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elfsI picked out Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette, based on a comment by a friend of mine. The comment was many months in the past, so I was surprised to stumble across the book at the local library. I read it through-- it's only 80 pages or so-- and I have to say that I'm disappointed.
Manchette is thought to be France's greatest roman noir writer, with a kind of post-modern hardboiled sensibility. Fatale is supposed to be one of his best works, but I didn't see it.
In Fatale, we meet a woman we learn is named Aimée walking in the woods. She wanders in among a group of hunters far afield from a small French town, who express surprise that she's both dressed to hunt, and even there, since she had said she was leaving town soon. She proceeds to kill all of them. She then retrieves a mysterious satchel from a locker at a train station, boards a train, and undergoes a complete transformation from raven-haired beauty to blonde bombshell, along with a number of other physical changes to obscure her appearance. She heads for the small coastal town of Bleville.
Aimée is a hired killer. She hires herself. She goes from town to town, posing as a gorgeous but naive recent widow "with some money," and worms her way into the local upper crust of the town's society. The book is set in the 1970s, when even a medium-sized town depended mostly on rail and postal service for contact with the outside world, and television was three channels, one-way. Eventually, she learns, and then leverages, the internal hatreds of the wealthy into a willingness to commit murder, then tells one of the parties involved that she knows "a man" who will kill the other party for money.
In the story Manchette tells us, Aimée screws up. She kills a victim whom every member of the town hates, and then she feels sorry for him.
But here's the weird thing. For all the praise that this book gets, we never really get a clear reason why Aimée changes her mind. I've re-read the section in the middle where "the wrench" happens, and Aimée's motives are completely opaque. I'm sure Manchette meant, in his middle-passage sections where she returns to Paris to visit her mother, and has an unpleasant encounter with a masher at the train station, to reveal something about her character, but it's incomplete. Perhaps Manchette meant to say something like "Aimée is incomplete as a human being." But his third-person, completely objective, absolutely literal and linear narrative, also gives us an Aimée that is incomplete as a character. Without an appreciation for her and her motives, we're left with a vague, unsatisfying (but to a modern audience, hardly novel or unsettling) portrait of an evil-doer as avenging angel.
I looked twice into this book to try and find what was supposed to be "comedic." The opening chapter is stunning in its brutality, which is why the rest of the book fails, at least for me: its follow-on contrasts are weak, its characters poorly sketched and unconvincing, its crisis is arbitrary and its denouement is a mess.
I feel let down by a book so highly praised. At least it was a quick read.
Manchette is thought to be France's greatest roman noir writer, with a kind of post-modern hardboiled sensibility. Fatale is supposed to be one of his best works, but I didn't see it.
In Fatale, we meet a woman we learn is named Aimée walking in the woods. She wanders in among a group of hunters far afield from a small French town, who express surprise that she's both dressed to hunt, and even there, since she had said she was leaving town soon. She proceeds to kill all of them. She then retrieves a mysterious satchel from a locker at a train station, boards a train, and undergoes a complete transformation from raven-haired beauty to blonde bombshell, along with a number of other physical changes to obscure her appearance. She heads for the small coastal town of Bleville.
Aimée is a hired killer. She hires herself. She goes from town to town, posing as a gorgeous but naive recent widow "with some money," and worms her way into the local upper crust of the town's society. The book is set in the 1970s, when even a medium-sized town depended mostly on rail and postal service for contact with the outside world, and television was three channels, one-way. Eventually, she learns, and then leverages, the internal hatreds of the wealthy into a willingness to commit murder, then tells one of the parties involved that she knows "a man" who will kill the other party for money.
In the story Manchette tells us, Aimée screws up. She kills a victim whom every member of the town hates, and then she feels sorry for him.
But here's the weird thing. For all the praise that this book gets, we never really get a clear reason why Aimée changes her mind. I've re-read the section in the middle where "the wrench" happens, and Aimée's motives are completely opaque. I'm sure Manchette meant, in his middle-passage sections where she returns to Paris to visit her mother, and has an unpleasant encounter with a masher at the train station, to reveal something about her character, but it's incomplete. Perhaps Manchette meant to say something like "Aimée is incomplete as a human being." But his third-person, completely objective, absolutely literal and linear narrative, also gives us an Aimée that is incomplete as a character. Without an appreciation for her and her motives, we're left with a vague, unsatisfying (but to a modern audience, hardly novel or unsettling) portrait of an evil-doer as avenging angel.
I looked twice into this book to try and find what was supposed to be "comedic." The opening chapter is stunning in its brutality, which is why the rest of the book fails, at least for me: its follow-on contrasts are weak, its characters poorly sketched and unconvincing, its crisis is arbitrary and its denouement is a mess.
I feel let down by a book so highly praised. At least it was a quick read.
