French fiction

“La Decision” – by Karine Tuil – “Believe those who search for the truth, doubt those who find it”.

Best-selling French author Karine Tuil seems to favour novels which focus on current controversial issues as they affect the lives of characters with high-flying professional careers but dysfunctional private lives.

In this case, Alma is a judge who has to decide whether French nationals of Arab origin who wish to return from the Middle East, where they have been in contact with organisations like Islamic State, pose a security risk, or may even face prosecution if there is sufficient evidence. The stress of her job is compounded by the fact that she has fallen out of love with her husband Ezra, and is embroiled in an unwise affair with a charismatic but unpredictable judge, Emmanuel.

Alma is particularly preoccupied with the case of a young detainee called Kacem. Is it too risky to release him into the community, so that, for the sake of the public, he must serve a prison term which is likely to radicalise him into a full-blown terrorist? An added complication is that Emmanuel is the judge representing Kacem, creating a “conflict of interest” for Alma.

This could form the basis for a compelling novel which works on several levels – gripping and also thought-provoking. Yet I was to be disappointed. Was the novel written too quickly? The various plot strands are not well-developed , nor skilfully interwoven. While legal aspects are often dealt with in detail if at somewhat tedious length, others concerning the relations between the characters are too brief, or disjointed and superficial. At times, the book resembles notes for a novel, with simply too much explanation and “telling” as opposed to “showing” readers, to enable them to draw their own conclusions. Too much seems implausible or contrived. Although it is not important for me to like a character, Alma appears too emotional and self-absorbed to be an effective judge, or to arouse much sympathy. The aftermath of “the decision” is potentially the most interesting and moving part of the novel, but marred by being too rushed, with a somewhat trite conclusion.

At least I learned a few idioms and fresh vocabulary in what is a fairly easy read in French. However, I would recommend “Les Choses Humaines” instead, in which the plot and characterisation are handled better.

“Changer l’eau des fleurs” – Fresh water for flowers by Valerie Perrin

Violette has the unusual role of caretaker for the cemetery in the small French town of Brancion-en Chalon. With a tied house on site, the post was meant to be shared with her husband, but this idle philanderer, inaptly named Philippe Toussaint, rode out of her life on his motor cycle without warning nearly two decades previously.

In continual flashbacks, we learn how, born “Sous X” to an anonymous mother and brought up in children’s homes, the pretty but illiterate and unloved teenage Violette was an easy prey for control and exploitation by Toussaint. The birth of her daughter Leonine brings Violette great joy and a sense of purpose, but ties her more firmly to Philippe, until a tragic event which may also be a crime occurs.

Despite all this, the middle-aged Violette finds unexpected solace in the way of life which the cemetery provides: the ceremonies; the visitors; the incidents and anecdotes; the company of a team of undertakers, gravediggers and the Catholic priest with hearts of gold, if somewhat caricatured, and not least by the skill she has learned in planting her garden.

This novel has a filmic quality, no doubt due to Valerie Perrin’s work as a screenwriter, and her connection to the Director Claude Lelouch (of “Un Homme et Une Femme” fame). I wonder to what it extent it may have been inspired by John Irving’s “The Cider House Rules”, a book to which Violette appears to have become addicted.

A prize-winning bestseller in France, translated into many languages, “Changer l’Eau des Fleurs” (Fresh Water for Flowers) was the choice of my French reading group. I found the constant switches back and forth in time, including sub-plots to chart three often fraught love affairs over more than three decades, and clearly designed to build suspense, made it quite hard to keep track of the chronology – but by the end, this did not really matter. Also assuming different points of view, these flashbacks led to constant repetition, perhaps also intended to help the reader. A tendency to reel off a string of examples, when or two would do, and the inclusion of lengthy extracts from the lyrics of popular songs, contributed to the padding out of this book to 660 pages for a somewhat misnamed “Livre de Poche”. Admittedly, by checking out some of the singers on YouTube, I learned a little more about French popular culture.

Similarly, the novel is packed with colloquial idioms, but the desire to improve one’s French was stretched to the limit by the sense of being bombarded with melodrama, and some beyond ludicrous scenes, as when Violette, having somehow learned to ride a monocycle, scares the wits out of some noisy teenagers holding a midnight party in the cemetery, by careering down the alleys between the graves, draped in a shroud decorated with phosphorescent paint, a flashlight whistle between her lips. This was one of the points where I nearly abandoned reading, yet others have singled it out as hilarious. On the other hand, I appreciated a whole chapter devoted to random snatches of conversation heard by Violette as she gardened.

