The A26

by Pascal Garnier, Melanie Florence (Translator)

The A26 tells the grisly story of a dying man with murderous intent, from the 'slyly funny' [ Sunday Times] Pascal Garnier.
'Ultimately a very dark novel, but a very impressive one' The Complete Review  
Bernard lives with his sister Yolande who hasn't left the house since 1945. Bernard is now in the final months of a terminal illness. With no longer anything to lose, he becomes reckless—and murderous.
Locally the A26 is under construction. Concrete still wet, it stands ready to serve as a discrete cemetery for lost girls. 

Genres: Fiction, Crime, France, Noir, Thriller, Horror, 20th Century

112 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 1999

About the author

Pascal Garnier, who died in March 2010, was a talented novelist, short story writer, children’s author and painter. From his home in the mountains of the Ardèche, he wrote fiction in a noir palette with a cast of characters drawn from ordinary provincial life. Though his writing is often very dark in tone, it sparkles with quirkily beautiful imagery and dry witted humour. Garnier’s work has been likened to the great thriller writer, Georges Simenon. Gallic books has now published many of his titles, including - The Panda Theory, How’s the Pain?, The Islanders, Moon in a Dead Eye, and The Front Seat Passenger.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Dark and deeply disturbing.

The A26 - a short Pascal Garnier novel laced with gallows humor so dark you can't even see the gallows.

The French author frames his tale thusly: The construction for the new A26 highway is chomping up mile after mile of terrain in Northern France. Nearby a small house is all shuttered up. Yolande, the main occupant, peers out at the world through a drilled hole in one of the shutters. "Depending on her mood, she called it the 'bellybutton'' or 'the world's arsehole'."

As far as Yolande is concerned, it's still 1945 not 1980, and she's still 20 not 55. For, you see, Yolande was traumatized back at the end of the war, her head shaven for going to bed with a German soldier. Additionally, Yolande was the victim of emotional and physical abuse as a child and teenager at the hands of her sadistic father. The consequence: Yolande is completely mad (or, if you prefer language more politically correct, she's mentally deranged) and Yolande hasn't stepped foot outside her house in over 30 years.

Just think what it means to live year after sour, sooty year in a house pilled high with papers and garbage. "A network of narrow passages, tunnelled through the heaped-up jumble of furniture, books, clothing, all kinds of things, made it possible to get from one room to another provided you walked like an Egyptian." And Yolande has been living under this particular creaking roof with her younger brother Bernard all those years.

Brother Bernard has his own problems. Hovering around age fifty, railroad employee in his SNCF uniform, Bernard has recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Knowing his days are numbered, ever doleful Bernard turns . . . gulp . . . serial killer. A snatch of murder number one: "But the grip of Bernard's hand on the back of her neck had finally proved too much for Maryse's 'nearly' eighteen years. 'Strong as death! I'm as strong as death!'" Way to go, Bernard! Proving your strength against a petite teenage girl, you twisted fuck.

In spots The A26 is nearly as creepy as a Thomas Ligotti tale - say Dream of a Manikin (dolls and manikins begin to manipulate humans) or The Last Feast of Harlequin (nighttime street festival with drab clowns of the gaunt, vacant starring variety).

Bleak in the extreme, in this Pascal Garnier novel even the great outdoors dotted with brick houses doesn't escape. "The countryside, accustomed to low skies and drizzle, looked ill at east in its Sunday best in the sunlight. The bricks were too red, the sky too blue, the grass too green. It was as if Nature felt embarrassed at being so extravagantly made up."

The A26 is all about the gouging and violation of boundaries, from a massive construction project taking over homes to individuals debasing, humiliating or committing violence against others.

How warped and perverted are Yolande and Bernard? Flashbacks include Yolande and Bernard as teenagers, older sister and younger brother - incest.

