Elle by Philippe Djian

First published in France in 2012; published in translation by Other Press on May 23, 2017

Michèle lives in fear, sometimes in a state of panic. She believes in signs and portents that she sees everywhere. She receives anonymous texts that might be perceived as threatening, and she assumes they came from her rapist. Michèle treats the rape as a fact of life, in much the same way as she regards less significant events in her life.

The forces that shaped Michèle quickly become apparent. Michèle’s father has served thirty years in prison for a monstrous crime that occurred during Michèle's childhood. Her mother is paying young men for sex. Michèle isn’t pleased that her mother wants her to visit and forgive her father.

Michèle’s job is to evaluate screenplays. She doesn’t like Richard’s, a subject she danced around during the years they were married. Michèle left Richard before he learned about her affair with Robert, husband of her best friend Anna. Her son Vincent has been rude to her ever since the divorce. Vincent’s girlfriend Josie is pregnant by another man.

All of this we piece together in the first thirty pages of a novel that is largely based on Michèle’s fragmented thoughts. She is surprised when a rivalry develops between Richard and her married neighbor Patrick, with whom she’s thinking of having an affair, although she’s also thinking of ending her affair with Robert. As the novel moves forward, Michèle makes some decisions, defers others, and allows some decisions to be made for her. In other words, her life proceeds as lives do, although hers is more dramatic than most.

Michèle is a woman of moods. She wants to sleep with Patrick and then she doesn’t and then she does and so on. She hates her mother and then loves her and then hates her and so son. Sometimes she thinks she should change her ways; other time she looks forward to having more “unusual adventures” (i.e., sleeping with married men). Eventually (and I write this as a warning to sensitive readers) she indulges in rape fantasies that become realities.

There were several times when I thought (as I suspect many readers will), “Why is she doing this?” But it’s clear that Michèle doesn’t always know why she behaves as she does. The closest she comes to an answer is, “sometimes people would do just about anything to feel a tiny bit better.” And “just about anything” can include behavior that might seem rewarding in the moment even if, viewed later with a more rational mind, the behavior is self-destructive. As she tells her cat, “It’s a little complicated to explain,” probably because we can’t explain what we don’t understand.

To her credit, even when the circumstances of her life have victimized her, Michèle does not play the role of victim. She uses adversity to learn truths about herself, not all of which are pleasant. She moves forward, and whether those moves are healthy or not, they are preferable to wallowing in self-pity. Michèle might not be an exemplary person, but she isn't a bad person. Her character is a reminder that people respond to difficult childhoods in many different ways. It would be easy to judge Michèle, but she doesn’t deserve to be judged. All of that makes her a strong literary character.

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A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas

Published in France in 2015; published in translation by Penguin Books on March 7, 2017

A Climate of Fear contains the memorable line, “Please, fetch me some horse manure. I want it now.” What more could a reader ask?

Alice Gauthier, with some help she never learns about, posts a letter just before she dies. Her death is regarded as a suicide, but the retired maths teacher seems an unlikely candidate to take her own life. She drew a sign before she died, and Commandant Adrien Danglard of the Serious Crime Squad is called upon to puzzle out its meaning due to his encyclopedic knowledge of obscure facts.

Tracking down the letter leads Danglard and Jean Baptiste Adamsberg and a few other Parisian crime investigators to another apparent suicide where the same strange sign appears, as well as an suspicious deaths in Iceland ten years earlier. The investigation begins with a myth about an Icelandic island where a warm stone is said to offer eternal life. There does, we eventually learn, seem to be something creepy about the island, where visitors seem more likely to find eternal death.

The investigation takes a twist when evidence suggests that the victims were studying the writings of Robespierre, sending the detectives to a club where the government of Robespierre is reenacted. Some members seem to have infiltrated the club to spy on others. Some members are secret descendants of people who were guillotined during the Revolution, and who may be pursuing an agenda of their own.

The various characters in the club get a bit carried away, which I might not find credible except that Americans get a bit carried away with their Civil War reenactments, so perhaps the French are no different in the allegiance to one side or the other in their colorful history.

Fred Vargas has a background in history and archeology, both of which play a role in A Climate of Fear. In fact, I learned considerably more about Robespierre than I really needed to know. Still, the detail with which Vargas reconstructs French history is also evident in the detailed plot, which ties together multiple killings in an odd conspiracy — but then, all conspiracies seem odd to people who have not embraced them.

