This book (or is it a novella?) feels more like a screenplay. ( )

Mellie sees a stranger get off the bus in the rain during the off season on the French Riviera. Later when she returns home, she finds that stranger has broken in, and he rapes her. Later she shoots and kills him. Instead of calling the police, she dumps his body over a cliff into the sea. Then another stranger arrives in town. Mellie meets him at a wedding, and he immediately implies that he knows what she did. A game of cat and mouse begins.

I read a book by Japrisot, many years ago, and I loved it. It was a wonderful example of French noir. This one is a total dud. It consists mostly of dialogue, and reads like a screen play, and a pretty mediocre screen play at that. In fact there is a movie of this story, and I am not sure whether this "novel"(term used loosely) was adapted from the movie or vice versa. The parts of the text that are not dialogue read more like stage directions than anything you'd read to provide context, depth, or even just information in a novel. The characters are cardboard, and the treatment of women, especially Mellie is sexist to the Nth degree. Do not read.

1 star ( )

CONTENT WARNING FOR SEXUAL VIOLENCE—STIGMATIZING MENTAL ILLNESS

This is a more or less unusual project...it's a novelization of a film script that Author Japrisot wrote for a wildly successful French film. The DNA of the script is still here, in the copious dialogue tags; quite a few stage directions have survived the trip to novella-ization, too. What also shows is the very, very dated sexual politics of the day...far more horrifying than in the older Japrisot novel reviewed below.

Consider that Charles Bronson plays the male lead in the film. That the film was made in 1969, and came out in 1970. I don't think I need to get too deeply into the, um, action.

So with that warning in place, to the plot. Again its film-script DNA is on display. It is taut; it is not in the least bit deep. Its surfaces are glossy and its politics aren't particularly liberal. It has a lovely woman being abused by damned near everyone who spends even a few seconds onscreen. Americans are violent, nasty brutes; Italians are shouty abusive men; French people are supine and ineffectual.

Author Japrisot wasn't any kind of a patriot....

What's on offer here is a deeply angry story of revenge and of the toll an abusive world can extract. It's never going to be easy to read something written over fifty years ago by a bitter, outraged man without coming away from the experience a little less sure that the world's a good place filled with kind people. But in this story, the woman who exacts a condign revenge on that world is allowed a degree of freedom that would've been unthinkable even a decade earlier. Look at Janet Leigh's character in Psycho....

While it isn't an easy read, due to subject matter, it is formally interesting for its far-from-usual direct lifting of script elements in novelizing the work. It has all of Author Japrisot's strengths, the terse and pointed language and the stunningly easy to visualize settings. Because it's not a simple story, in the sense of having great resonance with dark and ugly parts of human psyches, I don't think it'll appeal to all audiences. Because it's novella length, I don't think it'll necessarily fit well into today's crime-fiction universe...the crime trend is towards bloat as much as the rest of literature is. But it's a bracing, bitter draft of revenge fantasy and devictimized womanhood.

Only not in a salubrious way. ( )

This short story was first published in France in 1992. Mellie, a young French housewife, shoots an intruder to her home, then hides his body. An American man comes to her small coastal town and seems to know exactly what she did, and tries to get her to confess. He swears he is not a policeman, so why does he want to know. The battle of wits between Mellie and the American makes for a great, quick read. ( )