Central Park by Guillaume Musso

First published in France in 2014; published in translation by Little, Brown and Company/Back Bay Books on March 16, 2021

Alice Schaefer is a 38-year-old police detective in Paris. Feeling sorry for herself, she goes out with the girls and gets toasted. The next thing she knows, she’s waking up in Central Park, handcuffed to a stranger. According to her watch, several hours have passed, but how could she have possibly made it to Central Park without being aware of passing through customs or immigration? She doesn’t have identification or money, but she does have blood on her blouse. The guy to whom she is handcuffed tells her that he was playing jazz in a bar in Dublin the night before and has no idea how he ended up in her company. The guy has something carved into his arm and Alice has some numbers written on her hand.

The idea behind Central Park — waking up in an unfamiliar place with no memory of arriving there — is a familiar basis for a thriller plot. To make a novel like this work, the author must create an original explanation for the gap in the protagonist’s memory. Then the author needs to sell the reader on the plausibility of that explanation. Guillaume Musso deserves credit for concocting an explanation I didn’t expect but fails to make the explanation remotely credible.

The story is entertaining if the reader doesn’t stop to think about it. Alice embarks on a series of adventures to (1) free herself from the handcuffs and (2) figure out why she was handcuffed to a guy in Central Park in the first place. She doesn’t go to the police because, being a cop, she believes that involving the police without knowing why she has blood on her blouse will only make her life worse. She eventually gets some investigative help from her best friend in Paris, Seymour Lombart, leading to predictable confusion about the identity of the jazz pianist to whom she is joined at the wrist. To add to the confusion, she finds a GPS tracker in her shoes. She also finds a small object implanted under her skin and does not understand how or when it got there. That’s a lot of unlikeliness for Musso to explain.

Alice’s backstory includes the usual tragic events that shape thriller heroes. She was estranged from her imprisoned father. She had a whirlwind romance with a man who died. She was tracking a killer named Erik Vaughn when she had an unexpected opportunity to arrest him. She took the initiative to make the arrest without calling for backup because that’s what thriller heroes do. Vaughn got the jump on her and stabbed her in the abdomen, changing her life in predictably tragic ways. Vaughn’s fate after that crime is uncertain, as it must be to make the plot work. Alice’s dismal life is supposed to earn the reader’s sympathy, but it features the same package of woes that are common to thriller characters. The package fails to generate real emotion, and the ending is such an obvious attempt to manipulate the reader’s emotions that I rejected it entirely.

Alice is remarkably slow-witted for a police detective, given her failure to ask a couple of obvious questions that would shed light on her situation. The story moves in unexpected directions but rarely follows a credible path. As the explanation of Alice’s plight slowly unfolds, my reaction was, “Really?” That’s not a positive reaction. The plot depends on a remarkable breach of professional ethics that, to avoid spoilers, I won’t explain. Suffice it to say that rational people don’t behave in the way that the book’s characters behave.

Suspension of disbelief is critical to a plot like this. My disbelief heightened with every new chapter. The story has the merit of being interesting — the plot kept me turning pages — but my disappointment at the reveal keeps me from giving Central Park an unqualified recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Khalil by Yasmina Khadra

First published in France in 2018; published in translation by Doubleday/ Nan A. Talese on February 16, 2021

Written in the first person, Khalil is an impressive examination of the key months in a young terrorist’s life. Yasmina Khadra imagines how a man whose mind has been twisted by religious zealotry might respond when his mission of destruction goes wrong.

Khalil was raised and lives in a suburb of Brussels, along with his twin sister Zahra (whose husband repudiated her after a brief marriage) and his older sister Yezza (who works in a sweatshop). Apart from Zahra, Khalil resents his family. Yezza has mental health issues that may have been exacerbated by an exorcism, or perhaps by religious traditions for which she is ill-suited. Khalil views his parents as parasites. He considers his buddies to be his family, the streets to be his home, the mosque to be his private club. He happily dropped out of high school with his best friend Driss. Under the tutelage of a man named Lyès, Khalil found a path that gave his life purpose: “to serve God, and to avenge myself on those who had reduced me to a thing.”

As the novel begins, Khalil is in Paris, one of four suicide bombers who have been chosen to attack the city. Driss will blow himself up after joining the crowd leaving a soccer stadium; Khalil will explode his vest while standing in a crowded line to board a train. To Khalil’s shame, something goes wrong and his vest does not detonate. He spends much of the novel trying to understand what happened; the explanations he receives leave him puzzled.

The reader is encouraged to understand why Khalil is a terrorist, despite being surrounded by Muslims — including Rayan, another childhood friend — who deplore terrorists. He does not want to reveal the crime he tried to commit, but he occasionally argues with people who have a very different view of what their mutual religion teaches about love and violence. Rayan tries to persuade him that “God’s not a warlord, much less the boss of a criminal organization” and that the Quran teaches “that if someone kills a human being, it’s as if he’s killed all humanity.” Yet Khalil rejects Rayan for marrying an infidel, choosing pleasure over restraint, and abandoning God. Whether Islamism is Islam is a question that pervades the novel.

