I started reading Garnier after devouring a couple of books by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Garnier is even darker. This story presents violent death as just another part of a dreary succession of days we struggle through with little motivation or satisfaction. At least that's about the best I can sum it up. But the writing is so good, and the humor and satire so sly, that it is quite engrossing. Not quite like watching a car wreck, but also the sort of pleasure you don't think you should be having. It is well-written, doesn't drag on, and as dark as it gets, which is appropriate for the dark times we're living in. The French settings and the little details about French life are also quite interesting. ( )

Mention of Garnier popped up on Twitter – I don’t remember who it was who RT’d it into my TL – but the description sounded interesting and I liked the look of the Gallic Editions paperbacks (there are eight, including The A26). So I bought one. It was… not what I expected. And sort of good. An aged brother and sister live alone in a house that is a dump – the sister hoards, and refuses to leave the house, after an event during WWII. The brother has been diagnosed with a fatal illness – cancer, I think – and has months to live. He retires from his job at the local railway station. And murders some people. Sort of accidentally, certainly unpremeditated. Meanwhile, the titular road is mentioned in passing as it is being built nearby. That original tweet described Garnier’s fiction as Ballardian, and I can sort of see the resemblance, but it reminded me more of some of the French noir Jacques Tardi has adapted. I wasn’t blown away, but I might try some more. ( )

The first Garnier I read. I *LOVED* it! Read my full review here: http://annabookbel.net/this-aint-no-upwardly-mobile-freeway-this-is-the-road-to-... ( )

I'm very grateful to Gallic Books for introducing me to the works of Pascal Garnier. The A26 is my second Garnier book, following The Panda Theory, and as was the case in The Panda Theory, the lives of the main characters in The A26, Yolande and Bernard, are dark and haunted by the past.

The publisher's description of this book led me to expect Bernard to be the driving force of the story, yet it is actually Yolande who serves as its brooding center. She is a paranoid agoraphobe who has never recovered from her experiences in World War II(view spoiler). Those experiences circumscribe, and ultimately define, the siblings' lives for decades, until Bernard's terminal illness irrevocably alters their relationship, both with each other and with the outside world.

The A26 was translated by Melanie Florence, and I found her use of British slang (e.g., bugger off, pinny, biro) jarring in a book set in France. I don't recall having the same problem while reading The Panda Theory, which was translated by Svein Clouston. Next up on my Garnier TBR pile is Boxes, also translated by Florence, so I will soon see whether this continues to be an issue.

I received a free copy of The A26 through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ( )

It’s the early nineties and a motorway is carving its way through the northeast French countryside. The construction of the A26 (the autoroute des Anglais as it now known) in its impersonal way inevitably affects the communities in its vicinity, disrupting lives in unforeseen ways and, in this novella, becoming an unexpected harbinger of death.

During the Second World War Yolande, as a wayward and sexually precocious teenager, earned the fierce disapproval of her compatriots for associating with a young German soldier, and was brutally punished as a result. Traumatised, she remained incarcerated at home for the remainder of the war and beyond, developing a paranoia about strangers and the outside world. Her younger brother Bernard, with whom she lives, does engage with life however, and is now nearing retirement from French national railway SNCF. Against the background of the arrival of the motorway the scene is set for many personal tragedies: the construction trenches are just so reminiscent of the blight that successive conflicts – the Franco-Prussian wars of the late 19th century and the global wars of the 20th – have visited on this corner of France that communities risk being devastated in similar fashion.

Garnier has crafted a perfect black comedy, with a cast of characters all equally mesmerising and individually flawed. The two siblings are ripe for disaster, Yolande living in a continuous present which remains rooted in the past, Bernard denying the inevitability of death from cancer by refusing to acknowledge it while, in periods of apparent remission, indulging in shockingly inappropriate acts.

Others lives interact with the siblings, from the chance encounters Bernard has on his solitary drives away from the claustrophobic confines of home to those whom Bernard and Yolande knew back during the war. Jacqueline and Bernard had been sweethearts but she had gone on to marry the irascible Roland who perpetually suspected her of affairs with Bernard. In addition Roland’s unfortunately resemblance to his father André, the chief architect of Yolande’s humiliation, leads to a conclusion that with hindsight seems inevitable.

What makes this miniature (exactly a hundred pages in this edition) so compelling is its combination of virtues. There are striking images and descriptive passages – Yolande sorting buttons or hurling missiles at rats, Bernard’s microscopic vision of Jacqueline’s face marked by encroaching age – combined with Garnier’s ability to get into the mindset of his characters. Seeing life (and death) through their eyes the reader is manipulated into acquiescing to their extreme actions, a technique that Patricia Highsmith famously displayed in The Talented Mr Ripley. While some of the protagonists are blameless (unless being human is in itself blameworthy) the major players all display features that range from that of the sociopath to the psychopath. Where they may lack empathy for others, Garnier demonstrates empathy for them and conveys that to us, making us almost complicit in their deeds.

Without seeing the original I can’t comment on the accuracy of Melanie Florence’s rendition but it certainly doesn’t read like a literal translation, flowing quite easily with no obvious awkward idiomatic hiccups. Garnier himself died in 2010 but his novels are gradually being published in English by Gallic Books with support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On the basis of this offering I shall certainly be looking out for more of the same.

http://wp.me/s2oNj1-a26 ( )