Customer Reviews

By a Slow River: A Novel

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4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was especially fascinated by Claudel's handling of the theme of murder during a time of war (WWI): on a gut level it's a perfectly crafted who-dunnit, with an amazing twist. The policeman who narrates the story thinks he's a pretty sharp judge of human nature, but he learns a thing or two not just about his neighbors but ultimately about himself, as he tries to solve the murder of little girl while the sons of the nation are being slaughtered at the front near his town. Ultimately he finds you can't completely uncover anyone's nature, not even your own. This is such an interesting book and such a beatifully told story--like discovering a classic--I want all my friends to read it so we can discuss. You'll be thinking about these characters long after you put the book down. Held me from start to finish. Bravo!

This is one of the most beautifully written novels I've read in a long time. I can only imagine what it must have been like in its original French. At the same time, it is an existential story of cold, lost men, the grey souls alluded to in the book's original title.

The stark juxtaposition of life-as-usual in a small town and the bombs of a world war bursting only a few kilometers away defines the novel. Its non-chronological construction gives readers snapshots in time and then backs up to show the confluence of events that conspired to create the gritty reality contained in those images.

Profoundly touching, and full of observations that make me as a reader nod in agreement.

Former Police officer Dadais reflects back two decades to December 1917, the French villagers are shocked when the strangled corpse of ten years old girl Belle "Morning Glory" Bourrache is found by the banks BY A SLOW RIVER that slices through a small, unnamed French village. The townsfolk find the crime hideous as the murder of a child could only have been done by an animal. On the other hand he wonders how everyone including him takes for granted that the nearby battles against Germans will leave both sides filled with uncountable numbers of dead.

Dadais remembers how he struggled to uncover the identity of the repulsive killer. Clues are not readily available but the stubborn Dadais insists that two suspects stick out, egotistical retired sexagenarian "Mr. Prosecutor" Pierre-Ange Destinat and that shadowy Breton war deserter, who admits he committed the murder, but Dadais knows he would have confessed to anything under the torture used to extract his admittance. Others wonder if Dadais wonders if others are as determined to hide the identity of the real culprit as he is to find him..

This is a terrific psychological historical thriller masked somewhat as a police procedural. Dadais is wonderful protagonist looking back at the case that obsessed him and his townsfolk when at the same time they understood the absurdity of caring about one death when millions were "legally" dying nearby. Philippe Claudel cleverly echoes Joseph Stalin's alleged comment that "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." Readers will appreciate this off beat suspense thriller as they wonder just who murdered that little girl.

Harriet Klausner

Summary and review:

The main part of this story takes place during WW1, in a village in France very close to the trenches where the horrors of the war are being played out.

As thousands of young men die in that conflict, this tale focuses on the murder of a 10 year old girl, the apparent suicide of a beautiful school teacher, and the death in childbirth of the wife of the narrator - a policemen investigating the murder.

The story ends with the policeman's findings, years later,

As much as I thought this was a touching and profound story with a *devastating* ending, and despite the fact this is a relatively short book, I found this novel tedious at times and was often tempted to skim.

Part of this problem may be due to the fact this is a translation from French, but I just think the authors particular style and manner of writing was just not my cuppa.

Still, recommended. Especially for those interesting in the time period around The Great War, and for those who like their mysteries dark and foreboding.

"I don't really know where to start. It is rather difficult. So much time has passed, that the words can never be recaptured, nor can the faces, the smiles, the wounds." Still, he needs to try, to say what has been burdening his heart for twenty years. Philippe Claudel opens his hauntingly beautiful, dramatic novel with these confessions of his first person narrator. Later on, he explains that words are difficult for him. "During my lifetime, I hardly spoke. 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 continue to disturb the nameless narrator of BY A SLOW RIVER (Les Âmes grises (Le Livre de Poche) (French Edition)) 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 the early days in 1914, town life follows its usual course and the war, assumed to be short lived, does not seem to concern the townspeople too much. The passing soldiers add good business for some and brings much needed work for others. As the narration touches on events later in time, Claudel convincingly evokes the impact on the town of the steadily growing viciousness of war: the hospital fills with wounded and near-dead and starving, exhausted, brutalized soldiers roam the countryside.