So, if one is not a reader who seeks to escape into a lengthy, sentimental soap opera, where flawed individuals sometimes redeem themselves, where events are often the result of tragic ironies, but the human spirit can survive with remarkable resilience despite it all, you can always choose a novel at the other end of the scale, like one of Claire Keegan’s, instead.

Vladivostok Circus by Elisa Shua Dusapin – A question of balance

After graduating, French speaker Nathalie’s first contract is to design the costumes for a celebrated trio of athletes, dedicated to beating the women’s world record in the perilous feat of four consecutive triple leaps without landing in-between on the “Russian bar”, which you need to look up online if not familiar with it. This means an end-of-season journey to the Vladivostok Circus, located on the far eastern shore of Russia, where the team of two Russian “bases”, Anton and Nico, who support each end of the bar, and the young Ukrainian acrobat Anna, with their Canadian manager Leon, plan to prepare for their tour de force in the Siberian capital Ulan Ude – the author has a fascination for remote places.

Nathalie appears quite self-sufficient, and knows what to expect to some extent, having spent time in Vladivostok as a child, because of her father’ work. However, she has to win the trust of the group. Including Anton, who speaks little English, and to understand how they work, in order to conceive costumes which will enhance their performance without creating any physical or technical problems for them. There is an added stress in that Anna is a newcomer to the team, replacing the previous star Igor, who was crippled in a seven metre fall when he failed to land on the bar. Anna still has to prove herself, while Anton in particular may have been traumatised by the accident, plus he is possibly getting too old to continue the only way of life he knows.

Novels are often based on some specialism which the reader is unlikely to know much about: piano tuning, transplant surgery or trompe-l’œil painting to make a surface look like rare veined marble – in this case all aspects of circus performances on the Russian bar. This is revealed through detailed descriptions of the characters’ daily life, with a focus on the banal, while significant events tend to be implied, referred to in passing or covered in a single sentence – like Anna’s achievement of becoming the first woman to succeed in the four triples jumps with descending to the bar.

I discovered Elisa Shua Dusapin through her first novel, “Winter at Sokcho”, a quirky but brilliant portrayal of a young woman, who feels like an outsider, trapped in a dead-end seaside resort near the grim border with North Korea, never having known her father who was French engineer passing through, so attracted in turn to a French graphic designer who happens to visit Sokcho.

With my expectations perhaps raised too high, I found Vladivostock Circus a pale imitation of this. It lacks the striking, often beautiful prose of the earlier novel. There is still the strong sense of place, but although descriptions of the circus, closed down for the season, the port city and the long rail journeys all ring true, they are too often unbearably mundane, as for the most part are the characters’ activities and exchanges.

It may of course be the essential point that a good deal of tedium and dull routine lies behind great achievement – also that the moments of truest connection and deepest insight may occur in the course of nondescript, ordinary life.

This is the kind of low-key novel with a minimal plot, leaving much unclear, which has a “marmite” effect on readers who view it very differently. The chief interest for me lay in comparing the French text with the English translation, which is good, but dares to deviate a good deal from the original wording so that it give some scenes a different flavour.

Overall, there is too little substance to sustain a couple of hundred pages. Perhaps a shorter novella would have made a more powerful impact, with a wider appeal.

Des diables et des saints – devils and saints by Jean-Baptiste Andrea: style over substance

Why does the elderly narrator Joe spend his days playing only Beethoven on the “free” pianos to be found in Paris railway stations? Who is the woman he keeps hoping to encounter, and is she part of some idealised dream?

For much of this novel I imagined that Joe is a gifted pianist who has been traumatised by two events during his adolescence: witnessing the explosion on landing of the plane carrying his parents and “insupportable sister”, and his subsequent despatch to the aptly named “Les Confins”, a grim boarding school for orphans run by the Catholic church in a remote spot on the French border with Spain. This is run by L’Abbé, a sadist who singles Joe out for psychological torture, after his Oliver Twist-style error of introducing himself by “asking for more”, that is a single bedroom instead of a dorm and salad for starters. Sensing that Joe is desperate to play the piano in his study, L’Abbé sets him to work using his digital dexterity to type endless letters for him, under strict instructions never to raise the piano lid. When he suspects Joe of a lie to avoid incriminating another boy, L’Abbé cunningly manipulates Grenouille, his brutal caretaker, in the knowledge that he will subject Joe to physical violence in revenge.

