Author: Sébastien Japrisot
Publisher: Simply Audio Books
Rating: WARTY!
This review is one of a brace of forays into World War fiction which I undertook this month. The other is Anne Frank's Tales from the Secret Annex which I have to say right now blew this one completely away. Anne Frank can write. This guy cannot, but I'll bet he's won more pretentious and snotty medals and acclaim than Anne ever will. Sébastien Japrisot is an anagram of the author's real name: Jean-Baptiste Rossi. I don't know why, but there it is. Consequently, all of my future novels will be penned by Waid Ono. Look for them on a loose bookshelf near you!
This novel is about a woman who wastes a significant portion of her life chasing a guy who isn't to be found because he's someone else and too stupid to grasp it. It's one of the most tediously pedantic novels I have ever not read. It should be neither seen nor heard. I picked it up thinking it looked really interesting. It isn't. Not even a little bit. It's tiresome and plodding, and as dense as a plate of day-old spaghetti. Don't start this novel unless you have a toolkit to hand for extricating deeply-embedded components, and preferably one of those fire department jaws-of-life devices for prying open the impacted and inscrutable.
The premise is that of a World War 1 widow/fiancée named Mathilde (aka Mary Sue) Donnay, disbelieving that her husband/fiancé, Jean Etchevery, aka Manech, is dead, and tracking him down after the war. She can afford this as a war widow/fiancée in 1919 because she is the spoiled brat of rich family. No word on how she ended up with that particular husband or why her family didn't cut her off because of him! No word either on Spanish flu, which was rampaging across Europe back then, but which didn't exist according to Sébastien Jean-Baptiste Rossi-Japrisot.
A lot of the novel's tediousness comes from two sources, both of which happen to be the author. The first of these is his verbal diarrhea in compulsively describing every last detail of everybody who is even tangentially involved in the story whether those details have any bearing on the plot or not. Stephen King would be proud of this writer. The other is in the abysmally artificial use of correspondence.
You that know that when novelist falls back upon quoting letters (or diary entries, for that matter, or newspaper articles) in the novel they're there for two reasons: first of all the novelist is just plain lazy; secondly, they're stupid if they imagine for a minute that they will fool us by adding a letter that miraculously (and in detail, yet!) moves the plot precisely to where it needs to go next. No one writes letters (or diaries or newspaper articles) like that, not even in 1919.
After the first disk on this audio CD, I had no interest at all in the five men who disappeared, one of whom was the woman's paramour. First it became immaterial to me whether they were ever found, and then I actively began wishing that they would be gone forever. Please interpret that how you wish. Mathilde does find pain-in-the-Manech in the end: he's lost his memory and the jerk-off was too incurious about his past to go looking, so she wisely ditches him and heads home. The end.
I rate this novel trench-mouth warty.