However, it is the murder in 1917 of a beautiful ten-year-old girl, Belle de jour, that disrupts the still prevailing attitude of complacency among the important "gentlemen". The "Case", as it is introduced early on by the narrator, raises questions that dig much deeper into the society's fabric than a simple police procedural would be able to explore. In his recounting of the events surrounding Belle's death, the protagonist appears to hold his own - belated(?) - 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 report, being put together by the narrator, is seemingly written in separate memory blocks (chapters), thus justifying the non-linear structure of his account. 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. It also epitomizes the meaning of the title "âmes grises - grey souls" in a way that will keep the reader's mind ponder its deeper truth: "Nothing is either totally black or totally white, it is the grey that wins. For human beings and their souls, its the same... You are a grey soul, really grey like all of us". Having read the novel in its original French, all translations are mine. Claudel's exquisite language, that is full of nuance, rich in local colour and often complex structures, will provide a major challenge for any translator. [Friederike Knabe]

This 2003 novel by the author of the recent BRODECK is set in a small town in Lorraine during WW1. Although the line of battle never touches it, it is close enough to the front for the fighting to be visible from a ridge near the town, and the dead and wounded from the trenches are brought to its hospital and morgue. But among so many men killed on both sides, the death that most closely affects the townsfolk is the murder of a 10-year-old girl, Belle de Jour, the pretty daughter of a neighboring innkeeper. What begins as a straightforward police story, somewhat in the manner of Georges Simenon at his most austere, turns instead into a penetrating examination of the shadowy moral territory in which most of us lead our lives, where nothing is either all black or all white -- hence the original French title: LES AMES GRISES (Grey Souls).

The original is written in a difficult French, full of colloquialisms and unusual words. I would have thought it almost untranslatable, but from what I can see online, translator Hoyt Rogers makes a brave attempt here. The language and syntax are integral to the heavy and brooding atmosphere that Claudel creates. It is fascinating how he gradually reveals his information, moving backwards and forwards in time over a span of about fifty years, "calling forth shadows," in the words of the nameless narrator. Synopses may tell you (possibly incorrectly) who this person is, but Claudel waits over 100 pages before revealing it, and the facts of his own emotional life do not fully emerge until the very end of the book. We will learn, for instance, that Belle de Jour, although the sole murder victim, is only one among four women whose deaths are important to the story. We find out about the others later, much later, when they have room to resonate as feelings rather than facts, as people who have been loved and whose loss changes those who loved them.

Reading a description of this book shortly after finishing the magnificent BRODECK, I feared that Claudel might merely be recycling a few favorite themes. Both books take place in wartime (BRODECK spans WW2 and its aftermath). Both are set in isolated villages in Northern France, whose petty local hierarchies are mercilessly laid bare. Both are first-person accounts by lonely men suffering a personal loss. But they are totally different in effect. Whereas BRODECK turned outward, using the village to cast light on the mentality of the Holocaust, BY A SLOW RIVER turns its back on the war to probe the innermost recesses of the soul. What it lays bare is much more than solving the murder of Belle de Jour. It poses the question of why this one death, or four, should matter among the slaughter of so many. The answers come only at the end, not as a simple whodunnit (there are at least two plausible solutions), but as a matter of understanding and even sympathy. But with those answers come other questions -- moral questions, and deeply disturbing. Neither black nor white, but grey -- a color that turns out not to be colorless at all, but complex and surprisingly satisfying.

[See also the first comment]

I've always found the idea of crime in the midst of a war rather interesting, and so this French novel about a murder during World War I caught my eye. I suppose I expected some kind of literary thriller, and while there is indeed a strong murder mystery plot, the book is really an extended meditation on death.

Death is everywhere in this book, as the narrator reflects on the horrific murder of a young girl in the small village he lived in twenty years earlier, in 1917. He was a policeman, but far from being deeply involved in the investigation, was instead relegated to the sidelines by the imperious judge who takes over the case. This murder was soon followed by the apparent suicide of a newly arrived young woman who had taken the schoolteacher's post. In the wake of this comes a third tragic death -- one which forever changes the policeman. Even as the first World War grinds up men by the thousands just over the hill from the town and pollutes its streets with mangled wounded, it's this trio of dead females that haunts the policeman. (Nonetheless, there are plenty of echoes of the war in how the judge and his strange sidekick "investigate" the murder, and it's hard not to think of Renoir's great film, Grand Illusion, while reading.)

The book slowly (probably too slowly for some) and very lyrically meanders back and forth over the last twenty years, as the policeman recounts his attempt to unravel the mystery of the little girl's murder while also slowly revealing the secrets of the other two women's deaths. During the telling, the deaths of numerous supporting characters over the intervening two decades are also carefully noted. (I think there are something like 15-20 deaths mentioned in the story.) All of which makes for some beautifully written, but melancholy reading. (The translation is quite amazing, with a lovely turn of phrase or epigramatic expression on almost every page.) The secret of the third death, and why it damaged the policeman, is heavily foreshadowed early on, but only fully explained about 2/3 of the way in. The secret of the suicide is also explained well before the end. However, the bits and pieces of the little girl's murder are put together over time, as information is very carefully meted out in small tidbits at just the right moments. Then, at the very end, the author yanks the carpet out from under the story with a carefully constructed twist.

This only further reinforces the book's overall bleak tone, as one is left with sense that trying to make sense of death is a meaningless endeavor, bound to end in disappointment.

Note: The book's title in French translates roughly as Grey Souls, which is also the title it was published under in the UK and the title of the 2005 film made from it.

I can't imagine anyone wanting to skim a book this short and this hypnotic. The translation from French is so bright, beautiful and compelling it seems impossible it could have been written in anything but English. Though drawn on by the voice, the deepening mystery and the devastating portrayal of a world at war, I often stopped to not just re-read gorgeous, striking, mordant passages, but to read them aloud to my spouse, who later read the book and loved it, too. The French have a genius for writing short, dark mysteries (think Thierry Jonquet) that continues to astound me, given all the years I was bombarded as a mystery reviewer by big fat empty American thrillers (Deaver, Baldacci) that were apparently written under the assumption that "nothing succeeds like excess." I'd give this book six stars if an extra one were available.

I had the pleasure of reading the original version of this work. Judging from past comments, the English version does it justice. I would have to remark that the beauty of the book, however, is in the prose, not in the story. Sure, the story is worthwhile, there are twists, and you will stay guessing till the end at what happens, yet the philosophical concept is what makes this book. I give this book 4 stars on content, but I have to say I am completely disappointed that the title of the book was changed from "Les Ames Grises" (The Grey Souls) to "By A Slow River." Essentially, the book is summarized in a statement from the secondary character Josephine to the narrator: "'The drunkards, the saints, I've never seen them. Nothing is either all black, nor all white, it is the Grey that wins. Men and their souls, it is the same....you are a grey soul, happily grey as us all." This philsophical premise is pounded into the reader throughout the course of the book; it is upon this that ALL things are based, thus the preference for title.

Within earshot of the WWI front lines of northern France, three deaths occur in a small village--one is clearly a murder. All of the deaths have connections to the passing of the wife of a prominent local citizen some years before. Author Paul Claudel's novel "By a Slow River" is the exploration of these four deaths and the slow revealing of the cause and effect of each. A parallel theme is the neighboring slaughter of millions in the trench warfare that continued unrelentingly for four years, with its direct impact on lives in the village.

This is a beautiful, if very dark, story told in rich language and understanding of how commonplace and relentless human tragedy can be. The author is eloquent on the pervasiveness of human cruelty and tendency to folly as well. There is no effort made here to justify any of the story's tragedies, but all of them are well-explained in the end.

An engrossing, intelligent read. Recommended.