Reviews

What more horrible event can befall a young boy than a father's accidental death? Carrère's (Gothic Romance, LJ 6/15/90) book, which won France's Prix Femina, examines this question while delving into other conditions of childhood: the consequences of exaggerating truth, how to relate effectively to the class bully, and what to do in that dark, awkward period after a tragedy before "normal life" can resume. The book starts out as a light childhood version of "Th Secret of Walter Mitty," as Nicholas heads to a mountain village where his entire class goes for the school trip. But why doesn't Nicholas's father ever return with the forgotten suitcase? Carrère effectively captures the world of childhood, particularly the stark aloneness and dependence on both well-meaning and not-so-well-meaning adults; and as the story careens toward a climax, we realize that it's not only Nicholas's dreams that are unrealistic, unpredictable, and, yes, even shocking, but life itself, especially this new life Nicholas must enter where there truly "would be no forgiveness." A disquieting story; recommended for most fiction collections.‘Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty P.L., Bloomington, Ind.

If Sartre had written an episode of the Twilight Zone, it might have been Carrère's much-lauded The Mustache, in which a man who shaves off his signature facial hair finds that his very identity is eradicated. Carrère's latest, winner of France's Prix Femina, lacks the self-conscious existentialism of that novel or the literary gamesmanship of his Gothic Romance, making it more accessible to most readers. Here, the mood is similar-eerie and indeterminate-but the grotesques are human, not imaginary. For little Nicolas, a two-week ski trip with his class is filled with unknown terrors. He is smaller than his classmates, occasionally wets his bed and hasn't really made friends since his family moved a year and a half ago from the town where he'd spent his first years. To make matters worse, his father, upset by a recent tragic bus crash, insists on driving Nicolas to the school-only to leave with Nicolas's suitcase still in the trunk. Nicolas is an imaginative child whose morbid fantasies are fueled by his father's job (as a traveling prosthetics salesman), by stories his father has told about children being kidnapped by organ thieves and by the disappearance of a child from a nearby town. Each of Nicolas's reveries starts with some terrible event-his father's death, the attack of the organ thieves-followed by a comforting redemption in which he is drawn into the circle of adults and children. Something terrible has in fact happened, but it transcends Nicolas's childish imagination and will exclude him forever from the sympathetic embrace of human society. Carrère builds his horror subtly, implying a scene, a mindset, an event. While few of his details are explicit, none are extraneous. Foreign rights sold in 14 countries. (Jan.)