Book Around the Corner

• Prettier If She Smile More by Toni Jordan (2023) Not available in French.
• The Insolents by Ann Scott (2023) Not available in English. Original French title: Les Insolents.
• The Last Red Tiger by Jérémie Guez (2014) Not available in English. Original French title: Le dernier tigre rouge.
• The Man Who Wanted to Be Simenon by Marianne Jeffmar (2004) French title: L’homme qui voulait être Simenon. Translated from the Swedish by Philippe Bouquet.
• Land Beyond Maps / Attack by Pete Fromm (2024) French title: Sans carte ni boussole / Attaque. Translated by Juliane Nivelt.

It’s time again to clear the To Be Written pile and give you an overview of books I’ve read or abandoned and that I don’t have either the inclination or the time to write a proper billet about. I know it’s not always flattering for the books that find themselves thrown together like this but limited reading and writing time calls for desperate measures.

Let’s start with one I quite enjoyed, Prettier If She Smiled More by the Australian novelist Toni Jordan, a book a lot better than its appalling cover.

Kylie is 43, has a boyfriend Colin, no children, a stable job at a pharmacy and a demanding family. Her life is turned upside down within a week as she finds out that Coin cheats on her, that the pharmacy she dreamt of buying when the owner retired has just been sold to a corporation and that her mother hurt her ankle and needs assistance for everyday life.

As she tries to juggle with all the challenges at the same time, it becomes obvious that something has to give and that she needs change.

I enjoyed reading the tribulations of Kylie with her immature brother, her spoiled mother, her more understanding sister and with her new boss and her religion based on KPIs and feedbacks. It’s definitely a good Beach and Public Transport book, a perfect light read. It’s my fourth Toni Jordan, I got what I hoped to find in her books.

Another book read a while ago, Les Insolents by Ann Scott, a French book despite the author’s English name. It won the Prix Renaudot in 2023 and it just fuels my weariness of literary prizes.

Alex, in her late forties, just out of a relationship with a married woman, decides to move out of her apartment in the Marais in Paris to rent a damp house in Brittany. She leaves behind her life and her two best friends, Margot and Jacques with whom she has a co-dependant relationship.

If I transpose this in the UK, imagine she’s moving from Camden to a remote place in Cornwall. And she doesn’t have a car.

She’s a musician, a famous composer of scores for the film industry, so she can work remotely. She’s clueless about the house, lives like a hermit, goes to the supermarket and walks along the beach. And of course she reflects on her life, her former drug addiction, blah, blah, blah.

The kind of milieu Virginie Despentes writes about but this is without Despentes’s spunk. So I was bored to death, never engaging with Alex and her clique and the whole morosity of the characters who are all victims of some trauma or other.

It’s also true that I have little patience and empathy with Parisians who move out of Paris to the great outdoors in Brittany, Normandy or Provence. It was our Book Club read for March and none of us liked it.

Totally different style, The Last Red Tiger by Jérémie Guez. I didn’t finish it, but that’s on me, not on the author.

The premises were interesting as the main character, Charles Bareuil signed in the Légion étrangère just after WWII and he lost his wife during the war.

He’s sent to Indochina where the war against Ho Chi Minh is intensifying and we know how that went for the French. Unable to accept the independence of this colony, the French government went into a war against a whole population, in a territory that favored the Vietnamese and it ended up in the Dien Bien Phu debacle. Zola would have a field day with the French colonial wars, I’m sure.

The plot thread is a competition, a cat-and-mouse play between Charles Bareuil and Tran Ông Cop, a Vietnamese sniper. It’s nicely done but I gave up when it became more about combats in the jungle than anything else. I couldn’t follow what was happening in those combats and well, it’s just not my cup of tea.

I was most disappointed by The Man Who Wanted to Be Simenon by Marianne Jeffmar. The cover is gorgeous and the blurb says:

“In a back alley in Paris, the police finds a dead body. Bernard Wouters, a well-respected teacher and unpublished writer had spent his life mimicking his idol, Georges Simenon. A journalist decides to investigate this mysterious death. She gets inspiration in Simenon’s work to solve the case”

Sounded intriguing, no? I expected a classic investigation but no. Instead of focusing on Wouters’s story and what led him in this back alley, Jeffmar adds another disturbing story about Wouters’ adolescent daughter, Marie-Jo.

She wrote a book set in Paris among prostitutes. She’s 16 and she’s a instant success à la Françoise Sagan with Bonjour Tristesse. But she’s not happy and it appears that her father was very controlling and I even wonder if he wasn’t incestuous. Basking in her literary success, that’s for sure.

It felt like the author wanted to pack too much into one book and failed to organize everything nicely. Plus it had aspects about prostitution and sex that I wasn’t keen on reading. I’m not a prude but the abuse against a prostitute, the murky relationship between father and daughter felt icky.

Something sounded off in this book. It’s was written in 2004 and I had a hard time understanding when it was set. The Thalys between Brussels and Paris is working but Wouters still pays with French francs, so it’s before the euro. It’s between 1997 and 2001, with early cell phones and still VHS cassettes.

The Paris described in the book sounds more like the Paris of the 1950s than the end of the 20^thcentury. Same with the teenagers’ names. Marie-Jo’s friends are named Laurent, Jean-Paul and Claire, not names of babies born in the 1990s.

The whole thing felt off to me, unless there were clever clues about Simenon all over the book that I totally missed because I’m not a Simenon expert.

Let’s end up with a positive note: two short stories by Pete Fromm, Land Beyond Maps and Attack, one of my Gallmeister goodies.

Fromm is his usual self, picturing turning points in the characters’ lives, a moment that lights the way for them. This moment brings them clarity about who they are, whether they like it or not and where they’re going. We find Fromm’s recurring themes, young love, happy times in the wilderness and fatherhood.

Next billet will probably be about A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane.