Fatale, by Jean-Patrick Manchette [book, review]

I 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.

( Plot spoilers, in case you ever intend to read obscure French noir. )

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.