Customer Reviews

Malevil

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I must admit I only ever read Malevil in French, so I cannot vouch for the translation, especially since there are dialogues in "patois", local southwestern language.
Malevil has been a favorite of mine since I was 13. I re-read it a couple of months ago (I am now 31) and I was surprised to see that my perception of the book was no different...
The book is set in rural France in the 70s, as a group of childhood friends gather to chat about the local elections, the upcoming harvest...etc. Suddenly, while they're bottling the wine in the somewhat cooler cellar, something happens - an atrocious sound, vicious heat, and hours, maybe days of unconsciousness and physical pain. When they manage to come to their senses and leave the cellar, the whole countryside around them has been incinerated.
Now what?
Now what, indeed. I would never have picked the book based on such a premise (I wasn't a disaster movie kind of teenager.) But what is fascinating about Malevil is what happens after the "catastrophe", the nature of which will remain a mystrey and one that no character is interested in solving anyway. The book becomes a kind of emotional and psychological "thriller" as one wonders how the survivors will organize to live, whether they actually decide to put some effort into it, how it can be done, how to deal with the absence of women...etc. It is a very human book in that sense. The appeal of the book also resides in the voice of the narrator, Emmanuel, who is everything but an observer. Emmanuel is the "lord of the castle" as his friends teasingly nicknamed him, and has always held a great psychological sway over them. This is further supported by the fact that Emmanuel loses no family to the disaster, which allows him to be somewhat more composed and rational than his friends. We follow his thought processes as he plans and even manipulates people to allow their community to survive.
I loved watching hope, problems and solutions unfold at a steady pace. I recommend Malevil to anyone who loves great, outside the box fiction.

Post-apocalyptic book written originally in French, is dated and a big strange. I didn't finish reading it.