outraged man without coming away from the experience a little less sure that the world's a good place filled with kind people. But in this story, the woman who exacts a condign revenge on that world is allowed a degree of freedom that would've been unthinkable even a decade earlier. Look at Janet Leigh's character in Psycho....

While it isn't an easy read, due to subject matter, it is formally interesting for its far-from-usual direct lifting of script elements in novelizing the work. It has all of Author Japrisot's strengths, the terse and pointed language and the stunningly easy to visualize settings. Because it's not a simple story, in the sense of having great resonance with dark and ugly parts of human psyches, I don't think it'll appeal to all audiences. Because it's novella length, I don't think it'll necessarily fit well into today's crime-fiction universe...the crime trend is towards bloat as much as the rest of literature is. But it's a bracing, bitter draft of revenge fantasy and devictimized womanhood.

Only not in a salubrious way. show less