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Post by bluetomb on Apr 13, 2023 23:32:52 GMT
This is very much in the realms of literary fiction, one of those novels that serious young writers and critics write serious things about, and I read it for in some haste for work purposes, assuming it would be fairly straightforward literary fiction but intrigued by the title and the blurb and hoping for some magic realist interest. It's a bit more than that though.
Elodie is a baker's wife in a nameless town in years following a nameless war. Plain, frustrated, her husband more excited about trying to make the perfect loaf than her, her life changes when an ambassador comes to town on business, with his glamorous wife Violet. Elodie becomes obsessed, spies on them, fantasises about them, becomes Violet's friend and confidante, does her errands, at one point they even kiss. But something strange is afoot in the town. Also we know that something heavy is going to go down, because the main narrative is broken up with letters to Violet from Elodie in the future, alone, sometimes visited by police, sometimes sleeping with strangers. The substance of the novel is immersion in the inner world of a sad, slightly strange, unreliable, yet ultimately poignantly ordinary middle aged woman, and the tensions and weirdnesses and little hurts of small town living, but hints build from the title on and increasingly as the novel goes on, of where things are going. Especially if one happens to be familiar with real life weird happenings of the 20th century. When the ending hits, it's a bloody, hallucinatory ripsnorter, full on mayhem, like a sort of literary Guy N Smith passage. It's pretty great, and frankly, the sort of thing I rather wish more literary fiction would get up to.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to people that aren't already into or at least interested in modern literary novels, but on the other hand if it were faithfully adapted into a film it would be the sort of artsploitation breakout hit that lots of horror fans end up enjoying. It's also short, and a relatively brisk, easy sort of a read. I got through it in a day and a half, the fastest I've read anything in years. So it might be worth a go.
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