Recall I mentioned horror. Well, The A26 features horror intertwined with the grotesque. "The face which appeared in his wound-down window left him open-mouthed: the McDonald's clown, with far too much rouge, false eyelashes and a layer of cracking plaster all over the cheeks."

What makes The A26 a particularly compelling read is the author's crisp, clear, hard-edged language dripping with vivid metaphors and similes. Sentences like this one are found on nearly every page. "It was a drop of water falling on her newly shaven head which had hurt her the most, a deafening sound like the stroke of a gong which had stayed with her ever since."

If you are interested in Pascal Garnier crime noir, I would recommend you not begin with The A26. Much wiser to start with a number of his other novels translated into English. When you get to A26, you will then see how the author shifted his signature dark humor several shades to the black.

What a haunting novel. What an author.



I attempted to locate a quote from a lighter moment in the novel. Alas, they are sparse. So here's Bernard along the road. "For the past hour, Bernard had been driving around aimlessly, turning left here and right there, as luck or misfortune would have it. He had no idea where he was going but one thing he was sure about, he had no desire to go home, not straight away. Like a fly trapped under a glass he was looking for a way out while knowing only too well that none existed."


French novelist Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s nothing quite like a delusional, paranoiac agoraphobe that lives with her terminally ill brother that has secrets; he’s lost every bit of conscience that he’s ever had and becomes a serial killer without remorse.  It poses a question that if you knew you were terminally ill, would your morals and values go out the window or would you be on the ‘straight and narrow’ and not change ?

Full of death, kooky-strange recollections, filth, rubbish, incest and outright brainfuckery, The A26 is a piece of short fiction that is reminiscent of an early days Coen Brothers film if David Lynch was a consultant.  With this being a thrilling mystery fueled by dark comedy, it is and will be a favorite for a long time. 

[TBV (on hiatus)]

Horribly creepy!

[Raven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must confess to having a bit of a penchant for what I dub ‘bijou but perfect’ reads- books that come in at less than 150 pages, invariably foreign fiction in translation and that reveal a whole world of human experience in such a condensed form. The late, great Pascal Garnier is one of my particular favourites with his amoral novelettes that plunge the depths of human sadness and frustration, and ‘The A26‘ is another perfect example of this.

Defying a straightforward classification of genre, I would loosely term this as a noir-esque thriller, but as the plot unfolds, I think maybe this is too simple a defintion. Ostensibly the plot is straightforward with Bernard, a man of mature years employed by the local railway coming to terms with the terminal illness eating away at him. Bernard comes to cope his own impending death by embarking on a murderous course of action. He lives with his sister Yolande, who not to put too fine a point on it is seriously mentally disturbed, having not left the house they share since 1945 when she was exposed as a Nazi collaborator and punished by the local villagers, whilst also trapped in the belief that the war is still on. She observes the world through a peephole, in the clutter and jumble of their ramshackle home, spending her days embarking on nonsensical flights of fancy, and venomous tirades about her persecutors with violent results. Her existence mentally in the past is made even more tangible when juxtaposed with the central motif of progress embodied in the building of the new road, marking the march of modernisation, and the sense of the world moving on without her.Through the murderous intentions of Bernard and the highly confused world of his sister Yolande, the reader is immersed into a dark tale encompassing death, isolation, suspicion and retribution. The violence when it comes is swift and brutal, but underpinning the book are moments of extreme poignancy which helps the story retain a core of decency in its examination of human relationships. Bernard, for example, has a deep-seated platonic relationship with a local woman called Jacqueline, who is married to a violent and boorish man and their lasting friendship is filled with the premise of opportunities lost and the wrong paths taken. Despite Bernard’s less desirable actions his character, certainly for me, elicits an empathy in the reader, that here is a man who through loyalty to his sister has missed out on living to such an extent that his whole character is now defined by the prospect of dying.