A Climate of Fear moves at a sedate pace, taking time to develop characters and (mostly) background. The pace might be a bit too sedate, but that’s preferable to modern thriller writers who, sacrificing content for speed, don’t want to burden readers with sentences of more than five words. The pace does pick up a bit at the end, before the traditional information dump in which Adamsberg explains the plot and ties the storylines together.

The police characters have obviously been developed throughout the series (this is the first Adamsberg novel I’ve read) and their personalities are clearly established. The novel might have been tighter, but the complex mystery should appeal to readers who enjoy misdirection and the opportunitiy to unravel complex mysteries.

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Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

First published in France in 2001. Published in translation in Australia in 2015. Published by Yale University Press on August 23, 2016

Nobel winner Patrick Modiano is supposedly noted for works that explore the nature of memory and identity (I wouldn’t know, having never read him before). Those themes are certainly at the heart of Little Jewel. Many things are missing from the young protagonist’s life, including memories, and it is up to the reader to guess where they have gone.

When Thérèse Cardères was younger, she was called Little Jewel. She recalls “Little Jewel” as a stage name, one that her mother used to show her off as a piece of jewelry. Thérèse has ambiguous memories of a film in which she and her mother played a role. She also recalls her mother playing a better mother in the film than she was in real life.

Thérèse is now 19. Her mother died in Morocco 12 years earlier. Yet Thérèse spots a woman wearing a yellow coat in a train station and becomes convinced that the woman is her mother, that her mother has been living a secret life. In fact, she has believed for some time that her mother, even when alive, was living a secret life and using a false identity. Seeing the woman in the yellow coat triggers memories that Thérèse reveals over the course of the novel. She also begins to have dreams about her mother (including one in which her mother has been branded) that may be more revealing than her memories.

Thérèse follows the woman, traces her to an apartment, but cannot bring herself to speak to the woman. Instead, she talks to neighbors about the woman. The stories they tell confirm Thérèse’s impression that the woman is her mother. Yet Thérèse tells her own stories about her past to the reader, and tells a different version of her life story to a pharmacist who befriends her, leaving the reader to wonder which of the memories that Thérèse relates are reliable.

Thérèse gets a job as a nanny for a mysterious couple who have a six-year-old girl. The girl’s mother reminds Thérèse of her own mother -- cold and distant -- while the girl reminds Thérèse of herself. This is one of multiple examples of identify confusion that pop up during the course of the novel.

A number of images recur throughout the novel -- black dogs, a yellow coat, the absence of chairs in a man’s study, a certain kind of music, vague sounds that may be voices or blowing leaves -- that will give literary-minded readers who search for symbols plenty to chew on. Relationships between the characters and the malleable nature of memories would also provide ample essay material if Little Jewel were assigned reading in a literature course.

Thérèse is an enigmatic character. Why doesn’t she speak to the woman who might be her mother? She isn’t quite a stalker, but she investigates the woman without gathering the courage to confront her. Is she afraid to confront her past? Thérèse’s memories of her mother and of her past are not perfectly consistent, suggesting that her present may be shaped by memories of the past that she has shaped to suit her present needs.

Thérèse spends much of her time walking the streets of Paris, often comparing it to the streets she knew as a child. She perceives the city differently by day than by night; as in childhood, she still associates darkness with the sense of being lost. She reveals her loneliness by clinging to people she meets, including a linguist who helps her explore her almost-forgotten memories. One of the people she meets, the pharmacist, treats Thérèse as would a mental health worker who is concerned about Thérèse’s emotional stability. The pharmacist’s behavior may be a clue to what’s really going on.

Gaps in Thérèse’s history invite questions. Why is she so afraid of traveling alone in Paris? Who were the men in her mother’s life? What kind of “dancer” and “actress” was her mother? What happened to Thérèse’s dog? Is Thérèse suited to be a nanny and what’s up with the mysterious parents who hired her? Why are there so many parallels and similarities between the lives of various characters of the past and present? Why does Thérèse believe that visiting the past might allow her to find a new path that will make everything turn out differently? A number of answers can be imagined to these questions, and different readers might answer them differently. The ending, I think, requires the reader to reimagine the entire novel, although I must confess that I don't know whether how I did so is the right or the best way.

