Frédéric Schiffter, Jessica L. Nelson and Chris Pavone: the books not to be missed

Narrowing

By Frederic Schiffter.

Le Cherche Midi, 184 pages, €19.

The rating of L’Express: 5/5

“The trouble with suicide is that you can neither advise nor advise against it,” wrote Cioran. This slightly defeatist sentence could have served as an epigraph to Frédéric Schiffter’s excellent new novel, Narrowing – whose title announces the program. It’s about a 44-year-old philosophy teacher who gets fired by his second wife. Tired of his students and of life in general, he is prescribed a sick leave which allows him to stroll as he pleases when this dreamy claustrophile does not remain locked within the four walls of his new makeshift studio.

The antihero of Narrowing will find love for a time but never morale, and even less tone or fishing. He loses weight, begins to look like a statue of Giacometti. Resilience is definitely not his department. With an elegant and ascetic style, Schiffter recounts the stoic drowning of a misfit. One thinks in turn of the 17th century Jansenists, Schopenhauer, Thomas Bernhard and the late Roland Jaccard – who before killing himself was a close friend of the author. Contrary to “blabla” and “gnangnan”, families in which he rightly places the majority of contemporary literary production, Schiffter constructs a work that is both morose and funny, whose sardonic and willingly misanthropic spirit can also recall Paul Leautaud. Let’s talk little, let’s talk well: Narrowing is one of the best novels of the current year, if not the best. What if Schiffter, writer for happy couplefinally had the success it deserves? Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld

The Stormy

By Jessica L. Nelson.

Albin Michel, 410 pages, €21.90.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

Louise Collet? We know all the evil that the ferocious Barbey d’Aurevilly thought of it: “a red stocking, sumptuously impious and Jacobin”, “of a disheveled, inflamed pedantry”. She remains best known for her adventures with Flaubert, Vigny and Musset. In his Flaubert’s Love Dictionary, Régis Jauffret drives the point home: if Louise Colet has had several prizes from the French Academy, the truth would oblige us to say that it is thanks to her affair with Victor Cousin… Do not throw any more? Through a fictionalized biography, Jessica L. Nelson takes the stand to defend this woman who is unjustly underestimated in her eyes.

How difficult it is to extol the merits of this thriller without revealing its origins and losing all the salt. So let’s start at the beginning, on this “day 1-7:28” which opens the text. Ariel Pryce wakes up alone in a hotel room in Lisbon. She had arrived in Portugal the day before with her husband – a business trip, he told her – but, in the early morning, he had disappeared. She worries about it at the hotel reception, consults the police, the consular authorities, nobody takes her seriously. She knows so little about her husband and the business he has come to conclude in Lisbon that his remarks become suspect. Until a ransom demand of 3 million dollars finally arrives. letters: nothing happens between them, but he respects her for her work. Jessica L. Nelson is therefore on the Hugolian line. Too bad this free woman wasted so much time with muzzles… L.-H. From LR

Two nights in Lisbon

By Chris Pavone, trans. from English by Karine Lalechère.

Gallimard, 544 p., €24

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

How difficult it is to extol the merits of this thriller without revealing its origins and losing all the salt. So let’s start at the beginning, on this “day 1-7:28” which opens the text. Ariel Pryce wakes up alone in a hotel room in Lisbon. She arrived in Portugal the day before from the United States with her husband – a business trip, he told her – but, in the early morning, he disappeared. She worries about it at the hotel reception, consults the police, the consular authorities, nobody takes her seriously. She knows so little about her husband and the business he has come to conclude in Lisbon that his remarks become suspect. Until a ransom demand of 3 million dollars finally arrives.

This is the thread from which Chris Pavone builds his diabolical plot. Already noticed for Expats, ten years ago, Edgar Allan Poe Prize for the first novel, he does not seek subtlety in the writing, nor the thickness of the characters, but the effectiveness of the story. By successive touches, he adds insights that force the reader to change his point of view and to question what he had understood and this, until the outcome nourished by contemporary concerns. With its approximately 550 pages, Two nights in Lisbon is a big novel, but it falls into the category of page turner and is the perfect pastime for a long train ride/an afternoon at the beach/a stormy weekend as summer approaches. With the satisfaction of closing it by saying that we at least took pleasure in being fooled by this oddly well-crafted plot. Agnes Laurent