Customer Reviews

Les Âmes grises (Le Livre de Poche) (French Edition)

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Philippe Claudel's book takes the reader back in time to World War 1 in the Lorraine region of France. Already crushed by the war, the little community of V. is even more shaken by a series of suicides that culminate with the murder of a little girl. Although set in France between 1914 and 1937 (time when the narrator relates his memories), the book is strangely universal: war happens anywhere at any time and is no more than legalized crime; crime also happens anywhere at any time and when it is a small child that is involved, it remains all the more horrific. The reader quickly forgets that it is World War I and can easily apply the events to contemporary times, contemporary facts of war. The author also manages to convey intensity through the rich use of the lexical fields of blood: war, murder, suicide, delivery hemorraghy, death, and the permanence of the gray that is part of the French title. Are those "Ames grises" ghosts, are they grey because real life is never black and white, are they "grises" because they are drunk (in French, someone is "gris" when he or she ha had too much to drink, and in the book, it is the civilians and the soldiers' main occupation apart from dealing with the war)? There is no doubt that the author also played on Gogol's famous book "Dead Souls".

Until the very end, the author manages to capture the reader's intrerest and there is indeed no clues as to who has committed the crime. I will certainly not waste the reader's surprise.

"Now I write as if I had died since then. And, deep down, that is true. That's the real, true truth. For a long time now, I feel dead. I pretend that I still live a bit. I am on borrowed time. That's all." The events that, twenty years later, continue to disturb the nameless narrator of LES AMES GRISES take place in a small town in northern France during World War I, in a region so close to the frontline, that the sounds of war provide a constant rumbling background. In this hauntingly affecting, beautifully written novel Philippe Claudel convincingly evokes the impact on the town of V. of the steadily growing viciousness of war.

Central to the story, however, is the murder of a beautiful ten-year-old girl, Belle de jour, that disrupts the still prevailing attitude of complacency among the representatives of the town's establishment. The "Affaire "- Case, as it is introduced early on, raises questions that dig much deeper into the society's fabric than a simple police procedural would be able to do. In his recounting of the events surrounding Belle's death, the protagonist appears to hold his own investigation by introducing, one by one, many of the ghosts, whose long shadows still haunt him into the present. What may have been his role at the time? Through a "parade" of richly drawn characters, who had been either directly, indirectly or possibly involved with the young girl's life or the Case, Claudel weaves a captivating, subtly structured web of evidence, rumours, suspicions, interrogations and deliberate disregard of clues. From the judge, the prosecutor, the father of the victim, to police officers and military, to other important persons in the town and even in the protagonist's own life, all the brilliantly brought to life as individuals with their strengths and weaknesses.

The narrator's account is seemingly written in separate memory blocks (chapters), thus justifying the non-linear structure of his report. The reader's attention is constantly required to pick up clues and connections that will reveal much more than the reader would expect at any one time. The conclusion is dramatic and comes with more than one unexpected punch. An extraordinary and powerful novel that will linger on in the reader for a long time. [Friederike Knabe]

J'ai lu ce livre pour une classe de la littérature français aux Etats-Unis. Ce livre nous donne un perspectif très intéressante de la société humaine et l'idée qu'on, comme les êtres humaines, n'a pas des âmes blanches ou les âmes noires mais simplement les âmes grises. Tous les personnages du livre n'ont ni les âmes parfaits ni les âmes diables, mais une mélange des deux. Le livre donne beaucoup de suspense et est très philosophique, pour des francophones et même des anglophones!