Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Penguin Books on April 29, 2014

Ludevic Senechal buys an old film from the son of a man who recently died. The film's former owner was obsessed by espionage and conspiracy stories. As Senechal watches the film, he goes blind. By chance, he speed dials the number of a Lucie Henebelle, a police lieutenant he dated for a short time. When Lucie watches the movie, she almost wishes she had gone blind instead of seeing the gruesome footage. But, as Lucie eventually discovers, there is more to the film than meets the eye ... or the conscious mind.

While Lucie is investigating the movie, Chief Inspector Sharko is lending his assistance as a behavioral analyst to provincial police who are investigating five dead bodies -- their skulls sawed open, hands chopped-off, brains and eyes removed -- that have been found buried in Upper Normandy. Sharko's efforts are hampered by Eugenie, a young woman who blames him for a certain traumatic event in his life. Eugenie is not real but the treatment Sharko is receiving for paranoid schizophrenia hasn't made his tormenter go away. Why Sharko is allowed to carry a gun is a bit of a mystery but perhaps delusions and schizophrenia do not disqualify police officers from carrying lethal weapons in France.

The two mysteries are, of course, linked, and so the two protagonists, Lucie and Sharko, are fated to meet. Their relationship proceeds in a way that is too obvious, but given that this novel is followed by a sequel, perhaps their relationship will take a less predictable path in the next installment.

Soon after they meet, Sharko travels to Cairo to investigate similar murders that occurred 16 years earlier while Lucie's investigation takes her to Canada. Franck Thilliez captures the rhythms of Cairo and Montreal as convincingly as those of his native France. The story relies upon a dark period in the history of Quebec involving the "Dupleissis orphans," a scheme that allowed church-operated orphanages to obtain government funding by falsely certifying orphaned children as mentally ill. Eventually a conspiracy is revealed that, in the tradition of modern thriller conspiracies, is far-fetched but (unlike some modern thrillers) at least remotely plausible. The notion underlying the "syndrome" that gives the book its title is fanciful but not without a scientific foundation.

Once Lucie and Sharko uncover the killer's identity, Lucie is shocked, but I doubt the reader will be. My reaction was "oh," simply because there is no way for the reader to have made the discovery independently. The information dump that ends the story comes as an anti-climax. Despite the disappointing ending, I enjoyed the character of Sharko and will probably read the next novel in the series.

RECOMMENDED

Malavita by Tonino Benacquista

First published in France in 2004; published in translation by Penguin Books on June 25, 2013

If, like most viewers, you were wondering "what comes next?" after the screen turned black at the end of the last Sopranos episode, you can imagine Malavita as the Sopranos sequel. Unfortunate events forced the Blake family to leave Newark, and then to leave Paris, and then to leave the Cote d'Azur before making their way to a village in Normandy. Along the way they were joined by an Australian Cattle Dog named Malavita. The cause of their journey is not revealed until chapter two, but the reader knows that it has something to do with Fred, "in the days when he was still called Giovanni." Having come into possession of a typewriter, Fred is posing as a writer, a cover story that disturbs both his wife Maggie (who regards her husband as barely literate) and, after Fred decides he should write his memoir, his exasperated FBI handler. The writing exposes Fred's checkered past to the reader while dredging up a sense of vulnerability that Fred has rarely experienced.

The Blakes are a family of sociopaths. Young Warren's ambition is to become a Godfather while his aptly named sister Belle guards her untouchable beauty with violent vigor. Maggie might burn down your house as retribution for a perceived insult, but her French neighbors revere her as a volunteer for charitable causes. Fred is widely regarded as a worldly pack leader, a community protector. Near the story's midpoint, Tonino Benacquista treats the reader to a departure, a series of short stories connected by a school newspaper. The circuitous route traveled by the newspaper turns out to be integral to the plot, but the stories are enjoyable standing alone.

Benacquista keeps the tone light, making it possible for the tolerant reader to like the Blakes, just as viewers liked Tony Soprano while cringing at his behavior. Fred is who he is, and Benacquista helps the reader understand why. Benacquista's approach to storytelling makes it possible to step back from the criminal nature of the Blake family and to look beneath the surface to find traits and circumstances with which the reader can identify. Crime families, after all, have the same domestic issues as other families. In fact, we understand Fred better than Fred -- a man baffled by honest people who "trust in a world that had to be obeyed" -- understands us. And even if we can't identify with Belle's narcissism or Warren's lust for power or Fred's indifference to his family (although he cares about his dog, so how bad can he be?), those characteristics (exaggerated for comedic effect but recognizable in people we know) can make us laugh.

