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A review by ronanmcd
Grey Souls by Philippe Claudel
5.0
An extraordinary, delicate and soulful book. Full of the existential contradictions you'd expect and crave in good French writing, film & culture. To live, we must die.
To follow a whole book, reading in the belief that we alone, and separate from the characters, have the fuller understanding and correct suspicions in regards to a murder is one thing. To twist that back on us and say that the characters themselves, and not our more circumspect views, were correct is another thing altogether. But the true mastery is in doing that by having us all along follow a narrator who is himself deluded, but earnestly so. In another author's words that may stumble and fall but the conceit works here.
In addition, tacking on at the very end that the narrator whom we have been trusting all along is a filicide seems hamfisted. But that is to examine it at a remove. It fits with the flow, and again emphasises just how deluded we have been.
This is, after all is said and done, a murder mystery. It is one that leaves the reader firmly in the grip of the idea that to know something truly is not the normal way of life. We live in shades of grey.
To follow a whole book, reading in the belief that we alone, and separate from the characters, have the fuller understanding and correct suspicions in regards to a murder is one thing. To twist that back on us and say that the characters themselves, and not our more circumspect views, were correct is another thing altogether. But the true mastery is in doing that by having us all along follow a narrator who is himself deluded, but earnestly so. In another author's words that may stumble and fall but the conceit works here.
In addition, tacking on at the very end that the narrator whom we have been trusting all along is a filicide seems hamfisted. But that is to examine it at a remove. It fits with the flow, and again emphasises just how deluded we have been.
This is, after all is said and done, a murder mystery. It is one that leaves the reader firmly in the grip of the idea that to know something truly is not the normal way of life. We live in shades of grey.