The Investigation

May 14, 2012
As this overly philosophical novel begins, the Investigator arrives in a strange, unnamed city with a mandate to look into “a most unusually high” suicide rate at the Enterprise, an organization worthy of both the adjectives Orwellian and Kafkaesque. There, he encounters the Waiter, the Policeman, the Night Clerk, and so on, and is met at every turn with petty bureaucracy, mindless conformity, and a surreal indifference to his needs. Frustrations mount until the Investigator cracks and, in an orgy of violence, destroys his already awful hotel room; though this leaves him feeling “perfectly happy,” what follows is a truly hellish existence. Claudel’s slim parable about the plight of contemporary existence cannot be considered an heir to classics like 1984 or The Metamorphosis. Though written in 2010, the Investigator’s world is more reminiscent of Eastern Europe before the fall of communism than of 21st-century life. There’s no subtlety or ambiguity; nothing is left to the imagination, from the lives of the characters to the ideas Claudel intends to illuminate. Few readers will be able to draw any parallels between the author’s vision and contemporary society.

June 15, 2012
A spare, dystopian fable that examines how closely contemporary life has caught up to Kafka since the publication of The Castle. No one comes to meet the nameless Investigator when a train lets him off at a nameless city. So it's long after dark by the time he arrives at the Enterprise, where he's been sent to look into a series of 20 suicides over the past year. A disembodied voice refuses to admit him so late and declines to give him any information about where he might pass the night. Left to his own devices, the Investigator finds the mordantly misnamed Hope Hotel, where a Giantess forces him to review an exhaustive list of hotel policies before she gives him the key to a room where he collapses for the night. In the morning, the Server at the hotel restaurant won't give him tea, toast or orange juice, and the Policeman he meets over his nonbreakfast ends up questioning him. When he arrives at the Enterprise, predictably without the identification he left at the Hope, he gets little cooperation from the Guard, the Guide and especially the Manager, who's cordial enough but also insecure, delusional and prone to hysterical fits. After spending a second night passed out in the Enterprise, the Investigator finds all the functionaries who posed such obstacles yesterday so solicitous that the effect is even more disturbing. By this time Claudel (Brodeck, 2009, etc.) has long since made it clear that in this investigation, it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive. A technocratic Kafka nightmare--heavy on surreal diagnosis of the world's ills, light on the traditional rewards of storytelling--crossed with Alice in Wonderland and a hint of Buster Keaton.

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February 1, 2012

Claudel, who here follows up award winners like Brodeck and By a Slow River (translated into 30 languages), is one French author American readers really seem to like. The Investigator encounters some truly absurd--dare one say Kafkaesque?--situations as he tries to determine what is behind a string of suicides at a huge complex called Enterprise in an unnamed Town. Do keep this one in mind.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2012
Where are we? In hell? Astonished readers share the perplexity of the Investigator, the nameless protagonist seeking to solve the mystery of 22 unexplained suicides in one bleak housing complex. But as he stumbles into a netherworld of nightmarish absurdity, readers recognize a literary reincarnation of Kafka's K in The Trial. For, like K, the Investigator ultimately confronts not a unique challenge facing a particular man but, rather, the existential dilemma enveloping all mortals. To render that dilemma imaginatively potent, Claudel inverts all the conventions of detective fiction and then invests the inversions with haunting implications. Utterly unlike the triumphant Sherlock Holmes, who solves the most difficult cases by teasing truth out of tiny clues, this absurdist detective staggers into ever-deeper incomprehension as he butts his head vainly against frustrating obstacles, human and inanimate. Slowly, painfully, he realizes that in this labyrinth of death, he is himself the quarry, trapped by an implacable Shadow. Spare and taut, the tale unfolds with the inevitability of fate, drawing readers into the profoundest of human enigmas. Felicitously translated from the 2010 French original, this masterwork adds luster to the stellar reputation Claudel established with his prizewinning By a Slow River (2003) and Brodeck (2007).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)