I picked up this book because I found the premise of it very intriguing. I knew that this was a love story, set in Paris, but the twist of it is that the gender of the two main characters is never revealed. That aspect of it was executed very well, however, I can’t say that I liked this book. This review will definitely contain a spoiler.
The narrator of this book is an academic, but is constantly drawn to the Paris nightlife, even working as a DJ in a club at one point. The love interest is a dancer in one of the nightclubs they frequent. The two are attracted to one another, first, purely on a physical level, and yet they then develop a friendship despite not having any interests in common, and as the narrator points out, being complete opposites. However, they are unable to resist one another for too long and begin a relationship. The love story between the two is very short, because just as I thought it might actually have some depth, A*** dies.
My first problem with this book is that the narrator is a completely unrealistic character. The writing is so incredibly pretentious that it just seems impossible that a person like this exists. This book was written in the eighties, yet the way this character thinks and speaks resembles rhetoric from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This immediately became problematic because I could not empathise with this character at all and found them to be progressively more pompous. As a result, the whole story lacked depth because of it. The entire plot of this book being based on that love story meant that the reader has to actually like the characters to enjoy the love story between them and I just could not bring myself to care. As mentioned above – the two were not compatible at all, but even if that is sometimes not an obstacle, in this case, the relationship just felt empty. So that when A*** died so suddenly and the rest of the book was devoted to the narrator’s grief and sadness at this death, I could hardly understand where these emotions were coming from. This surprised me, because I am normally very understanding towards any love story that I read about.
Another thing which I think certainly didn’t work in my favour was that I read this book in English. When I bought it, I did not know that this was written by a French author, and had I known that, I would most likely have read it in French. Because the unique aspect of this story, namely the characters’ genders not being revealed, is much harder to achieve in French than in English, because with the latter one almost has to make an effort in order to add a gender element to language. Especially when it comes to using tenses. So I can definitely appreciate Garréta’s skill and writing talent in that respect. However, the rest of the story fell flat. There was beautiful writing in this book, but for the most part it felt quite pseudo-intellectual and overambitious and it lacked character development. Yet what I did find to be skillfully carried out, in relation to the exploration of gender, is how little it affected or mattered to the story. Therefore this successfully demonstrated that gender really can be seen as just a social construct and furthermore that by writing a story in such a way, many more people would be able to relate to it. If it was actually relatable, that is.
Overall, I would recommend this book if you want to read it out of curiosity, but I can’t really recommend it beyond just that. I think that one Goodreads user was able to perfectly summarise my thoughts on this book by just stating: “Ennui”.
I give this book two out of five wine bottles.
Books and wine. 