In this take on a well-worn theme, the harshness of the regime at Les Confins is so repetitious as to seem tedious – one becomes inured to it, rather like most of the boys. This is not relieved much by the moments of black humour, or Joe’s identification with and conversations with Michael Collins, the astronaut who circled the dark side of the moon while his colleagues undertook the first moon walk in 1969, and other surreal incidents. Take the occasion when “the Vigie”, the gang to which Joe is admitted, sneak up on the roof to experience the violent wind which blows through the valley “once every three years”. Wedging his feet under a low parapet, Joe spreads his arms wide like wings, to experience the sensation of flying, and freedom. With echoes of “Le Grand Meaulnes”, Joe eventually falls in love with Rose, the spoilt daughter of a rich benefactor of “Les Confins”, to whom Joe is forced to give piano lessons. It can be quite hard to keep up with the author as he flits between scenes.

Many of the incidents are implausible, the characters stereotyped and exaggerated. Yet by the end, the author succeeds in suggesting that L’Abbé himself was once an abused orphan who genuinely believes that it is necessary to punish his pupils to bring them to his version of belief in God, while Grenouille is probably suffering from an old soldier’s PTSD. One has to suspend disbelief over the fact that the fifteen-year-old Joe, son of a comfortably off family, would have been packed off to Les Confins when he was so close to being old enough to go out and earn a living. So much of the book is devoted to his two years spent at the school, that there is too little space to cover the half century he spent with the freedom to come into his inheritance and work as a music teacher, which would have “restored the balance” in real life.

However, Jean-Baptiste Andrea is less interested in realism, except perhaps to move us over the plight of orphans who suffer long-term damage through abuse. Instead, he is more focused on using his quirky style to go off at a tangent on flights of fancy, and observations on life. So this is a novel likely to divide opinion sharply. He is a talented writer, so although I did not care for this particular plot, I shall probably attempt another of his novels, hopefully on a different theme. Best read in French if possible, I suspect……

Étoile Errante – Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clézio – “Le soleil ne brille-t-il pas pour tous?”  (“Doesn’t the sun shine for everyone?”)  

It is 1943, and despite occupation by the Italian army, allied to Nazi Germany, the remote French commune of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, close to the border, seems to be a haven for Jews. Although she has been obliged to adopt the French name Hélène, Esther’s family is not typically Jewish because her father, a former teacher, is a self-styled communist and “pagan” who risks his life guiding refugees along the “Old Salt Road” passes across the Alps into northern Italy. When in due course Esther is obliged to flee in turn with her mother, she falls under the influence of a rabbi, so that, once the war is over , it makes sense for the pair to follow a relative’s advice to emigrate to Jerusalem “to forget” the troubled past. This proves impossible, since the establishment of Israel means displacement of the Palestinians and more strife.

Esther’s brief, chance meeting in Palestine with Nejma, an Arab girl of a similar age, is the device used to link the two characters, even if only tenuously.  Le Clézio portrays them as “wandering  stars”, innocent victims of circumstance uprooted from their homes who happen to be on opposite sides of the conflict. Yet their positions are not equal, for Esther has the means and choice to travel further and create a new life in Canada, although she will always be haunted by memories. Nejma’s story occupies less than a quarter of the novel, making it seem like a digression in the account of  Esther’s life, but it is more moving, since she suffers more in her attempts to survive at the most basic level in or outside the grim camps set up by the United Nations. Her future, which is left unclear, appears bleak.

Despite being very observant, even as a highly educated woman in later life, Esther does not seem to reflect much on how the injustice borne by her people has led to a chain reaction of suffering for others.  It is Nejma who has the insight to see the significance of a dying Arab’s question, “Le soleil ne brille-t-il pas pour tous?”  (“Doesn’t the sun shine for everyone?”)  This is the closest the author comes to “taking sides”.

Perhaps because I read this in December 2023, during the unrelenting bombardment of Gaza triggered by the brutal incursions by Hamas into Israel on October 7th, I was expecting Le Clézio, as a Nobel Prize winner, to give more consideration to the moral issues raised by the conflicts which form the background to this novel.  It appears that he prefers to leave it to us to reflect on these, via his focus on individual lives, which tend to follow a random course, subject to fragmented, disjointed perceptions, as in reality.

