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.

RECOMMENDED

The Age of Reinvention by Karine Tuil

Published in France in 2013; published in translation by Atria Books on December 1, 2015

The Age of Reinvention is a novel of breadth and substance, marred by its failure to tell and resolve a convincing story. It focuses on the lives of two characters. One is driven by ambition. The other has little drive to realize his modest ambitions. In ironic ways, their lives follow opposing arcs -- one rises while the other falls, then falls while the other rises. From this they learn lessons about life. The lessons are true enough even if the story seems false.

Samuel Baron and Samir Tahar meet in law school in Paris during the mid-1980s. Baron is the abandoned son of Polish parents who was adopted by a French couple. Tahar is the charismatic son of Tunisian immigrants. Baron drops out of law school to become an underpaid social worker and an unpublished novelist. Despite his self-esteem issues, he manages to marry a beautiful woman named Nina.

Tahar, on the other hand, has opened the New York office of a French law firm and has become a highly successful celebrity lawyer. He has also married a beautiful woman named Ruth, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish client of his firm. To make this life possible, Tahar reinvented himself, fabricating a history that parallels Baron’s. Part of the deception involves the pretense of being Jewish because (he fears) confessing to his Muslim origins would bar his chance of employment in the Parisian legal community.

All of that happens early in the novel, before the central story begins. As the title implies, reinvention is one of the novel’s themes. In Tahar’s case, it is reinvention by deceit. The way people justify deceit and the pain they cause by being deceitful is a related theme.

Tahar and Baron are each pathetic in their own way, Baron because of his inability to deal with his failures, Tahar because of his inability to handle his success responsibly. They are both made pathetic by their shared love of Nina. The second part of the novel is devoted to that dynamic.

Yet Tahar is a virtuous character when compared to his half-brother. Karine Tuil uses the contrast to give depth to Tahar and to make him a little more likable, or at least a little less despicable. Like real people, all of the characters in The Age of Reinvention are a shifting mix of good and bad qualities. None are admirable. Still, as each character, at regular intervals, howls in pain, it is easy to sympathize with them. While all the characters might be a bit too tragically flawed, they are at least more interesting than the flawlessly virtuous characters that populate so many novels.

While The Age of Reinvention is well written, some of it reads like a well-written soap opera. An expository chapter about Samir’s half-brother follows a well-worn path. Women are almost secondary characters in the novel, yet in some ways -- not necessarily convincing ways, particularly with regard to Nina -- the story is about the liberation of women.

The Age of Reinvention is thought-provoking. Interesting discussions of identity politics and identity-paranoia are among its highlights. While I appreciated the novel on an intellectual level, it didn’t grab me on a gut level. I didn’t buy into the plot, which relies on a chain of unlikely events. The most unlikely is portrayal of Tahar as a highly compensated, New York “celebrity lawyer,” given that he handles the kinds of cases that rarely generate fees or make headlines. Perhaps I would have discounted my skepticism if the novel had drawn me into the characters’ lives, but they are too self-absorbed to care much about.

Footnotes in novels are usually an annoying distraction. That was my reaction to the footnotes in The Age of Reinvention, most of which provide an unnecessary sentence describing something about the lives of background characters who make a single appearance. I suppose I get the point -- even people in the background of our lives are important -- but I could have lived without the footnotes.

High quality prose makes the story an engaging read. Despite its melodramatic moments and unconvincing nature, it is nearly always interesting and the final chapter conveys a worthy message. For those reasons, I recommend the novel, but not with enthusiasm.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Blue Room by Georges Simenon

First published in France in 1963; published in translation in the UK by Penguin Classics on January 1, 2015; Penguin Classics U.S. digital edition forthcoming in 2016

Tense and surprising, The Blue Room is the account of a man named Tony who is being interrogated and will soon be brought to trial for a crime. For most of the novel, the reader is uncertain of the crime's victim and of Tony's guilt or innocence.

What the reader does learn is that Tony had an affair with the grocer's wife, that the grocer's wife was deeply in love with Tony, and that Tony was careless in the way he responded to the woman's affections. When he answers "of course" to the question "Would you like to spend the rest of your life with me?" he does not realize that his offhand remark, tossed out without a moment's thought, will have profound implications. It is a moment that returns to haunt his memory again and again throughout the course of the brief novel.

Georges Simenon was a master of psychological suspense. In the spare prose of a defeated man -- defeated by life, defeated by himself -- Tony examines his life, ponders the interrogator's questions, and never quite manages to voice his inevitable regret. Simenon creates a vivid sense of place (even of the blue hotel room in which Tony and the grocer's wife make love), captures the textures and scents of the world, and makes each character meaningful.

The Blue Room is a haunting novel that teaches powerful lessons. The crime(s), once revealed, are less important than the real crime -- to act for one's own pleasure, to speak without thinking, without regard to the consequences that selfish acts and words have upon others, and ultimately, upon oneself.

RECOMMENDED

Shadow Ritual by Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne

Published in France in 2005; published in translation by Le French Book on March 25, 2015

The connection between the Nazi party and the occult is one that fiction writers continue to exploit, although rarely in a way that might be considered fresh. Freemasons, their predecessors in the Knights Templar, and Nazis are standard ingredients in these stories. So are ritual killings, plenty of which occur in Shadow Ritual.

Francois Le Guermand, having fled France in 1940 with other refugees of the German invasion, by 1945 has become a trusted SS officer. Together with Nazi officers, Le Guermand is selected to membership in an ancient Aryan secret society, Thule-Gesellshaft. To carry on Hitler's work, he is charged with burying some crates and disappearing into a clandestine life. That plan is foiled by the Russian advance, which causes Le Guermand to disappear in a way he had not planned.

In 2005, a concentration camp survivor, now pursuing archeology in Jerusalem, is asked to authenticate a fragment from a stone tablet called the Tebah Stone. Bashir Al Khansa (a/k/a "the Emir") wants to gain possession of the stone on behalf of a mysterious client. A couple of other professional killers join the fun -- a Palestinian and a Croatian -- and of course there is a character whose hobbies are gardening and torture. Ritual killings in Jerusalem and Rome fuel investigations by the police and others, including both Freemasons and, um, non-Freemasons. Our primary good guys are a male and female who are so forgettable I can't recall much about them. The killings and Stone stealing have something to do with a ritual and "a secret lost in antiquity" that will lead to "the power of the gods," all of which is even sillier than most novels about Freemasons and Nazis.

History lessons that readers of similar novels will have encountered before dominate the book's first half. Much of the history is so well known (not just to thriller readers) that it acts as a drag on the story while adding little of value. At times, Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne seem to have been attempting a philosophical novel, but they are no Camus.

Unfortunately, the novel just doesn't work at any level. The clichéd plot is carried by trite characters. The prose sometimes relies on phrases like "It's us against them. Evil is lurking ..." but most of it time it's fine. Sadly, the story isn't. I've read the story before and this novel provided no reason for me to want to read it yet again.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Shiro Project by David Khara

Published in France in 2011; published in translation by Le French Book on November 18, 2014

The Shiro Project begins with the release of a weaponized virus in a Maryland laboratory in 1957, then jumps to the Czech Republic in 2011 where the residents of a village are all dead. After that we go to the Israeli Embassy in Brussels to learn the story of Eytan Morg, a genetically modified Mossad agent who made his debut in The Bleiberg Project. Eytan spent most of his life capturing or killing escaped Nazis, but since there is not much point in chasing octogenarians, he has more recently devoted himself to a secret society called Consortium. The group is dedicated to creating a master race of superior beings who might even be superior to Eytan. To his surprise, Eytan he finds himself coerced into working with Consortium against a common enemy.

Flashback chapters fill us in on Eytan's past while chapters set in the present team Eytan with a Consortium agent named Elena who is Eytan's genetically-enhanced counterpart. When Elena isn't trying to kill Eytan, she admires and even wants to bed him. Such is the nature of the fickle heart.

The evildoers that occupy Eytan and Elena have their genesis in Unit 731, a covert agency of the Japanese government that experimented with chemical and biological warfare in China before and during World War II. Nefarious Pentagon conspirators also play a role.

The story is intelligent, drawing upon history to create credible villains, although the villains seem dated. The story is also a bit wooden, a description that applies equally to the protagonist. Eytan's egocentric attitude (people "believe in nothing" because they do not share his passion for his cause) is occasionally overbearing, but most of the time he's a reasonably likeable hero. We are told that Eytan "saw the value in each life he took." As sensitive killers go, Eytan is stuffy, more likely to deliver lectures than violence. His genetic programming apparently did not include a sense of humor.

Fortunately, the novel is more fun than Eytan. It delivers a satisfying amount of action, moves at a brisk pace, and leads to a pleasing (albeit predictable) resolution.

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