Concrete Flowers

July 30, 2018
A Parisian housing project seethes with resentment and a young immigrant searches for hope in this stilted, painfully topical novel from N’Sondé (The Silence of the Spirits). When Rosa Maria’s brother is found dead of an apparent heroin overdose in a parking lot, her abusive father, recently laid off from an auto factory, falls deeper into his alcoholic pit of shame. To escape his abuse, Rosa becomes obsessed with the playboy Jason. After the police shut down an ersatz club operated by the project’s youth, a riot breaks out and Rosa uses the chaos as an opportunity to seduce Jason. The resulting pregnancy disillusions her of the belief that she can still escape “the repeated dramas, the omnipresent violence” of the projects. Indeed, those repeated dramas render N’Sondé’s novel a laundry list of France’s contemporary troubles, with each character offered as an uncomplicated example of the nation’s pathos. As Rosa frets about what to do with the baby, a police crackdown on the perpetrators of the riot sweeps up her best friend, prompts her father to catastrophically lose control of his anger, and leaves Rosa’s dreams “punctured on all sides.” This bleak resolution is unfortunately predictable and makes it impossible for the reader to gain any worthwhile insight into the vibrant, complicated culture of Paris’s underclass.