From the outset, the lyrical, often repetitive prose creates a hypnotic effect as he describes in great detail the landscapes, sea voyages, small daily events in a village or refugee camp. The reader has to pay close attention, to glean scraps of information to build up a picture of what is going on. One needs a certain amount of general knowledge about, for instance, the Shoah or Holocaust, the belief in “Eretz Israel” leading to the foundation of the modern state in 1948, the Nakba (forced movement and dispossession of the Palestinians) and subsequent conflicts there to appreciate the novel more fully.

However, one can simply read this as a lyrical, impressionistic account of how war makes people rootless and vulnerable but hopefully coming to terms with their situation and gaining greater self-knowledge and control over their lives.

Le Soleil des Scorta by Laurent Gaudé: “There is nothing new under the sun”.

It’s the 1870s in “Les Pouilles”, the arid, sun-scorched heel of Italy’s boot. A weary donkey carries former bandit Luciano Mascalzone, prematurely aged by years in jail, back to his home town of Montepuccio, where he plans to fulfil his dream of “possessing by force” the beautiful Filomena Biscotti, a final crime for which the local men will surely kill him. The opening scenes, with their vivid sense of place and of a simple, sentimental, inward-looking community, quick to deliver rough justice, calls to mind a spaghetti western.

The succeeding chapters which trace Mascalzone’s descendants, the “Scorta” line, through four generations, starting with his bastard son Rocco, resemble a darker version of Daudet’s “Lettres de mon moulin”. They present a series of incidents which reveal the gradual change of a community over a century, focusing on the relations within a family in which each generation feels tied to a land it seems impossible to leave, but where making a living means a struggle to survive. Whether this takes the form of Rocco’s acts of violence and theft by which he enriches himself, or the sheer hard work rebuilding a business selling cigarettes like his grandson Elia, it gives a sense of pride. Those with less drive may be satisfied to labour growing olives, or fishing. Life evolves gradually, but not always for the better: the fishermen’s tradition of supplementing their income with smuggling switches from cigarettes to Albanians or refugees from further afield; the streets of Montepuccio may be lit with electricity, but they are thronged with tourists, and bright young people, including Elia’s daughter Anna, leave to study in the cities of the north.

Striking descriptions of the landscape ring true, since based on Laurent Gaudés own experience of frequent visits there, where his wife’s family and neighbours must have provided the models for his characters. Since he has also made a name as a playwright, it is not surprising that this novel has a distinctly theatrical flavour. One can imagine many of the scenes as stage sets: at one extreme Rocco’s defiant, remarkably vigorous death-bed speech to his startled audience; at the other the family celebration with a huge banquet held on a fishing platform in a rocky cliff, which remains “engraved” ad the high point of the family’s memories.

The story is related in old age by Rocco’s daughter Carmela to Don Salvatore, the once fiery priest and outsider, nicknamed “le Calabrais”, who has softened his jaundiced view of the locals. Sensing the onset of senility, Carmela is anxious to ensure that, after her death, details of the family’s history should be passed on to Anna, including one closely-guarded secret which seems ironical more than shameful, but might indeed dent the reputation of “les Scorta”, if widely known.

Despite its insights into human nature and evocation of a distinctive community, the frequent sentimentality, exaggeration and sheer implausibility of some events may captivate the reader, but make it more like a series of fables or flights of fancy than seriously moving. On the other hand, it makes one reflect on a disappearing way of life which has perhaps been dismissed too readily for its superstition, prejudices and poverty, so undervalued for its strength of ties to family, land and traditional ways of living.

In the English translation, the title is “The House of Scorta”.

“Le Chat” or “The Cat” by Georges Simenon: an impasse in more sense than one

In addition to his detective novels featuring the chief inspector Maigret and other works, Georges Simenon wrote 117 “romans durs”, literally “hard” but described in English as “psychological novels”. One of the best known of these, published towards the end of his writing career, is “Le Chat” or “The Cat”, so popular that it was made into a film in 1971.

“Le Chat” was apparently inspired by a visit to his mother in the 1950s, where Simenon was struck by how she and her partner did not speak to one another, but seemed to express a mutual hatred via the cruelty they inflicted on each other’s pet animals.

From this bizarre situation sprang the tale of two lonely, recently bereaved people in their sixties who happen to live in the same Parisian cul-de-sac and make the mistake of getting married, only to find that their differences in class, taste and habits make them completely incompatible and provoke a profound conflict. The husband Émile Bouin is painted in a more sympathetic light – he’s a simple working man, goodhearted if a bit vulgar, who likes to drink a glass or two in a café and smoke his “nauséabonds” cigars. By contrast, Marguerite is a dainty “petite bourgeoise”, daughter of the founder of a biscuit factory, eventually ruined through a partner’s financial mismanagement. Frail in appearance but with a will of iron, she is portrayed as self-centred, vindictive and superficial.