Garnier’s books are marked by their integration of strange characters into their French provincial settings as evinced by ‘The Panda Theory’ and ‘How’s The Pain?’ and always retain at their heart a sense of human frailty, despite the blackness of the humour and at times horrific events. Combining the style of Simenon with the visual imagination and humour of the Coen Brothers, there is much to recommend these novellas. They are small works of literary genius, and I would urge you to discover them for yourselves.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's the term for double or triple noir? Pascal Garnier's The A26 is as creepy, as bizarre, and as diseased and unsettling as any noir novel out there. I mean, like, would you want Yoyo and Bernard living next door to you, or even in the same neighborhood? 4 very, very dark noir stars for another fine novel by Pascal Garnier (with a hat tip to Lee, who introduced me to Pascal).

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't add much to what has previously been written in other reviews of this book. Dark - check. Disturbing - check. This is the 2nd of Pascal Garnier's short novels I've read (the other being The Panda Theory). Both are excellent and I've got several more in my sights

[WJEP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sacrebleu! This is a vile little tale. Yolande and her younger brother Bernard are frappadingue psycho-killers. Back in WW2, Yolo was a femme tondue and remains shell-shocked. I didn't get what made Bernard so psycho -- maybe living alone with Yolo all those years.

Naturellement, Garnier includes some cuisine tips: I learned that when cooked in red wine, a rat is just a one-portion rabbit.

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The series title the publishers are giving Garnier’s novels is Gallic noir. Amongst the definitions for ‘noir’ in my French-English dictionary are ‘bleak’, ‘mournful’, funereal’ and ‘doleful’. All are suitable descriptions for the flavour of The A26 by Pascal Garnier. The alphanumeric title indicates a route number, specifically an autoroute or motorway. The setting will seem familiar to military history buffs – nearby towns are Lille, Lens, Vimy, Arras and Bethune, familiar sites of battle in the First World War. But it is the Second World War that overshadows this novel, though set some fifty years after it ended. Bernard and Yolande are brother and sister, living in an unnamed village near the autoroute that is under construction, and as true-crime aficionados know, building sites are great places to dispose of corpses. Bernard is about to retire from being something like a ticket inspector for the SNCF. Yolande is a total recluse. During the Occupation she had a German boyfriend and had her head shaved as a collaboratrice. She has not left the house since and is unaware that the war is over. Bernard drives a Renault cinq (older readers may recall when it was sold in America under the franglais label Le Car); he is also capable picking up an attractive hitchhiker and leaving her body under a future on-ramp. Bernard is friendly with the local brasseur Roland and his wife Jacqueline, with whom Bernard apparently shares some history. As a total homebody, Yolande is not as handy as her brother at body disposal, and in some respects I was reminded of the famous short story by William Faulkner that we all read in our introduction to literature course.

The A26 definitely fits the above definitions of noir and as the fully realised setting displayed, it is also thoroughly Gallic. As in WWI trench warfare, there is lots of mud and rain. If you’re feeling homesick for a holiday in France (summer in the Dordogne perhaps), here winter in Hauts-de-France may well be the cure. I doubt I’ll read more of Garnier (though I may revisit parts of this one in French), but he certainly satisfied any tastes I had for noir.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I was to meet Pascal Garnier in a bar I would be seriously uncomfortable in his presence. It takes a strong imagination to come up with something like this, assuming that there is nothing in it from Garnier's own background.

It has the hallmark of How's The Pain but is far darker. I defy readers to find even the slightest piece of brightness. The characters, Bernard's apartment, his car, even the space underneath the new road add greatly to the bleakness and depravity.

Some may recall The Local Shop in the recent British TV show The League of Gentlemen. There is a similar grotesqueness about it, viewers don't laugh very much. I would be surprised if Gatiss had not read this before he wrote about New Road and The Local Shop. Was Gatiss's New Road the A26?

However, despite all this, the novella works. I am sure Garnier originally had a longer version, but short suits. Short sentences, and brevity in descriptions of the most striking scenes make this so readable. As Yolande says in the last sentence "Its a cold world out there and I'm going to make sure they know it."

