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.

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED

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.

RECOMMENDED

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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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