05/04/2020
At the dinner party that opens this disturbing Simenonesque novella from Garnier (The Panda Theory), Marc Lecas loudly announces in response to a stray remark “I know Agen, too!” even though he spent only a few hours a decade ago in this town in southwest France. Marc doesn’t say another word until he and his second wife, Chloé, who doesn’t understand why he’s always so distant from people, go home. Later, Marc buys a fat lazy cat he names Boudu, and he visits his grown daughter from his failed first marriage, Anne, who’s a patient in a mental hospital, even though it’s not her birthday, the one time a year he normally sees her. Without telling Chloé, Marc decides to go somewhere “far, far away,” and he takes Boudu and Anne on a car trip that stretches into several weeks. Along the way, Marc’s finger gets seriously infected, and a Hungarian hitchhiker they meet winds up dead. The trio end up parked in a dump outside Agen, where worse befalls them in the shattering climax. Dark humor and assured prose lift this melancholy portrait of a depressed personality. Readers new to Garnier will want to check out the earlier work of this gifted author, who died in 2010. (Mar.)
Praise for Pascal Garnier
‘The final descent into violence is worthy of J G Ballard. 4 stars’ The Independent
‘Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit’ The Observer
‘Reminiscent of Joe Orton and the more impish films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol’ Sunday Times
‘Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny’ Sunday Times
‘A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince’ Sunday Telegraph
‘The combination of sudden violence, surreal touches and bone-dry humour have led to Garnier’s work being compared with the films of Tarantino and the Coen brothers’ Sunday Times
‘A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard’ Financial Times
‘Bleak, often funny and never predictable’ The Observer
‘Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit.’ The Observer
Featured in the Independent‘s ‘Crème de la Crime’
‘A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon’ Times Literary Supplement
‘A perfectly balanced cross between a thriller and a social document’ L’Express
‘Deliciously dark … painfully funny’ New York Times
‘A guaranteed grisly thriller’ ShortList
‘Horribly funny … appalling and bracing in equal measure’ John Banville
‘Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He’s a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read’ A. L. Kennedy
‘Arch and lyrical … a funny and outlandish story’ Crime Thriller Fella
‘Garnier’s main theme – the banality of a bourgeois existence – is a common one, although never, in my experience, has it been dealt with so succinctly … a clever piece of literary noir’ Killing Time Crime
‘Garnier’s books are marked by their integration of strange characters into their French provincial settings as evinced by The Panda Theory and How’s The Pain? and always retain at their heart a sense of human frailty, despite the blackness of the humour and at times horrific events. Combining the style of Simenon with the visual imagination and humour of the Coen Brothers, there is much to recommend these novellas. They are small works of literary genius, and I would urge you to discover them for yourselves’ Raven Crime Reads
‘If you appreciate Georges Simenon’s romans durs, i.e. his harder, edgier novels, Garnier is your boy … He routinely tosses off penetrating philosophical truths like they’re afterthoughts, as the French do so well. There’s dark humor in these short novels, lots of apparently arbitrary brutality that’s all the more chilling due to its seeming randomness, colourful characters, and some lines and passages that hit such a deep place, you just have to put the book down and reflect for a while after reading them’ Criminal Element blog
‘Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining … Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable’ John Powers, National Public Radio