Certainly noir. As Eric Allthwaite said, "even the white bits are black".

Read it if you dare.

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wounds of war...

Brother and sister Bernard and Yolande have lived together all their lives. Yolande remains permanently holed up in their house, every door locked, every window covered, her only viewpoint on the world a small hole in one of the blinds. And for Yolande, the world she looks out on is still in the grip of WW2, a period that traumatised her so completely she has never recovered. Bernard has been the functional one, his job on the railway providing their income. He has given up his own chance of a personal life to look after his older sister. But now Bernard has been told that he is dying, and suddenly all the missed opportunities and disappointments of his life erupt into violence...

Given the novella length of this book, it packs a mighty punch. Ink-black noir, there are no gleams of light or humour to lift the tone. On the surface, Bernard and Yolande are a pair of extremely dysfunctional and disturbed siblings, each with their own streak of madness, and with the potential for violence simmering not far below the surface. The book has a thriller format, seen from the perspectives of the perpetrators of the various crimes that take place.

But it seems to me (though I may be over-analysing it) that the entire novella is a metaphor for a France still bleeding from the wounds inflicted on it in WW2 – the wounds of defeat, collaboration and betrayal – wounds that eventual victory may have covered, but with the thinnest of scar tissue, easily scratched away. The book was written in 1999, and is set perhaps a couple of decades before that, when many people were still alive who had lived through the war. And Garnier shows this couple as having been damaged even before the war began, much as France still reeled from the horrors inflicted upon its landscape and people in the First World War.

'Row upon row, their white tunics stained with blood like that bastard of a butcher. “I kill you, you kill me.” And the more they killed, the more of them sprang up again, it was truly miraculous! That's why there'll never be an end to the war – anyway, it's always been here, it's that kind of country, there's nothing else to do but go to war. The only thing that grows is white crosses.'

Yolande had committed the crime of having an affair with a German soldier and had paid the price when her countrymen shaved her head to display her disgrace to the world. But Garnier's description shows that this episode was as much to do with lust and cruelty as justice and patriotism. The world may have forgotten Yolande's shame but she has never forgotten those who shamed her. There is the chance for Yolande to throw the past aside and go back out into the world, but she carries her prison with her in her mind. She's not a weak woman, far from it. Her selfishness makes her monstrous and it's hard to see her as having been a victim. She is a fact, a piece of history, a hidden scandal, France's shame. And that unresolved shame is shown metaphorically to be still shuddering through the later generations.

Bernard has watched the woman he loved marry another man – a cruel, boorish man who treats her badly, and when he receives his death sentence his pent-up frustrations and anger boil over into a murderous spree. There are some shocking scenes of violence and horror, but they're not written in an overly graphic way – Garnier is painting impressionistic images rather than drawing detailed pictures. His descriptions are full of craters and mud, and when he describes places he does it in terms of their association with battles and war, this modern landscape scarred still with reminders of France's violent past. The A26, being built in the book, runs through or past many of the great battlefields of France and close to those of Belgium – Arras, the Somme, Ypres – and Garnier plays darkly with the conjunction of the digging of the road and the history of its bloody surroundings.

To say I enjoyed this would be a total misuse of the word. It is too dark, too upsetting, to enjoy. But it is powerful and gut-wrenching, with Garnier's compelling writing enhanced by an excellent translation from Melanie Florence. I may have made it sound more political than it is, though that's how it struck me. But it works too on the level of being an extremely dark thriller, leading up to an ending that shocked me and left me feeling completely undecided as to the morality of the tale. Despite the awfulness of their actions, there was some part of me that empathised with each of the dreadful siblings, and that was the most unsettling aspect of all. As entertainment, I enjoyed Garnier's Boxes more, but for me this one is the more powerful and meaningful, and therefore better, of the two. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Gallic Books.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