She detests her husband’s pet Joseph, an independent alley cat who seems to menace her beloved parrot. Despite being deeply religious, she is suspected by Émile of having murdered his cat. This is the beginning of a long-term feud which the pair conduct into their early seventies, communicating solely via written messages. So Émile’s “Attention au beurre” is loaded with meaning – implying malignly that the butter may be poisoned just as Marguerite did away with Joseph. Needless to say, the parrot has come to grief as well, but has been restored to its cage in stuffed form, to trouble Émile‘s conscience.

The monotonous, oppressive life the pair lead is revealed from the outset, and would soon become intolerable even to the reader, but for the continual touches of dark humour. Simenon also captures the nostalgia and melancholy of a former Paris in the 1960s when inner city neighbourhoods of close-knit communities in which people know each other’s business, or think they do, are being disrupted by redevelopment schemes. Even the couple’s cul-de-sac is being demolished by the bulldozer.

Deftly constructed with flashbacks and digressions, Simenon skilfully reveals past events which have shaped the characters, their motivations and emotions, against the atmospheric backdrop of open air cafes and bars, dance halls on the banks of the Seine, or meetings in the Parc Montsouris. Simenon’s clarity of expression and insight hook the reader despite the essential sadness of the theme as it draws to its ironic conclusion.

Simenon embarked on his “romans durs” with the intention of winning The Nobel Prize for Literature, but never achieved this ambition, causing him to change his career from “novelist” to “no profession” in his passport, in a surge of disillusion. The more French novels I read, the more I think he deserved such a prize.

“Une Vie” by Guy de Maupassant: A Woman’s Life

For his first novel, Guy de Maupassant sought the advice of his mentor Flaubert, and there are similarities between his heroine Jeanne and Madam Bovary – both underoccupied, privileged C19 women of whom little is expected except to be married and follow a conventional path with no self-fulfilling goals to give them a sense of purpose. It took Maupassant more than five years to complete Une Vie, by which time Flaubert was dead. Meanwhile, he was producing a spate of short stories and plays, often on risqué themes which would titillate the public and bring him commercial success.

Yet “Une Vie” took more time because it was meant to be different, with its slow-paced focus on the on the inner life of an unremarkable individual. At first, I was a little bored by the banality of Jeanne’s life, as she returns from the narrow education of a convent to the family home where her head is full of naïve, romantic notions. The plot becomes more interesting when she marries the handsome Julien, but her honeymoon in Corsica turns out to be her one true adventure, and indication of how her life might have been. Julien soon proves to be mean with her family’s money, which was probably his reason for marrying her, and unfaithful as well.

Maupassant is particularly successful in entering into the mind of a woman, describing her emotions, even the experience of childbirth. He also creates a strong sense of place in the descriptions of the countryside on the Normandy coast, and some atmospheric scenes. He develops the psychology of his characters to good dramatic effect, as when, during her wedding party, Jeanne’s father is forced to tell her the facts of life, which he does in the most oblique and ineffectual way possible, because her mother cannot bring herself to do it. Then there is the cynical worldliness of the local priest when she confesses to him that she wants another child: part of his advice is to suggest that she pretends to be pregnant as a way of effectively tricking her husband, taken off his guard, into giving her the child that she longs for, but he really does not wish to have.

Jeanne’s acute sensitivity makes her ill-equipped to cope with the relentless sequence of misfortune which dogs her, and in turn unsurprisingly weighs the reader down. Maupassant may well have been unaware of this effect on us, since he was prone to periods of deep depression, being influenced by the philosophy that it is the destiny of mankind to suffer, because the faulty will is more powerful than reason, causing us to make bad decisions.

The author’s own mother also had a philandering husband and suffered depression, but was less passive than Jeanne, and made the decision to separate from him. This, plus the fact that Maupassant had a younger brother who kept getting into debt through gambling, show how much the author used his close relatives as models for Jeanne, Julien and their son Paul.

The essentially rather gloomy “novel of mourning” is leavened with a few somewhat melodramatic events, each of which could have made one of his intriguing short stories. Although not exactly an enjoyable read, this is an interesting experiment, which prompts reflection and lingers in the mind.

La femme rompue – The woman destroyed, by Simone de Beauvoir – feminism through cautionary tales.

