Tanguy Viel

"A vulgar case of fraud, Your Honor, nothing more." Kermeur stands before the judge: he has confessed to killing a businessman, Antoine Lazenec. "We saw him sprout up like a mushroom at the foot of a tree," but in a quiet little town, lacking both ideas and jobs, > when someone like him arrives with such a determined expression on his face, (...) there is something about him that feels like an outstretched hand pulling our very soul out of us, with all those ideas of change, with all those grand schemes . People fall for it, starting with the mayor; the retiree Kermeur invests his severance pay, enthralled by the adventurer Lazenec's dreams of wealth. The beauty of it is that the swindler does not leave town after it has become blatantly obvious that the grand plans will never materialize, that he has pocketed the money, after the mayor has committed suicide; no, he stays right there, flaunting his lavish lifestyle, peddling optimism and falsehoods: > a man like that, Your Honor, a man like that, I realized later: if you don't make him disappear yourself, he will never disappear. He will come back . This is the motive for the murder: a poor man, ruined by a swindler, wound himself up like "an electric battery" and finally exploded, ridding himself and the entire town of a vainglorious scoundrel. What need is there for a lengthy interrogation? That is what we ask ourselves as well. In reality, the narrative is a slow soliloquy, in which Kermeur, the narrating "I," speaks with the "mirroring I," embodied by a laconic judge. It is like the mirror over the mantelpiece, before which the protagonist is accustomed to spending long hours. > And not because I want to see what is reflected in it, I told the judge, but I can't help myself, from staring at it I find myself tangled, as it were, in the thickness of the glass, my brain caught by the fog that could be mistaken for any hellish morning when the sun tries in vain to reflect within it, but made pale, as it were, or deceived by the opaque grain of the mirror . We thus learn the entirety of the retiree's life: his wife's abandonment, the raising of his son, from childhood to an adolescence prematurely marked by run-ins with the law, nostalgia for work and his few friends, a passion for fishing, and the setting of an Atlantic coastal town, where it seemed that > the pines and the ferns and the thick grass of the dunes (...) were in on a secret and whispered against me, beside me, proud to inhabit their peculiar world, a world without sentences and without malicious thoughts . It is, in short, the anatomy of a depression. There is nothing worse than expecting one thing and finding oneself confronted with another. Picking up the book, one hoped for a detective plot or an adroitly told provincial tale; instead, we ran headlong into a rambling spill of words—well-written, it must be said, at times offering intriguing insights, such as when the author observes that "a child is not programmed to feel compassion for you," a truth that we parents should keep firmly in mind! And yet, a sparkling, spirited style is not enough to save us; we are far removed from *Doctor Zhivago*, my dear Viel. The relentless succession of sentences, the lack of action, the excessive introspection, the overindulgent self-narration are all elements that render the novel utterly tedious and pedantic. Why not read it? It is unbearable.