Electrico W

April 29, 2013
Romantic and atmospheric, this novel also benefits from a particularly fine sense of place and time. It is 1985 in Lisbon. The narrator, Vincent Balmer, is a French journalist. He is trying to finish a novel when Antonio Flores, a photographer, asks him to help cover the trial of Pinheiro, a serial killer. The two men share a suite in a hotel and interact with a complex group of characters, such as “Duck,” an important woman from Antonio’s past; Irene, a woman known to both men, who once told Vincent that he had “a young man’s body that hadn’t aged well”; Aurora, a young woman who gives what is quite possibly the funniest violin recital ever rendered in literature; and Vincent’s father, among others. Dealing with so many characters sometimes gives the book a cobbled-together feel, but also makes it lively and fleet. An epilogue describes the characters’ futures so neatly and completely that the reader may want to skip it. But skipping anything else in this witty, sad, and interesting novel would be a shame. Agent: Isabelle Laffont, Editions JC Lattès (France).

May 15, 2013
A French journalist and a Portuguese photographer find they have some uncomfortable things in common in this latest from Le Tellier (Enough About Love, 2011, etc.). Narrator Vincent Balmer has relocated to Lisbon to escape from his fruitless love for flirtatious, withholding Irene. When he agrees to cover the trial of serial killer Ricardo Pinheiro with photographer Antonio Flores, he doesn't know that Antonio is having an affair with Irene. When he finds out, he determines to get his revenge by tracking down Duck, the childhood sweetheart Antonio still pines for; then Irene will know what it feels like to be rejected. This mildly distasteful premise is mostly an excuse for Le Tellier's atmospheric, leisurely narrative of nine days in 1985, which mingles Vincent's search for Duck, the first day of the trial and his wanderings through Lisbon with Antonio and Irene--who arrives from Paris and is not pleased to find Vincent supposedly involved with someone else. He's faking this romance, aided by a woman he meets at a cafe. Another very young woman met by chance gives Antonio a taste of the hopeless love Irene and Vincent have both experienced, providing more satisfactory payback than Vincent's eventual discovery of Duck. Unfolding memories give readers a better understanding of and sympathy for Vincent, who has endured a difficult childhood, his mother's death and a fraught relationship with his father, who recently committed suicide. Intermittent excerpts from Portuguese writer Jaime Montestrela's Contos acquosas, which Vincent is translating, amplify the novel's tone of existential unease, which is also buttressed by glancing references to the Salazar dictatorship and Vincent's memories of a journey to the Okavango Delta in Africa, "a metaphor for unfinished business, for adversity, for an unreachable goal." It makes an allusive kind of sense that he names his novel after a Lisbon tramline that no longer exists. Delicate handling of deep themes--loss, missed connections, meaninglessness--gives the novel an emotional charge greater than its low-key particulars and pacing.

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June 1, 2013
Le Tellier (Enough about Love, 2011) is a quadruple threat: writer, journalist, food critic, and mathematician. But threat is not quite the right intensifier to describe him. Nor should one take his fifth novel too seriously or regard it as lightweight, though it is humorous and reads effortlessly. Vincent Balmer, lovable loser, is our protagonist and narrator. Photographer Antonio Flores, a Lisbon native, joins him there to cover the trial of a serial killer for a French newspaper. The novel covers nine days in nine chapters, each named for a different character. While detailing his failures at love and Antonio's successes, Vincent is translating a book of short stories and writing a historical novel. Many threads overlap: Le Tellier means for us to appreciate the gentle vibrations of this net woven from distinct narrative tropes, capturing reflections and feelings, accumulating and preserving details. Noticing a couple getting soaked in a downpour, Vincent remarks, Watching them, I succumbed to the all-encompassing amazement I always feel about lives that are not my own. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)