book #4

Thanks to yet another insomniac night, I've finished Lydie Salvayre's The Power of Flies (1995; translated from the French by Jane Kuntz 2007) somewhat quicker than anticipated. It's not in fact the longest of novels, weighing in at 186 pages. What it lacks in length it makes up for in a sort of hallucinogenic intensity as the passably revolting narrator, having committed a murder whose victim we discover only in the novel's last line (making this, if it were anything like a genre novel, a sort of whogotdun rather than a whodunnit), rants in turn to various authority figures -- a judge, a DA, a shrink, a prison-hospital nurse -- about his nausea and loathing for practically all human beings, himself included, and two of his obsessions: with the works of Blaise Pascal, and with his mother, a lifelong victim of his disgustingly vile, violently abusive father. Along the way there's a fair amount to recoil from, but also plenty of moments of high humour -- I laughed aloud more than once.

I enjoyed The Power of Flies quite a lot, but in a curious way I'd be reluctant to risk recommending it to anyone else. It's such an odd duck of a book that it's obscure to me why I liked it, and hence why others might love it or detest it or even just be bored by it. Definitely a one-off.