Khalil offers a serious look at how a terrorist might be created and how, faced with the unexpected consequences of a terrorist act that hit close to home, a terrorist might begin to question his own dogma. Khalil isn’t a likable guy — apart from contemplating mass murder, he’s incredibly judgmental about most people, particularly women who don’t cover their faces — but the story is intended to make us understand Khalil, not to admire him. The novel builds tension as Khalil positions himself for another suicide assignment. Khalil is young; whether his destiny has been written is a question the reader will ponder until the last page reveals a satisfying answer.

RECOMMENDED

The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos

Published in France in 2016; published in translation by Pushkin Press on September 1, 2020

“It is wise to be wary of anyone who loves books” cautions Madeleine, the widow of Henri Pick. Yet The Mystery of Henri Pick is a book for booklovers. The plot revolves around writers and critics and libraries and books, published and unpublished. The novel asks whether literary success has more to do with the story of a book than the story the book tells.

People who loves books and even some who rarely read harbor the belief that they have a story to tell. An unwritten book languishes in many souls. A small percentage actually take the trouble to write it, only to have the manuscript rejected by multiple publishers until they stop shopping it around. What happens to all those unpublished manuscripts?

Richard Brautigan conceived the notion of a Library of Rejected Books in his novel The Abortion. One of Brautigan’s fans brought it to life in the form of the Brautigan Library, which now resides in Vancouver. David Foenkinos imagines a librarian in a French village who, tickled by Brautigan’s idea, dedicates part of the library to unpublished manuscripts. Jean-Pierre Gourvec welcomes all rejected novels, provided their authors drop them off in person. By the time he dies, the library has accumulated thousands of manuscripts.

After Gourvec dies, Magali Croze assumes stewardship of the library. The unpublished manuscripts became covered with dust. An editor named Delphine Despero happens to spend an afternoon in the library with her boyfriend, Frédéric Koskas. There she discovers a novel called The Last Hours of a Love Affair. The book blends a love story with the death throes of Pushkin. The author was Henri Pick. Or that, at least, is what the public is told.

Henri Pick owed a pizza shop before his death. His wife had no idea that he had written a book. Henri showed no interest in literature, although his widow discovers a volume of Pushkin among his belongings.

Delphine’s discovery of Pick’s book sets the literary world on fire. The idea of a man pursuing a secret project that can be promoted as a masterpiece assures that the novel will be a best seller. The discovery changes the lives of Henri’s widow Madeleine and his daughter Joséphine. Journalists hound them for information about Henri in their hope of feeding more tidbits to the novel’s admirers.

Jean Michel Rouche, formerly an influential book critic who has become undone by his professional disappointments, suspects that Pick did not actually write the mysterious book. His effort to unmask its true author wakes him from his depression and gives him a reason to live. The mystery also drives the plot that brings the cast of characters together. Did or didn’t Pick write the amazing book?

The truth is revealed in an epilogue but is the truth really all that important? The Last Hours of a Love Affair brings joy or contentment to people who imagine that it might have been written for or about them. After all, readers “always find themselves in a book, in one way or another. Reading is a completely egotistical pleasure.” Perhaps the novel’s true origin is unimportant because “life has an inner dimension, with stories that have no basis in reality, but which are truly lived all the same.”

While the novel illustrates the ways in which people value form over substance — if conventionally published, The Last Hours of a Love Affair would probably have had a small readership — it also asks whether form and substance might sometimes have equal merit. If a book is meant to capture hearts, why are the heart-capturing circumstances of its discovery and publication of any less value than its content? Perhaps the story of artistic creation can be just as important (even if just as fictional) as the art itself.

Books about books are always fun for booklovers. The Mystery of Henri Pick explores the nature of books while revealing the hidden natures of its characters. With deceptive simplicity, the novel weaves together the lives of seemingly unremarkable people who, like most people who read, are more remarkable than they appear. Foenkinos even tells a couple of low-key love stories. The Mystery of Henri Pick is a charming addition to the literature of literature.

RECOMMENDED

Blast vol. 1: Dead Weight by Manu Larcenet

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Europe Comics on Oct. 7, 2015

The central character in Blast, Polza Mancini, is a morbidly obese writer who resembles a snowman with a carrot nose. Most of the characters have noses that could pass for vegetables, or fingers, or bird beaks. The art seems to send the message that people are grotesque. Mancini is more grotesque than most. But Blast also makes the point that “the legitimacy of disgust as a reaction to deformity is a universal principle,” a natural law that causes abnormality to be a defining characteristic rather than one part of a complex individual. And how can someone like Mancini not hate himself when it is so natural for others to hate him?