Malavita exposes the hypocrisy of people who make a point of holding themselves out as morally superior to (or holier than) the wayward Blakes. Which is worse, the novel implicitly asks: the Mafia kingpin or the factory owners who poison the village water supply? French pomposity, Italian appetites, and American arrogance all add humor to Benacquista's story. By the novel's end, Fred is redeemed in a small but meaningful way. Malavita doesn't have the depth of character that The Sopranos developed, but it tells a funny, fast-moving story without wasting words. That made it worthwhile for me.

RECOMMENDED

The Paris Lawyer by Sylvie Granotier

First published in France in 2011; published in translation by Le French Book on July 2, 2012

Catherine Monsigny, a young lawyer, takes on the defense of Myriam Villetreix who is accused of poisoning Gaston, the man who apparently saved her from deportation by marrying her. Catherine sees the case as her springboard to fame, although she wonders how she will interest Parisian reporters in the murder of a farmer in a rural community in central France. It happens to be the same community where Catherine's mother was murdered when Catherine was only four years old. Catherine's mother was killed in a park where Catherine was found crying in a stroller. The killer was never identified.

As Catherine was growing up, her bottled-up father refused to talk to her about her mother. Her father always tried to replace the reality of her mother's death with a myth, casting her mother as a princess struck down by evil witches, and Catherine as a girl who is protected by fairies. Her memories of that day -- someone handing her the piece of cloth she had dropped -- might be false. She may have been too young to remember anything, as her father has always insisted.

Catherine is an introspective character. She is young and naïve. "She believes in everything she has not experienced." Yet she is also rebellious and adventurous, as she proves by bedding one of her clients early the novel, shortly after she gets him acquitted. She wonders whether she is (like some of the people she sees accused of sex crimes) a mere "consumer of flesh," unable to see her partners as anything other than objects of her desire. As the novel progresses, Catherine undergoes a maturation process, feeling by the end of the story that, at the age of twenty-six, she is "older than the rest of the world."

In part, The Paris Lawyer is a family drama. The primary focus is on Catherine as she discovers her mother's secrets, but it is also on Catherine's father, who coped with his wife's death as best he could (although not in the way that Catherine wanted) and lives in fear that his daughter no longer needs him. To a lesser extent, the story involves a different family drama, that of Myriam and Gaston, "two people mistreated by life" who either loved or despised each other, depending on the observer's viewpoint. More fundamentally, The Paris Lawyer is a thriller, cleverly woven from various plot threads in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Title notwithstanding, it is a psychological thriller rather than a legal thriller. Myriam's trial remains in the background for much of the novel, serving as a framework for the larger story.

Sylvie Granotier slowly builds a suspenseful atmosphere from a series of ambiguous incidents and flashes of buried memories. Through much of the novel, I was puzzled about where the plot was taking me, a pleasant departure from the stacks of predictable thrillers that substitute silliness for depth. The Paris Lawyer is ultimately a contemplation of guilt in all its different guises, but it is also a good story that ends with surprising revelations about the killers of Gaston and of Catherine's mother. Its only flaws (small ones, I think) are that the novel's denouement borders on melodrama and the story is more intellectually than emotionally engaging.

RECOMMENDED

Eléctrico W by Hervé Le Tellier

First published in French in 2011; published in translation by Other Press on June 18, 2013

The events described in Eléctrico W take place in Lisbon over the course of nine days. Antonio Flores is a photographer living in Paris, but during his childhood in Lisbon, he raced every day to catch a funicular tram called the Eléctrico W. One morning he missed the tram but met a girl called Duck, who eventually became his lover. Their romance ended with a forced separation after Duck's father discovered she was pregnant.

Antonio tells the story of Duck to Vincent Balmer, a journalist with whom Antonio has joined forces to cover the trial of Pinheiro, the "Mad Killer of Lisbon." Vincent, the novel's narrator, has an old flame of his own, a woman he loved despite her refusal to give herself to him. Of Irene he confesses: "the memory of her terrifies me because it's everywhere in me, ready to spring up as soon as I'm alone, when all it really is is regret." Vincent is chagrined when Antonio reveals that Irene was Antonio's lover before Antonio left Paris, and is even more discomfited by the news that Irene will be visiting Antonio in Lisbon.

Motivated by a combination of jealousy and confusion, Vincent embarks on a search for the long-lost Duck. Vincent's wanderings gives Hervé Le Tellier the opportunity to paint caricatures of Lisbon's colorful residents, including a surprising woman named Manuela Freire. Vincent believes he has bad luck with women, but perhaps (as Manuela suggests) his problem is his inability to recognize and seize the moment when a woman is giving him a chance. Vincent's interaction with the novel's female characters, as well as Antonio's momentary obsession with a young woman named Aurora, allows Le Tellier to explore various aspects of love and desire.