Little Jewel is the kind of book that demands a close reading, and probably a rereading, in order to plumb its hidden meanings. That won’t appeal to readers who want everything laid out on a platter -- the novel’s ambiguities are at times frustrating -- but readers who enjoy being challenged to divine a novel’s multiple meanings should find Little Jewel appealing.

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The Wicked Go to Hell by Frédéric Dard

First published in France in 1956; published in translation by Pushkin Press on August 4, 2016

The Wicked Go to Hell is one of the oddest thrillers I’ve read. First published in France in 1956, it is one of more than 300 books authored by Frédéric Dard, who died in 2000. The novel is as much a male bonding story as it is a crime story. Of course, a woman comes between the two protagonists -- hey, Dard was French -- but ultimately the story is about two men who come to love each other in the way that only hardened killers can.

Frank and Hal enter prison at the same time. They are assigned to the same cell. They both sustained cuts and bruises that they attribute to being worked over by the police. The reader knows that one of the men is a spy who tried to steal secrets and, after being arrested, refused to reveal the organization that employs him. The other man is an undercover cop, assigned to get information from the spy. The reader does not know, however, which one is the spy and which is the informant. In the end, it may not matter, since the point of the story is that the line between law enforcer and law breaker is sometimes too thin to perceive.

Another point that the novel makes overtly is the notion that no man is truly bad. That’s true, but Frank and Hal come pretty close. The corollary might be that no man is truly good, even if he supposedly serves the cause of justice.

Much of the story is unbelievable, unless it’s acceptable in France for the police to murder innocent victims. Yet as difficult as it was to suspend my disbelief in large parts of the story, I found myself not caring whether the plot was credible. The key plot device -- the reader doesn’t know whether Frank or Hal is the good guy until the novel’s end -- is just brilliant. A wild closing scene makes up for some earlier scenes that border on melodrama. For all its faults, I was completely caught up in this brief, fast moving, story about two violent men who each discover something about their true natures after they become friends.

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Renée by Ludovic Debeurme

First published in France in 2011; published in translation Top Shelf Productions on February 23, 2016

Renée is a graphic novel with the feel of a sketchbook. The art is minimalist, as is the text. Backgrounds are nearly nonexistent. Some pages are blank. When words appear, they often make an arc across the page. Sometimes the words are intended as dialog, sometimes they are narrative monologue spoken by an unseen character, and sometimes the origin of the words is unclear. Frequently, wordless sequences of five or ten sketches end up with characters curling up into balls.

Renée is a sequel to the author’s Lucille. The characters who appear in Renée are trapped in depressive states, often with good reason. Arthur, who killed Lucille’s attempted rapist in the first novel, is in prison, sharing a cell with Eddie, who accidentally caused the death of a fisherman with whom he was fighting. The others are figuratively imprisoned by the lives they have made for themselves. Renée is seeing Pierre, a married man twice her age who can’t choose between the two women. Lucille is living in a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, a woman she loves and hates in equally stifling degrees.

After Eddie gains his freedom (and, thanks to Arthur’s decency, finds a place to live), Arthur gets a new cellmate who is suspected of being a child molester. The experience changes Arthur and (for reasons I won’t reveal here) eventually causes Lucille and Renée to meet and bond.

The story has surprising depth, given the minimalist nature of the storytelling. Some of the scenes are surrealistic, including a scene in which people crawl out of the cuts that Renée has made in her arms. In a dream sequence, Arthur grows wings and, as an insect, flies out of prison to nest comfortably in Lucille’s hair. Characters enlarge or shrink or parts of their bodies change or they morph into embodiments of ugliness. I’m sure there’s a fair amount of symbolism here that I’m not quite grasping, although I suspect the illustrations stray into the territory of fantasy to express how the characters are feeling at the moment.

Some of Ludovic Debeurme’s illustrations are grotesque but none should be particularly upsetting to readers who are not easily upset. The text, on the other hand, describes events that include rape and incest, topics that might be disturbing to sensitive readers. Those events are not gratuitous; they are necessary to understand the states of mind and stages of life that the characters experience.

The beginning of Renée is confusing. The story is not always told in linear time and recognizing characters can be a challenge, given how their appearances change. The story requires the reader’s effort but by the end, everything falls into place. The ending is left open, with two characters sailing away in search of more answers, or to start another chapter in their lives. Perhaps the intent is for another volume to continue the story, but the ending may simply be meant to remind readers that our own stories never end until we die -- there is always something new, something unexpected, perhaps even something pleasant, awaiting our discovery.

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