[Trevor · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting novel by Pascal Garnier, I must say though that it is not my favourite of his books. In parts it is tedious and slow and it is for that reason I cannot recommend it to others.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since partisans shaved her head during World War II for sleeping with a German soldier, Yolande has refused to leave the shack where she lives in extreme squalor with her brother Bernard, who works on the railways. Now, though, Bernard has discovered that he's suffering from a terminal illness -- presumably cancer -- and has just a short while to live. In between ruing the fact that he let his obligation to look after his sister prevent him from wedding the love of his life, who eventually tired of waiting and married another, Bernard takes his death sentence as a liberation, sex-murdering two women and disposing of their remains in and around the monstrous workings for a new highway, the A26 . . .

Garnier's fairly short novella is, I think, less a story than a transcribed nightmare. We're meant, I think, to register that there's far less difference between the motives of the suddenly crudescent sexual predator Bernard and those of the partisans who victimized and humiliated Yolande than the partisans might have chosen to believe: they likewise were giving in to a long-thwarted lust, although they dressed it up in the guise of patriotism. And I think, too, we're meant to take the under-construction A26 and its surrounds as symbolic of modern France: however much the edifices of progress might dominate the conceptual landscape of that (or any other) nation, all of the detritus of earlier periods, all the divisive hatreds of the past, are, like the rats infesting Yolande's rubbish-filled hovel, still there, and it would be fatal simply to forget them, to try to chase them under the threadbare carpet of memory.

The other novellas of Garnier's that I've read have been dark -- sometimes pitch-dark -- comedies, intersections between noir and the comedy of manners, but there's a real unrelieved bleakness to The A26, a real bitterness of worldview. I found I began to enjoy and appreciate the book two or three hours after I'd finished it, once I'd had a little to think over what I'd read. That's often the sign of a good book, of course; but I could just as easily have put it out of my mind as I turned the last page with a "so what?" In future I shall have to approach Garnier's novels more warily.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't normally read crime, well never. But thanks to Glenn Russell GR guru who reviewed a few of Pascal Garnier's books, I gave this a go. And there's crime, sure, but there's no plot really. People's lives in a northern French town are screwed up following some nasty things that happened during war time with collaborators and a few young people, now older when the events in this novel occur, got caught up in it all. War brings out the worse in people, some take advantage, some are taken advantage of. What happens later when lives and love are thwarted is what concerns us here. Morality and immorality are questioned. The lives of a few townsfolk are unravelled. The past never really passes. On to the next Pascal Garnier for whom crime is a kind of McMuffin to the real business of human effects on each other.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pascal Garnier is a writer who should be lauded as a great of crime fiction, up there with the titans of the genre.
His books never go beyond 100-150 pages but they pack a huge punch and go to places that some writers are incapable of exploring in 500+.
In this story we meet brother and sister Yolande and Bernard. Yolanda reminded me of miss haversham, reclusive she hides from the world 50 years after a public humiliation after fratenising with a German soldier in the war. Bernard is dying of a terminal illness and with a thwarted love in the past and a curious relationship with his sister it is a recipe for dark horror as a motorway is constructed in picardy.
If you like crime writing, and like very dark humour this is a must read and having now read three of his books I can't wait to find the next one. Books you can read and enjoy in a day.

[Aaron (Typographical Era) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bleak. Honest. Raw. Powerful. I have dozens of adjectives spinning through my head as I close the cover of Pascal Garnier’s novel The A26, place it down on the table beside me, lean back, breathe for what feels like the first time in ages, and sink deep into the couch in my living room. For the past ninety minutes or so I’ve felt trapped in darkness, lost in a damaged world where insanity reigns supreme and hope is nothing more than a cruel, nonexistent joke. I’m not exactly frightened by what I’ve just read, that’s not the right word, but do feel slightly unsettled. Am I sweating a little bit? Fuck. I am. The A26 has left me feeling a bit dazed, a bit off balance, and truth by told, a touch sickened. This a good thing though for it signals that ultimately the author has accomplished his desired effect. Point to Garnier. Consider my outer defenses not just breached, but utterly destroyed.

The story takes place in the early 1990s right around the time that construction has begun on the 222 mile long A26 motorway connecting the towns of Calais and Troyes in the northern part of France. Work on this modern convenience provides a backdrop for a tale of damaged siblings who live together in a dilapidated house along the new route. At first it’s the sister, Yolande, that appears to be the most broken. She’s stuck in the past, unable to move beyond tragic, life altering events that occurred back in the mid 1940s. The true extent of what happened to her is revealed as the story progresses, but think flirtatious young French girl mingling with Boches during the Second World War and you’ll be well on your way down the treacherous path to disaster.

READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/the-a...

[Pia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers who provided me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What an amazing little book! Dark and cruel, but beautifully written (and translated).

Sad, ill Bernard lives with his sister Yolande, who hasn't left the house since the end of the war. Bernard knows he has little time left to live and out of the blue starts killing people. Meanwhile, his sister is getting crazier by the day.

Everything is dark in this books: the atmosphere, the feeling, the house. However, it is a smooth read and easy book to read, one that leaves you wondering how did all go wrong for the characters in it.

I'll certainly be reading more of Pascal Garnier's books!

[Michael Croy · Rating 4 out of 5]

How do you like your noir? Dark? Creepy? Atmospheric? Well then you've got to read Garnier. Excellent compact narratives, didn't see it coming plot changes and just a general sense and weight of foreboding in each of his books. Front Seat Passenger is also very, very, good.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark and bitterly amusing glimpse into a twisted, depraved world. An uncomfortably funny read.

[Ajmal Mohamed · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A cat sprang from one pavement to the other. He had mistaken her for a cat , she was going so fast , eyes scouring the darkness for any signs of the past. It was still there , its lines faintly visible beneath the badly applied transparent layer of the present.”

ഒരു ക്രൈം ഫിക്ഷനിൽ വളരെ അസാധാരണമായി മാത്രമേ ഇത്തരം literary quality യോട്‌ കൂടിയ വാചകങ്ങൾ കടന്നു വരാറുള്ളൂ. French Noir ഫിക്ഷൻ എഴുത്തുകാരനായ പാസ്കൽ ഗാര്നെയരുടെ ‘ The A26 എന്ന ചെറു നോവൽ പണ്ട് നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടിൻപുറങ്ങളിൽ ഒറ്റപ്പെട്ടു കിടന്നിരുന്ന ആളുകളെക്കുറിച്ച പറയുന്ന ‘സഹോദരിയും സഹോദരിയും മാത്രം തനിച്ചു താമസിക്കുന്ന വീട്’ അല്ലെങ്കിൽ “ആ വീട്ടിലേക്കു ആരും പോവാറില്ല,അവിടെ ആ സ്ത്രീയും അവരുടെ ഭർത്താവെന്നു തോന്നിക്കുന്ന ആളും മാത്രമേ ഉള്ളു” തുടങ്ങി അപൂർവമായി കേൾക്കുന്ന കാര്യങ്ങളെയാണ് ഓർമിപ്പിച്ചത്.

existential novel കൾക്ക് പേര് കേട്ട നാടാണ് ഫ്രാൻസ്. ക്രൈം ഫിക്ഷനിലേക്കു വരുമ്പോൾ അതിന്റെ tone കൂടുതൽ bleak ആയും nihilistic ആയും മാറുന്നതിന്റെ നല്ല ഉദാഹരണമാണ് ഈ നോവൽ. ആർത്തി, കാമം, അസൂയ, തുടങ്ങിയവയും കൂട്ടത്തിൽ സ്വത്വപ്രതിസന്ധിയും അന്യവത്കരണവും ചേർന്നു ആ കഥാപാത്രങ്ങളെ കൂടുതൽ മൃഗീയമാക്കുന്നു. (The machinations of their relentless lust will cause them to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill as they become more and more entangled in a web from which they cannot possibly extricate themselves.)
ഈ നോവലിലെ കഥാപാത്രം ബെർണാഡ് അയാളുടെ സഹോദരിയുമായി അസാധാരണബന്ധത്താൽ വര്ഷങ്ങളായി ഒരു വീട്ടിൽ ഒറ്റയ്ക്ക് കഴിയുകയാണ്. രണ്ടാം ലോക മഹായുദ്ധത്തിനു ശേഷം ആ സ്ത്രീ വീടിനു പുറത്തിറങ്ങിയിട്ടില്ല. വീട്ടിലെ ചുമരിലെ ദ്വാരത്തിലൂടെ പുറംലോകത്തേക്കു നോക്കുന്ന അവരുടെ മനസ്സിൽ ജർമൻ സൈന്യം റോന്തു ചുറ്റുന്നതിന്റെ ദൃശ്യങ്ങൾ മാത്രമേ ഉള്ളു (Depending on her mood, she called it the ‘bellybutton’ or the ‘world’s arsehole.’)
ബെർണാഡ് ആകട്ടെ കാൻസർ ബാധിച്ചു ആസന്ന മരണനാണ് . ജീവിതം കൈവിട്ടു പോകുമെന്നുറപ്പായ അയാൾ തത്വത്തിൽ അതിനോടുള്ള പ്രതിഷേധം എന്ന നിലക്ക് ഒരു സീരിയൽ കില്ലറായി മാറുന്നു. അസാധാരണമായ Violence കൊണ്ടും Story direction കൊണ്ടുമൊക്കെ നമ്മളെ ഞട്ടിപ്പിക്കുന്നുണ്ടീ novel . പക്ഷെ അതിനു വേണ്ടീ മുൻപ് പറഞ്ഞ സാഹിത്യ ഗുണത്തിൽ ഒരു കോംപ്രമൈസിനും എഴുത്തുകാരൻ തയ്യാറല്ല എന്നതും ജോർജ്‌ സിമോണിന് ശേഷം ലോകം കണ്ട ഏറ്റവും മികച്ച നോയർ എഴുത്തുകാരനായ Pascal Garniere വ്യത്യസ്തനാക്കുന്നു.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The French are just as good at noir as the Americans, and not just in their films, either. Pascal Garnier's The A26 gives us a look at an elderly family of former German collaborators who, even today, are off the scale of human toxicity. Bernard likes to murder women and dump their bodies by a major highway construction project, and his wife Yolande shoots a bartender because his wife attempted to visit her.

Garnier is almost as good as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Boris Vian.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

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; like many young women in Nazi-occupied France, Yolande survived by becoming the mistress of a German officer, only to have her fellow villagers turn on her after France's liberation, shaving her head in retribution for her collaboration horizontale (for a good brief discussion of this practice, see this article from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandsty...). 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.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pascal Garnier’s short, spare novel packs a powerful punch. It’s grim, bleak and pretty horrific in places. It’s also quite hypnotic and immensely readable. It features a dysfunctional pair of siblings, Yolande and Bernard, living in a small French town. Yolande, we discover, has been traumatised by what happened to her during WWII and hasn’t left the house since 1945. Bernard has held down a job but a terminal illness now threatens this and sends him on a murderous spree. Atmospheric and moving in spite of its gruesomeness, this is a haunting and deeply uncomfortable read, but a very enjoyable one nonetheless.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It's difficult to drive with only one eye, you only see half the world, the uglier half."

Garnier's nasty little novel is a flytrap. Everyone who blunders into it comes to a grievous end. I was entertained but it certainly won't be to everyone's taste. The echoes of Simenon may be deliberate — but Garnier isn't in the same league. At best, a Gallic Jim Thompson. Even so I'm grateful that his books have been translated, and in such arty editions.

[World Literature Today]

This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the Sept/Oct 2015 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...

[Morteza Bahrami · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing dark noir.

[Tolkien InMySleep · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark, gallic, deadly

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The A26 (1999) is the third Pascal Garnier this month, in part thanks to Glenn Russell, Ray Nessly, and Benjamin Black, who all name him as a favorite author. I first read How's The Pain, then Moon in a Dead Eye, and now this. The first two have some deadpan humor I was surprised to see in what the publisher calls Gallic noir, as real violence happens in the midst of some almost sweet comedy, including social satire. He's a great writer, wth great tonal description and character studies, and then there is this suddenly non-comedic violence. Crime stories, for sure.

Those first two are relatively light compared to this one, that is often described as the darkest and most brutal of his books. If you respect crime horror as a sub-genre, maybe think of Silence of the Lambs, or The Killer in Me, with a streak of mercilessly grim "humor," you re close to this book.

I don't know when Garnier knew he was dying (he died at 61), but this book features a man, Bernard, in the last months of terminal cancer, sweetly taking care of his deeply disturbed and traumatized sister, Yolanda, who has not left her house from 1945-1980. Bernard, facing death, gets a little crazy himself, murderously so. So I really didn't enjoy the disturbing parts, and yet came to admire the way the book spins slowly out of control into madness at the end. Do not begin with this book if you want to read Garnier, I would say. But he has this unsettling habit of combining elements of empathy and murder and humor I have to acknowledge is interesting. I htink How's the Pain? is my favorite now, the story of an aging hitman on his last job, but the humor in The Moon in a Dead Eye, the send-up of old folks in a gated retirement village, is also memorable. One plus: These books are typically very short! I'm glad this one did not go longer.

A26? Oh, there's a new road going though that bro and sis are annoyed by!

[Best_books · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rather than 3 this book was definitely labelled correctly - ‘Gallic noir’ .

A tale of a brother and sister, their deeply disturbing relationship and the ways they controlled their own uncontrollables.

For the sister, haunted by her days as a collaborator and the summary justice she faced by the community following the war, she chose to never leave their house. Mentally scared, paranoid and unable to grasp the reality of the present she lived in the 1940s, oblivious of the dirt, rodents and prison walls that framed her home life and every part of her existence . For the brother, who had put his life on hold to support his sister’s fanatical insecurities, his semblance of sanity could only exist when his future technically was still there for the taking . Having worked a mundane railway job to pay and ‘care’ for his sister, when a terminal illness left him unemployed and awaiting death he was finally forced to confront his own miserable life and emotional emptiness; and his own insanity blossomed.

I am not always fond of Garnier’s writing . Sometimes his turns of phrase are shockingly good and at other times attention to detail - or lack of it - makes his penmanship irritating (mush in bowls when one was just described as wiped clean for example) . I am however gripped by his ability to describe the horrific as if it were somewhat mundane. His writing is emotionally deep yet lacks any sentimentality. This book is no different and easily a worthwhile, if not disturbing, short read .

[Jeffrey Powanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

A grim, unpleasant noir about two French siblings, Bernard and Yolande Bonnet, who live in a trash-filled cottage near an unfinished highway, the A26, which traverses several of the bloodiest battlefields of France. Yolande is a delusional agoraphobe who hasn't left the house since 1945, when villagers shaved her head for sleeping with a German soldier. Bernard, a retired railway worker who is terminally ill from cancer, spends his final days contemplating the pointlessness of life. He abandons his shaky moral compass and embarks on a senseless killing spree, leaving his victims beneath the new highway.

Only 112 pages long, there's a lot going on in this slim novelette (including murder, incest, wartime trauma, domestic abuse, and alcoholism), and there are several genuinely shocking scenes. Garnier's skill at writing flashbacks and indirect discourse is something to admire. But the story of these unsympathetic and utterly broken characters didn't grab me at all.