This is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in 1917, and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in Northern France, near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local factory. One morning a beautiful ten year old girl, one of the three daughters of the innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the beside of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks. More than one record has to be set straight. Beautiful, like a fairy story almost, frozen in time, this novel has an hypnotic quality.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"an odd, disturbing novel, haunted by ghosts, the victims of crimes that are long past but ever present. .. a page turning whodunnit with a subtle after taste." -- KATE CHISHOLM SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "a masterpiece... a beautifully written and mesmeric study of individual and collective guilt." DAILY MAIL
About the Author
Philippe Claudel was born in 1962. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the Prix Goncourt for Stories in 2003, France's leading literary award.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing little book,
By Etienne B. "world literature fanatic" (wandering the world) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Grey Souls (Hardcover)
For some reason, I've read about a half-dozen novels in the past year that are set in Europe during World War I. Perhaps I wanted to read some of these books in short order to better compare them to one another. The best of these novels, in my opinion, were All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), Three Mile Road (Boyden), and In Desolate Heaven (Edric). Having just completed All Souls by Philippe Claudel, however, I now have to put this novel at the top of the list. This elegantly written mystery serves as a metaphor for the horrors that are beginning to take root in Europe. This is a modern classic and it is not surprising to me that Claudel was recently awarded the 2010 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Subsequently Republished as "By a Slow River",
By
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This review is from: Grey Souls (Hardcover)
"Grey Souls" (which is not available in a Kindle edition) was republished some two years later as "By a Slow River" . This newer version is sold in hard copy at a fraction of the price of "Grey Souls" and is also available in a Kindle edition. The two translations are of VERY different styles. The "By a Slow River" version, while beautifully written unfortunately lapses too often into American vernacular which strikes a jarring note. I sugest the "By a Slow River" version which receives very favorable ratings on Amazon
The locale (as in Claudel's "Brodeck" and his screenplay for "I Loved You a Long Time") is Alsace and this time the time is WW1. I bought this book because I was blown away by "Brodeck". I m not sure which is the better work - so read both
0 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't Bother,
By
This review is from: Grey Souls (Hardcover)
I thought this sounded like a book taking place near the town of Verdun, France (where I lived for three years). It was a totally disjointed story and boring, boring, boring. I finally ended up scanning it to the end (and the ending was bad).
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