The graphic novel Blast is Mancini’s story, as told to the police during an interrogation. But Mancini tells his story in own way, slowly relating the entire story of his life as the police impatiently wait for him to confess his crime. The key event, as Mancini tells it, is his exposure to the blast. He felt the blast at a low point in his life. In fact, the story of his life until that point is in black and white (mostly black, representing a dark life), but with his description of the blast, color appears. It is a transcendent, transformative experience. Then it ends, and the world is dark again. Dark and spooky, with massive blotches of black and trembling shapes in gray.

Mancini has a history of entering and leaving psychiatric hospitals, but in a story like this, the reader is asked to decide whether his perspective of life is any less valid than any other. Mancini maintains that society has no problem with individual decisions to alter bodies, sometimes painfully, with surgery and tattoos and piercings, but when people decide to change spiritually “through delicious intoxication,” they are seen as contemptible and unbalanced. A police officer say that Mancini is giving himself “poetic excuses” for being an irresponsible and destructive drunk.

Mancini has (he tells the cops) experienced life, lived without boundaries. He abandoned his wife and his job as a food editor to live the life of a bum, not necessarily choosing to be a bum, but choosing solitude.

Yet solitude is not so easy to find. In the woods, he encounters a group who live apart from society, a self-proclaimed Republic that wants him to join their community. That isn’t the life for Mancini. Yet it is in the woods, joined by a member of the Republic who appears whenever Mancini opens a bottle, that Mancini experiences a second, colorful blast. He perceives all; his awareness is complete. “I heard the inaudible, saw the invisible. There was nothing left to hold me down.” And so he begins to float.

At one point, Mancini muses that silence, like solitude, is a poetic invention. Living in nature is both terrifying and comforting. “There’s a mystery in nature … something you can’t force. It’s revealed only if you know how to wait, perfectly still, and it cannot be shared.” A good many panels are silent, in the sense that they are wordless, but they carry the story along as Mancini travels, observing the world in all its detail — the stray dog lifting its leg, the crumbling wall, the beetles on the forest floor.

When the police provide more facts about Mancini’s past, the reader is challenged to decide whether the police are correct in their view of Mancini, or whether there is any truth in Mancini’s perspective. Has he adopted a self-serving philosophy to avoid remorse or has he discovered a way to live with himself, a philosophy that might benefit others? Blast leaves it to the reader to decide, but since this is the first of four lengthy volumes, there is much more to this original and inventive graphic story. Fans of graphic storytelling, of philosophy, and of the macabre will all find something to admire in Blast.

RECOMMENDED

Waiting for Bojangles by Olivier Bourdeaut

Published in France in 2015; published in translation by Simon & Schuster on March 19, 2019

Waiting for Bojangles is a whimsical celebration of living, of crazy love, and of “Mr. Bojangles,” the Jerry Jeff Walker song that so perfectly captures the grief and joy that defines a life. The narrator’s family dances every day to Nina Simone’s rendition of the song, sometimes forgetting to eat, often with the guests who fill their rooms above a grocery store or their vacation castle in Spain, joined by their pet crane, Mr. Superfluous.

Most of the story is told by a son who describes growing up with eccentric parents and the lascivious senator who lived with them. His father George gives his mother a new name every day, Yvonne or Hortense or whatever suits him; his mother gives her son a freshly scented glove every day so that her hand will always guide him. Occasional passages appear from George’s notebooks, giving the reader a slightly different perspective of the family.

The mother has taught her son to believe that “etiquette was the main guardrail in life” and “a lack of manners put you at other people’s mercy.” She believes that “aesthetic balance” is more important than conventional education, so the son misses school when the almond trees come into bloom. Conflicts with teachers lead to his early retirement from school, giving Olivier Bourdeaut an opportunity to explore creative ideas for home schooling, all of which are more fun than being ridiculed by a teacher for having been instilled with an unconventional view of life by a mother who “thumbs her nose at reality.”

Waiting for Bojangles is in part a love story, a story of enduring devotion. The family never opens its mail, which leads both to freedom and tax debt. It is the latter that triggers even more bizarre behavior in the narrator’s mother, such as a nude stroll to the grocer for mussels. George frets that she is losing her mind and doesn’t know where to find it. Yet George knows he cannot live without her love, and if it is crazy love, “that craziness belongs to me, too.”

The characters are eccentric because they make it a point to enjoy life and don’t much care how they are judged. Bourdeaut’s writing style is as whimsical as the story, featuring a random rhyming scheme. For example: “The object of my dread has now hit us in the head, along with fire and brimstone, right in our own home.” Some of the rhymes are forced, but that might be an artifact of translation.

The story, like the song “Mr. Bojangles,” is both happy and sad, the sadness deriving from the realization that someone as joyful as the mother is not equipped to live in a society that prefers to medicate the mentally ill until they have no personality rather than tolerating a personality that cannot easily be understood. Yet mental illness takes a toll on families and the novel does not pretend otherwise. The story’s lesson, I think, is that joy and sorrow are inseparable, that both are fundamental to life.

The book, like the song and like life, is short. Waiting for Bojangles reminds us to embrace joy while we can during a life that will end too soon. The story is such a joy to read that the importance of its message might be lost in the laughter.

RECOMMENDED