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 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…
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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. ( )

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/the-bleakness-of-humani...

The stars are for the quality of the writing - the story itself is unremitting bleak. ( )

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 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. ( )

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. ( )