Customer Reviews

I'm Off

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This short novel is a potpourri of genres--it's a mystery, a social commentary on life in Paris (with the requisite French digs at other countries, including the U.S.), a travel/adventure story, a meditation about love and lust, and a study of midlife crisis. Its main character, Felix Ferrer, a marginally successful gallery owner whose main preoccupation is his own ego, is interested in locating and then selling paleoarctic artifacts from a ship lost near the Arctic Circle long ago, when it became icebound. When the artifacts, his former partner, his wife, a succession of girlfriends, and his financial security all disappear within a short period of time, Felix rouses himself and sets out to regain the artifacts, and, perhaps, some control over his life.

Echenoz is an immensely skillful writer. He creates a fast-paced narrative in which Ferrer ranges from his Parisian art gallery, to the Arctic, where he lives with a seal-hunting family (nice contrasts here), and back to Paris and Spain, and Echenoz makes these transitions seamlessly. His imagery is often striking, and there's a good deal of sardonic humor and light satire about Parisian life. His ability to make the reader see the world through the eyes of Ferrer, and his observations about people, are sometimes startling and original.

Unfortunately, the "hero," Ferrer, is so blasé and so obnoxiously self-satisfied that it's difficult to care much about his world or what happens to him, and the whole novel feels smug. The unnamed narrator's snide and self-important asides degenerate rapidly from cute to annoying ("Personally, I've had it up to here with [a certain character]. His daily life is too boring."). The characters' casual cruelty toward everyone in a subordinate position, their universal lack of "engagement," and their treatment of women as objects further distance the reader and reflect the feeling that becoming involved or caring intensely about anything at all is somehow unsophisticated or bourgeois. Although the author is hugely talented and his book did win the Prix Goncourt, it lacks the vitality and sense of commitment I've come to associate with this prize. And if it's satire, it somehow rings too true. Mary Whipple

A delightfully short novel about a middle aged man, Ferrer, who starts this novel off by leaving his wife and deciding to recover a huge stash of valuable artefacts from the Artic wastes, to sell in his art gallery. Of course there are disastrous consequences, to great comic effect, yet the novel manages to end, rather against trend these days, happily ever after. Echenoz has a marvellous sense of his characters, and gleefully takes it upon himself, as the story's omniscient narrator, to say quite honestly whatever he likes, be it slight praise or crushing invective. Naturally this makes the book, at times, hysterical, as well as providing effective insights into the nature of relations between men and women as Ferrer jumps from bed to bed, all the time reminded by his doctors to be mindful of his heart. The only real criticism of the novel is the feeling there should be more, so much more than what the final on-hand work is; yet, with a narrator this refreshingly scathing in his nature and humorous to boot, this may well be the longest short novel you'll read for a long time.

Incredibly well executed writing with a lightness of touch - crime writing and thrillers generally receive a bad wrap but writers like Echenoz, Pennac, Harry Mathews, Henri-Frederic Blanc and Montalban take this genre to another level. Irreverent, playful and enticingly readable I'm Off (like Lake, Double Jeopardy and Cherokee) is a wonderful read.