Cossé’s 2003 novel has been admirably translated, and the psychological issues she raises are telling and true.
The “accident” in the title refers to the Paris crash that killed Princess Diana, but Cossé takes the unusual step of imagining the life of a woman who was putatively involved.
Louise Origan is living a life, if not of quiet desperation, then at least of self-questioning, but her life is changed dramatically when, on a night in late August 1997, a Mercedes traveling at a high rate of speed grazes her Fiat Uno and leaves her shaken. The next morning she’s even more unnerved when she discovers that the Mercedes had crashed in the Pont de l’Alma and created a media frenzy. It’s reported that a “slow-moving white Fiat Uno” had been in the vicinity of the crash, and authorities (as well as sharklike journalists) are eager to find the owner. Louise knows she doesn’t want to be involved, so she takes her car across Paris to be fixed and leaves a false name at the garage. Even after she picks the car up, she considers ditching it (literally) and leaving her flat for a while, but then the sleazy mechanic shows up with a proposal—telling her story to Paris Match for one million francs and splitting the proceeds. To ensure this happening, he kidnaps her, but she escapes, committing a serious crime in the process. Then her life becomes peripatetic, as she roams from hotel to hotel and changes her look (ironically morphing into a Diana look-alike), still haunted by the possibility that her secret will be found out. The ultimate irony plays out when she discovers that she’s one of a long line of Fiat “owners” who have wished to insinuate themselves into the pop-culture drama.
Cossé’s 2003 novel has been admirably translated, and the psychological issues she raises are telling and true.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60945-049-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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