Women in Evidence [Paperback]

Sebastien Japrisot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2000

When a young man is shot dead on a beach, suspicion is cast on several women. Marie-Martine, the glacial lawyer who records their evidence, seems also to be involved - as are a gamekeeper, a blacksmith, and the military police.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sebastien Japrisot loves a mystery. In his award-winning World War I tale, A Very Long Engagement, he sent his beguiling heroine Mathilde Donnay on a high-stakes scavenger hunt to discover which of five condemned French soldiers--one of them her fiancé--may have evaded execution. Women in Evidence, Japrisot's sixth novel, set in the years following World War II, chronicles another woman's search for answers about her lover's fate. This time his death is not in question, but the identity of his killer certainly is. For this young man--is his name Vincent or Beau-Masque, Tony or Francis or Christophe?--has had many lovers, and each one, it seems, has good reason to want him dead. Rashomon-like, Japrisot reveals the victim's life from many different perspectives. First, a young bride recounts how she was kidnapped on her wedding night by an escaped convict named Vincent whom she shoots when he rejects her. Next, a prostitute named Belinda discovers a young man named Tony bleeding in the kitchen of her brothel; he tells her he has assumed the identity of her ex-lover in order to help him escape from prison. Caroline, a schoolteacher, relates how an escaped prisoner named Eddie broke into her house, an event that triggers some pretty torrid fantasies in this repressed widow's brain. Eight women in all, with eight different takes on this mysterious young man. And though each tale differs significantly from the others, a few salient details carry over from story to story: a spurned bridegroom left in his pajamas by the side of the road; the murdered daughter of a powerful man; a prison break. Yet the accounts differ so radically--whom is the reader to believe?

The women's testimony is being collected by Marie-Martine Lepage, a lawyer and one of the dead man's many loves who is trying to clear his name of a terrible crime. Her notations appear frequently in earlier chapters, commenting on, critiquing, and occasionally contradicting what the other women have said. Is she a narrator we can rely on? Perhaps not. In her own chapter, Marie-Martine informs us:

I am writing by the glow of a red light on my ceiling that stays on all night. It was a hard battle before they let me have a pencil and paper. They claim my condition deteriorates when I delve back into this affair. But who else could tell the rest of it?

So when she tells us that "his real name was in fact Christophe," can we really believe her? In Women in Evidence, Japrisot has accomplished two things: He has given distinctive voice to eight very different women, and in doing so he has crafted an intriguingly labyrinthine plot that will have you reading the final pages more than once as you try to unravel the puzzling tangle of contradictory evidence. And like the obstinate young man whose death lies at the heart of the tale, this novel is not entirely what it seems. Beneath its mystery-genre veneer is a smart and original meditation on the mutable boundaries of passion and the extremes to which love can lead. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly

Defying common sense and delighting the senses, this soft-core erotic mystery by French writer Japrisot is being republished in English under a new title, to take advantage of the popularity of his A Very Long Engagement. Eight female narrators recount the escapades of a French prison escapee who calls himself Christophe, among other names (he has as many aliases as lovers), and who may be a vicious murderer-rapist or only a sweet-talking, lusty rake who's so seductive no woman can resist him. Emma opens the book describing how "Vincent" kidnaps her on her wedding night, hijacking her new husband's van. Bound, gagged and petrified, Emma eventually becomes captivated by her captor, and desperate to run away with him. A widowed schoolteacher, a prostitute, a Japanese art student, an American psychologist, a battlefield nurse, a movie star and a Parisian lawyer all fall for Christophe's manipulative charm, playing out their sexual fantasies with him while he remains shameless and sincere, adoring and cruel. Satirizing and teasing at the same time, screenwriter-director Japrisot skewers his own profession in the story of Frou-Frou, an Oscar-winning actress featured in such hits as Legs and Lips. From Hollywood to Burma, a Javert-like accuser pursues the peripatetic hero, who is himself obsessed with memories of the grandmother who bestowed upon him a mysterious inheritance. By the time Christophe comes to trial, he has been guilty of almost everything except the crime for which he was imprisoned. The colorful characters giving evidence in court are by turns duped, nostalgic, proud and ashamed, providing bits of information needed to make sense of the complicated hero's life. The ending--part poetic justice and part French cinematic technique at its most coyly frustrating--does not detract from this spirited polyvocal tale celebrating the ambiguities between love and passion, and between morality and sin. (Apr.) FYI: Crown originally issued this book in 1986, under the title The Passion of Women.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Plume; Reprint edition (April 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452281628
• ISBN-13: 978-0452281622
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #535,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you have any illusions about being a writer..., May 13, 2000

By 

"abartlett2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women in Evidence (Paperback)

then read this book. Interesting weaving of plot among many different points of view. The book begins with a man on a beach with the tide coming in. He's laying there wondering if the tide will take his body out to sea after he dies. He can't remember exactly how he got here, and who it was that shot him.

Chapter break to a desposition from a woman who tells us what she knows about this man. He's an escaped convict and her lover. Chapter break to another deposition: he wasn't the first woman's lover; he barely knew the first woman; he is this woman's lover. And so on.

Japrisot does an excellent job of weaving the story and giving you just enough information to form the story in your mind of what really happened.

Excellent read (as is A Very Long Engagement, also by Japrisot). Well worth the price.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enough Evidence To Know What A Good Book This Is., April 16, 2000

By 

DakKi (Santiago, Chile.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women in Evidence (Paperback)

Women, a matter of importance in this world, the subject of this book. Allthough it's hidden in a very interesting plot (which I'd like to explain completely, but I cannot, for I'd be spoiling all the fun). It's about a woman searching for answers to her life and everything in it, specially about her lover, and who he was and what became of him, in the second World War. I am a man, a lover of women, and really feel like I got to know them by reading this wonderful novel. It reminds me of plays, like "The Blue Room", because of the importance of the charactersns: a lot of them are displayed so we can learn of ourselves and the world we live in. Buy it, read it. Enjoy it as I did.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma., February 4, 2002

By 

David J. Gannon (San Antonio, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Women in Evidence (Paperback)

Sebastien Japrisot is a world class writer who remains surprisingly unknown in the U.S. His works are usually-I think quite inappropriately-assigned to the Suspense genre. To say Japrisot is a suspense writer is akin to describing an aircraft carrier as a boat-it's technically correct but doesn't begin to fully communicate the reality of the situation.

Women in evidence is a case in point. This is a novel of enormous complexity. At heart it is about loves as obsession-irrational, lustful, confining, explosive obsession. All of these facets of love as obsession are explored through a series of vignettes concerning-presumably, though one is never really certain-one man's relationships with a series of women as related by the women.

We know that what is about to transpire will be highly charged and volatile as we met this fellow at to opening of the novel. He is running along a beach, bleeding profusely from a gun shot wound. Fallen on the beach, he reflects on his situation and how he got there-leading us into the stories that follow.

Although all relatively short, the stories themselves are highly charged, compelling, consuming and sufficiently detailed and well constructed as to seems to be stand alone tales unrelated to one another-yet, there runs throughout the series tantalizing tidbits that seem to tie them all together as fragments of the same man's history. But are they? And if so, which one explains his extreme situation on the beach?

This is one of the most original and complex novels I've ever read. I was completely absorbed and beguiled by it from cover to cover. Like Japrisot's other best works, reading Women in Evidence is physically and intellectually demanding experience, well worth the time and effort for those willing to take the plunge.

Dive in and revel in the mystery.

(In the interests of full disclosure, for those who think the title of this review seems familiar, it is a quote by Churchill. Once, when asked to explain Russia, he replied "One cannot. Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma".)