By a Slow River

¡No perdáis el tiempo leyendo ésto y corred a comprar este libro! Si el último libro publicado por Claudel, 'El informe de Brodeck', era perfecto, este, que es anterior, roza lo sublime. Todas las frases son perfectas, no hay ninguna mala. Parece increíble pero es cierto. La prosa de Claudel es deliciosa, todo encaja como en un reloj suizo. Se me acaban los calificativos.

Diciembre de 1917, en un pueblecito de Francia. Acaba de ser encontrada una niña flotando en el canal y a la escena del crimen acuden un juez, un militar y un policía. Y es este último el narrador de la historia, veinte años después. Como máximo sospechoso tenemos al fiscal Destinat, ya jubilado. Pero no sólo nos hablará del Caso, también de su historia show more personal, de su mujer, de una maestra nueva que llegó al pueblo, del juez... todos los personajes son importantes.

Es un relato implacable, en el que parece que nadie es culpable ni inocente, todos son víctimas. El gris impregna toda la historia, tanto en el clima como en las almas, que no son ni blancas ni negras, sino grises. Cuando acabé este libro, quedé tan impresionado que cogí mi chaqueta y salí a pasear un rato con mi perra para calmar mi mente. ¿Qué puedes leer después de una obra perfecta, tan bien escrita? Cualquier libro que escoja no estará a la altura. Seguro. show less

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 show more 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. show less

What a wonderful sad story. It is told from the view of a police officer who has a lot of sympathy for all the inhabitants of a little Belgian village. He suffers all incidents with them which they have to face to. He describes everything with a great care and love for all protagonists be they rich or poor, a celebrity or a 'nobody'. In the end it's clear that he is one of them, facing the same problems as they do and perhaps his sympathy for everyone else is at the same moment his therapy for surviving.
Philippe Claudel's language is rich and subtly nuanced. It's a great pleasure to follow his story and his thoughts.

I finished reading this book a couple of hours ago and maybe I should wait for it to sink in before I write a review. But I am so taken by it, perhaps verbalizing will help me process it.

The truth is that I feel cheated by the narrator, a police officer in a small town in France telling us in flashback the events around a murder during WWI. I am afraid to give spoilers, but I often find it unfair to be punched on the face by an ending. In this case though, the end was there all along, and I am the one to blame for being too credulous.

I expected that this book would defy genre, but it did much more than that. It is a mystery. It is certainly a book of war – WWI. But is more… It is a book about how death robs us, those left behind show more living, of a piece of ourselves, and we are left like the amputee in the book talking to his amputated limb. Not entirely whole and maybe smaller in our own humanity.

If I was now writing a review or essay for some college professor, I would be penalized some points if I didn’t mention the parallels between the private tragedies of the characters’ lives in the book and the much bigger social tragedy of war raging just 20 miles from it. The more I think of it, this is a great book of war, although the war remains always at the margins of the story.

I think that at this point I don’t have to warn you that it is a dark book. But I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading it either. It is a book to ponder, and one that takes a while to digest, but it is not disheartening or gory. It is just a good book to reflect on… show less

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.

This book was recommended to me by author Elizabeth Speller during a Twitter conversation about WW1 books. I have to confess I had previously not heard of either the novel or the author. By a Slow River – original title Les àmes grises – translated from French by Hoyt Rogers was the winner of the Prix Renaudot and a bestseller in France. It is the compelling and atmospheric story of three mysterious deaths in an isolated French village during World War one.
The story is narrated by a policeman who looks back on what is known locally as The Case from a distance of twenty years, when he returns to wind up his father’s affairs after many years absence. In December 1917 with the sound of the artillery bombardment rumbling not too far show more away, death of a different kind comes to this small village. Belle the ten-year old daughter of the Rѐbillon café owner Bourrache; known to all as Morning Glory is found strangled. This shocking death is the second to bring tragedy to a small town where many men are in reserved occupations, a place oddly removed from the war. A couple of years earlier, a replacement schoolmistress whose beauty, cheerful demeanour and gracefulness had turned the heads of many of the local men, and stolen a few hearts, committed suicide. As The Case gets underway, with a desperate search through that freezing December for a murderer, a young woman dies in childbirth while her husband is out searching for a killer.
“When we ran into Pierre-Ange Destinat on the street, the rest of us called him Mr.Prosecutor. Men raised their caps to him, and women of the humbler sort curtsied. Fine ladies of his own social class would incline their heads ever so slightly, like little birds when they drank from gutters. Whatever the greeter or greeting, it seemed no matter. He didn’t answer – or did it so faintly you would’ve needed four well-polished opera glasses to see his lips move. But it wasn’t disdain, as most believed; I think it was simply detachment.”
Prosecutor Pierre-Ange Destinat living alone in his Chateau with his two servants Barbe and Solemn still grieves for his long dead wife. Destinat who has a regular table reserved for him and dines occasionally at Rebillon has earned the enmity of the sinister Judge Mierck; a dark presence in the town, and another regular at Rebillon. It was in a small house in the grounds of the Prosecutor’s chateau that the schoolmistress had lived, and it is just outside the walls that Morning Glory is found dead. Mierck an unpleasant, malevolent character, chillingly drawn by Claudel, is quickly called to the gruesome scene outside the chateau, and directs the start of the investigation.
“Before that moment we had all accepted Judge Mierck for what he was. He had his place and he held it, not liked much, but respected. But on that first Monday of December, by the mortal remains of this little girl, his words, and even more how matter-of-factly he said them, almost cheerfully, with a gleam in his eyes at having a murder case at last, a real one, for it was murder, no doubt about it! – in this time of war, when all the killers had forsaken civil life so they could ply their aggression more violently in uniform – after that day, people in our region never thought of him without disgust.”
Judge Mierck and his friend a rather mysterious Colonel tie up The Case quickly– declaring it closed, but the memory of these events will stay in the minds of many.
Twenty years later the Policeman is still struggling to make sense of the tragedies, continually haunted as he is, by the ghosts of the past. Now temporarily back in the village he uses the small amount of information he has to wheedle out the secrets of the village. Gradually as the story of what happened during those years of the war is revealed, the story of an entire town is brought to light.
By a Slow River – (which I think is the US title, the UK title is Grey Souls) is a sadly, beautiful novel, enormously evocative with a strong sense of place. Within the non-linear structure of this novel, Dadais – Claudel’s policeman narrator in recalling the most terrible events of his life, creates a very intimate relationship with the reader. I don’t read many modern crime novels, - although this is very much a literary crime novel, with character and place really at the centre – but I am very glad I read this one. Claudel is an author I will have to investigate further. show less

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 show more 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. show less