Jean Prévost (1901–1944)

Generally speaking, the plot is driven by the idea of success consuming a man's life, which we are made to watch with increasing certitude as the narrative progresses. As with paranoid fears and angst, the will of becoming is primary, and will be made manifest through any available detail. One is made to understand that the initial event, the slight, does not explain what the protagonist proceeds to make of himself; one is amazed at the insignificance of this event - especially, but, I suppose, not exclusively as a modern reader - and this amazement is filed away steadily throughout the book.

It has been said that to solve a psychological problem one has to forge a challenge of a similar size; judging by the size of the obstacles that the hero strives to overcome, by the goals he sets, his problem is vast, much bigger than the slander of the stolen case. This is how the reader complaining about not being able to discern the protagonist's features nevertheless arrives at a character study in reverse, as it were.

It is, on the other hand, a question of perspective, which in this book is defined through an interesting stylistic quirk: it has not quite parted with the classical tradition, but it is obviously not content with the insight it offers in respect to the emotional states and thoughts of the hero, and so dips often into the modernist custom of directly inhabiting his mind. And here, again, we are confronted with the depths of the unsaid and the unthought, the way the protagonist hides his own real motivation behind practicalities and the thin veneer of vindictive reasoning. (Or, possibly, I just could not take seriously the heaps of numbers and strategic business decisions that advance the hero in his quest).

On the stylistic plane, the inconsistencies in these excursions into the mind of the non-narrator - parentheses, italics, whole paragraphs, all of that interrupting a dialog - probably make the work all the more intriguing as a transitional phenomenon, like the irregular orthography of a manuscript implying language change. Surely, the book is more than that, but some of it is a beautiful dried butterfly.

The dried butterfly effect holds true on many levels, as the female characters and the roles they are allowed to hold testify. The mesdames and mesdemoiselles have a distinctly stale 18th c. air about them, and I am willing someone to take issue with the modern reader attitude I am demonstrating in this. I expect they would be hard-pressed to make their point.

Despite several shortcomings I've pointed out so awkwardly, the story is always gripping and the diction unfalteringly elegant.… (més)