The Moment Before Drowning
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
Starred review from May 7, 2018
On Dec. 12, 1959, Capt. Jacques le Garrec, the narrator of British author Brydon’s provocative and unsettling first novel, returns in disgrace to his hometown of Sainte-Élisabeth in Brittany. He’s accused of committing a terrible crime in Algeria, where he has spent the last two years in the French army intelligence services interrogating Algerian insurgents. While le Garrec, a former police detective and WWII Resistance fighter, awaits trial, an old acquaintance asks him to look into the murder of Anne-Lise Aurigny, a brilliant high school student whose mutilated body was found outside Sainte-Élisabeth in a field of heather the previous winter. Le Garrec soon learns that Anne Lise’s father was a German officer and her mother was brutalized after the war as a supposed Nazi sympathizer. As le Garrec investigates further, he’s troubled by the memories of the atrocities he witnessed in Algeria and of the 19-year-old Algerian girl he was powerless to save. This is a remarkably assured debut by a gifted new writer. Agent: Bill Goodall, A for Authors (U.K.).
May 15, 2018
An exploration of political oppression wrapped in a carefully constructed mystery.In Brydon's auspicious debut, Capitaine Jacques le Garrec is a member of the French Resistance who, after the war, joined the Paris police and, in 1957, was seconded to the intelligence service, serving as an interrogator at al-Mazra'a during the Algerian Revolution. In 1959 he returns to France in disgrace. A "heinous crime" has been committed, and his culpability in it will be determined at a hearing in a week's time. He is permitted to return home to Sainte-Elisabeth in Brittany until the hearing. When he arrives he is asked by an old friend to investigate the unsolved murder of Anne-Lise Aurigny; as his investigation of this young woman's death proceeds, the nature of the "heinous crime" is revealed in a series of flashbacks: A young Algerian woman has died in his custody, and in his report, le Garrec accuses the commander of al-Mazra'a, Lt.-Col. Lambert, whose first demand of le Garrec was that he shoot a prisoner, of maintaining a brutal and bigoted colonial rule. This, more than the woman's death, is his crime. In a parallel conflict, le Garrec must contend with the nihilistic Capt. Lafourgue of the Sainte-Elisabeth police, who believes that the role of the police is to "scare people...to create terror," and to be "the tentacles of power made visible." The two commanders are the poles of le Garrec's existence as he struggles to bring meaning to the deaths of the women, while behind the Algerian sun the spirit of Sartre smiles down. Though the descriptive prose is sometimes overcooked, the characters are alive and the mystery is mostly satisfying.An erudite and entertaining addition to the shelf.
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