The perfect understatement of each plot thread adds to the novel's realism. The reader eventually learns that there is more to the story of Duck.  That story's completion gives Eléctrico W its final dramatic edge.

Le Tellier's elegant, atmospheric prose makes this a novel to savor. Le Tellier makes frequent reference to poets, both real and fictional, and there is a poetic sensibility to his phrasing and choice of words. One poem that Le Tellier quotes is, like Eléctrico W, about "lying and illusion and sincerity."  During the nine days, Vincent idly translates the fragmentary stories written by a (fabricated) poet who has appeared as a character in some of Le Tellier's other work. Le Tellier seems to be suggesting -- through the translated vignettes, Vincent's coverage of Pinhiero, and the character of Manuela -- that the line between fiction and reality is murky at best. Vincent is drawn, he tells us, to "unfashionable authors, the ones who failed to produce a major famous work by which they'll be remembered." Eléctrico W deserves a better fate than the forgotten books that appeal to Vincent. I wouldn't classify it as a major work, but if every good novel "is good in its own way" (as Vincent opines), Eléctrico W is good in many ways.

RECOMMENDED

Total Chaos by Jean-Claude Izzo

Published in French in 1995; published in translation by Europa Editions on May 7, 2013 

First published in 1995, Total Chaos is French literary noir. Three friends from the melting pot of Marseilles (whose parents spoke Italian or Spanish at home) bond in their youth over their outsider status and a shared love of poetry and old books. That, and their shared love of the beautiful Lole. The three friends once participated in a series of armed robberies, but their adult lives have gone in different directions. Fabio Montale became a cop. Manu is dead. Pierre Ugolini, having spent some time drifting, returns to Marseilles to avenge Manu's killing. It is a question of honor, and honor is all that matters in Marseilles. It doesn't end well for Ugolini, and that's where the story begins.

Montale's job is to preempt rioting in a neighborhood where the French regard everyone who isn't of French ancestry as a dirty Arab. When Leila Mouloud disappears -- an Arab student upon whom Montale has something more than a crush -- Montale assures her father that he will find her. At the same time, Montale is determined to understand what happened to Manu. Therein lies the plot -- such as it is.

Montale spends quite a bit of time revisiting the past -- too much time, as the story is often slow to move forward. Much of the novel seems directionless. A fair amount of the novel -- apart from Montale showing off his exquisite taste in food, alcohol, and music -- consists of Montale's internal monologue. Some of it (particularly the woeful condition of immigrants) is interesting, but his redundant thoughts did not always hold my attention. I expect a certain amount of existential angst in a noir protagonist, but Montale just won't shut up about his relentlessly downbeat view of the world. There are only so many times I can read things like "We were all like insects caught in a spider's web. We struggled, but the spider would eat us in the end" before I want to slit my throat. Or maybe Montale's, to put him out of his misery.

Montale is a classic noir character, the alienated tough guy with a soft heart. He doesn't fit in with the police -- he too frequently identifies with the outlaws, rooting for the underdog -- but he cannot abide the pain caused by crime. He's surrounded by corruption and despair (from which, conveniently enough, frequent sexual encounters provide his only respite). He easily falls in love but never holds onto it, perhaps because he doesn't really want it. He tells us, more than once, that he loves women too much. Eventually, his "I am so passionate, I love every woman I take to bed, including the prostitutes; I cook wonderful meals for them with fennel and garlic but I will never be happy" attitude starts to wear thin. Maybe it's a French thing. And maybe observations like this are a French thing -- "There in front of me was every man's dream: a mother, a sister, and a whore!" -- but even by noir standards, that's a little too cute for my taste.

There are things about Total Chaos I admired. Jean-Claude Izzo writes short, punchy sentences that are well suited to the story he tells. He captures the atmosphere of Marseilles -- its music, ethnic restaurants, and commuter trains full of tough-acting kids -- in vivid terms (the city is "an ancient tragedy in which the hero is death"). While there is the skeleton of a good story here, it is given too little flesh. I like the way the twin mysteries are eventually resolved, but the story is too often dull, and noir should never be dull. Montale does no detective work to speak of, opting to drift through the novel, making existential comments upon the seedy events he observes ("life didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was death"). Not quite all: sex and cognac and sex and well-prepared food and sex also matter to Montale. It's unfortunate that he's too awash in self-absorbed despair to recognize the pleasure in the things that obviously give him so much pleasure. Total Chaos is the first novel of a trilogy, but it failed to inspire me to read the other two. I'm not sure I would survive the experience.

NOT RECOMMENDED