The best Claudel is back with one of his typical crime novels with that unexpected mixing component that only the creative capacity of this French author can make it work.
The taste for the black genre is partly explained by its connection with that atavistic and dark part of the human soul in its worst instincts tamed by morality and the need for coexistence implemented from reason.
And that is well known to the good old Claudel and he manifests it in many of his stories and particularly in this new novel.
We traveled to a new Ithaca in the heart of the Mediterranean, only in its most sinister aspect. Because the inhabitants of the Dog Islands are also characters in a modern odyssey, with a greater dose of tragedy sensed between the gusts of the sirocco wind that brings echoes of violence.
Death, the typical crime of all black novels, points in this case to certain tragedies of emigrants in search of that luck half Russian roulette among the waves of the sea. And no, luck does not end. The bodies of the last victims of the sea, unfortunately in the conscience of the islanders, end up lying on their beaches.
These are days of hope for the locals. Perhaps a capital decides to invest in the island as a new leisure claim for the rich in search of adventure. And the victims are the worst marketing image in such negotiations.
Only that the dead bring with them the conflict between neighbors, the tensions and the fury unleashed in that space that becomes more and more suffocating.
And so fiction ends up hitting us with force. Because in the end we are not so different from those infamous guys who live on their little island looking at their navels, impassive to pain and death, capable of defending the land with weapons and blood ...
You can now buy the book The Dog Archipelago, the new novel by Philippe Claudel, here: