2008 is a year for new starts : I decided to read more French novels, even when I have been prejudiced against them, and this time I even tried an audio-book! It was quite comfortable for me to listen to the story while doing house chores, but there was no less than 6 CDs to be played on our living room player, and as Mr. Smithereens wasn’t particularly interested in the story, I’m afraid this way of “reading” isn’t totally adapted to our way of life. But I must say I was sucked in by the story, and the reader’s voice was warm and charming… And now that I know, through Mandarine, that so many copyright-free books are available on Librivox and others, maybe one day, I’ll yield to the temptation of getting an i-pod for the purpose? (In case you haven’t noticed before, the painful realization must hit you: I am no hi-tech geek at all… I barely own a 5-year-old laptop and a basic mobile phone with no options whatsoever). 

Back to the content though. Fred Vargas is a French female crime writer who has been more and more successful in recent years. Her books are totally eccentric, in characters and in the language itself. If you start a Vargas novel, you have to relinquish all notion of harsh, black-and-white realism. Murderers, victims and investigators live in a Paris that doesn’t really exist, even though all the streets are correctly described. A Paris that would be gentler, funnier and quainter than the real one. There is suspense and action and resolution like in a classic thriller, but you also take time to enjoy the sun gleaming on the Seine river, and most pages are filled with humor, even in the darkest moments. 

Humor comes from the characters, who are sympathetic oddballs getting themselves into sticky situations (usually, sticky with freshly-shed blood), but also from the language itself. It’s a feast for people who like odd French expressions, and many of them are invented by Vargas herself, twisting French into a language of her own. For example, in this novel, the investigators deal with a serial killer who has his own twisted logic. They say that the killer has “a fly in the helmet” and set about to discover what the “fly” is. Nowhere in French can you find such an expression, but in the same time, its meaning don’t really need any explaining. 

In “Sans feu ni lieu” (something difficult to translate, basically meaning homeless, but sounding very much like another expression “fearing neither God nor man”), we are introduced to a group of heroes who are featured in other Vargas novels as well: the Three Evangelists living together in their so-called Rotten Hut. The 3 men actually share a house for money reasons and are named Mark, Luke and Matthew (therefore the joke). They are researchers in history (Fred Vargas’ own professional background), but because their jobs don’t pay well and don’t take all of their time, they do odd jobs, like ironing and cleaning, translations, but also dabbling in crime investigations. These very original heroes remind me of another French novelist’s saga: the Malaussene family created by Daniel Pennac. They too are sympathetic oddballs, misfits, living in the northern working-class neighborhoods of Paris, Belleville. After this delightful discovery, I’ll make sure to borrow another Fred Vargas’ next time I want to read something funny and suspenseful.