In her trilogy of novellas which takes its overall name from the third story, “La femme rompue”, or “The Woman Destroyed”, Simone de Beauvoir, celebrated feminist writer and longstanding companion and lover of Jean Paul Sartre, portrays three women not dealing well with a crisis in later life. In each case, the crisis is due partly to external factors, including the behaviour of others, but also appears to be partly of their own making.

In l’Âge de discretion (The Age of Discretion), the first story, the sixty-something narrator is increasingly disappointed by her husband’s premature acceptance of ageing and being “past it”, and depressed by the unexpectedly lukewarm reception of her new work. Her complacency is shattered by the discovery that her son Phillipe has rejected the academic profession into which she has steered him, and the left-wing values of his parents, for a career making money. De Beauvoir’s clear, expressive prose with its sharp dialogues explores every facet of the narrator’s changing emotions as the facts are gradually revealed.

She contrives to create some sympathy for the woman, even while exposing the full extent of her failings: she often appears to be an unreliable witness, is jealous of the suspected influence on Philippe of his partner Irène, has sought to control Philippe too much herself, and proves overemotional and extreme in her reactions when she cannot have her way.

The same mixed response applies to Monique in “La Femme Rompue”, although I feel rather more sympathy for her as the growing sense that she has lost connection with her husband triggers his confession that there is indeed “another woman” in his life, but not one that Monique can respect – as if that would really ease her pain. Published in the 1960s, it would seem that de Beauvoir is writing this as a cautionary tale for women who put all their eggs in the basket of sacrificing a career to support a husband and children, running the risk of losing all of these, with nothing to fall back on.

I was least satisfied with the shortest story, “Monologue”, in which a dense stream of consciousness is spouted by an ageing woman who has gone mad in her desire for revenge on those who have wronged her. It is exhausting and tedious (perhaps intentionally!) and somewhat confusing if read in French as a second language. This bleak, disjointed recital seems simplistic in suggesting that the narrator’s sense of her mother’s neglect and preference for her brother when she was growing up can be blamed as the initial cause of a chain of dysfunctional relationships, including with her own daughter. “Monologue” differs from the other novellas, in that it reads like an exercise in creative writing, which lacks authenticity because De Beauvoir is too cool and controlled to identify with her crazed character.

“Le suspendu de Conakry” by Jean-Christophe Rufin: run-of-the-mill

The quay of Conakry harbour is crowded with Guineans, mesmerised by the spectacle of a body suspended from the mast of a sailing boat in an apparent vicious act of revenge, but for what reason? The victim is a wealthy Frenchman who may have had a large amount of money stashed on board after selling his business, so was theft the main motive? Bored in his job, with secret dreams of being a detective, the unlikely consul at the local French embassy,  Aurel Timescu, cannot resist the unexpected opportunity to investigate the crime unofficially in his manager’s convenient absence.

The first in a series which has proved popular, this novel marks a change in direction for author Jean-Christophe Rufin. With an impressive career path as a doctor playing a leading role in Médecins Sans Frontières, and as a diplomat, his past novels have been located in a variety of countries, but tend to focus on serious themes and moral issues.  In some ways, “Le suspendu de Conakry” follows this pattern, with its references to the corruption and lack of freedom in  formerly communist Romania, Aurel’s country of origin,  to  the problems of post-colonial Guinea and the insidious network of the international drug trade.

However, as detective fiction it seems quite formulaic: divorced anti-hero with a drink problem, on bad terms with his boss. Habitually wearing an ankle-length mac in a country with an average temperature of over 80° F, Aurel is widely mocked and underestimated.  Yet he somehow manages to establish a rapport with hints of possible romance with Jocelyne, the murder victim’s glamorous sister. This is despite behaving like a gauche adolescent in her company. Although Rufin has claimed when interviewed that Aurel is based on embassy staff he has met, he seems to have carried absurdity too far.

The plot is rather thin and banal, with Aurel largely relying on information he deploys young  local men, like Hassan who works for the embassy, to glean by quizzing possible witnesses and suspects.  There is a potentially interesting twist in  Aurel’s persistent attempt to understand the psychology of Jacques Mayères. Influenced by his Romanian culture which fosters a belief in ghosts, he even imagines that Jacques is looking at him from a photograph.  This apparently assists Aurel to work out how the crime occurred but the  eventual denouement seems implausible  and contrived in too many respects. For the most part slow-paced, the novel concludes abruptly, still dangling a few loose ends. 

This proves an easy read which leaves one feeling dissatisfied, because some promising ingredients  could have been handled better.