"Brodeck" by Philippe Claudel (Anchor Books, 2010)

Translated from French by John Cullen. Jews, Nazis and Kristallnacht aren't named (except perhaps in a concocted dialect) though that's what the book's clearly about.

A man living in a middle-europe village, is told to write about a recent incident. "You must tell the story, in sequence, one event after another. You mustn't forget anything, but you mustn't add useless details, either. They'll make you veer off your course, and you'll run the risk of confusing or even irritating your readers" (p.31). We learn that the men of the village (not the narrator) have killed "De Anderer", an enigmatic, quiet, arts-loving man who'd been living in the village for 3 months.

The narrator arrived as a 4-year-old orphan in the village over 30 years before, brought by an old lady. The village befriended him, gave him a house and later paid him to go to university (because the villagers felt that at least one of them should be educated). There he met his wife-to-be. He spent time in a concentration camp where he was prepared to accept humiliation in order to survive. Others didn't.

Though we already know the who, what and where of the crime, the novel has the pacing of a detective novel. The narrator jumps around in time as he collects information for his report. The drunken non-believing priest has heard the villagers' confessions. There's no shortage of detail, even when meeting minor characters. E.g. - "In order to speak to me, she'd interrupted a conversation with Frida Niegel, a magpie-eyed hunchback who always smells like a stable. She and Mother Pitz love to review all the widows and widowers in the village and the surrounding hamlets and imagine possible remarriages. They write the names on little pieces of cardboard, and for hours, like cardplayers, with mounting excitement they arrange the deck into pairs", p.81.

We learn that before killing the man, some villages killed his horse and donkey - his right hand ... was clutching something that looked like a hank of long, slightly faded blond hair. It was the hair of his horse's tail, which emerged from the Staubi like a mooring line ... I could see two large masses below the surface of the water, calm, ponderous bulks which the river currents were very gently stirring. The sight was unreal and almost peaceful: the big horse and the smaller donkey, both drowned, floating underwater with wide-open eyes. Because of some unknown phenomenon, the donkey's coat was decorated with thousands of miniscule air bubbles, as polished and shiny as pearls (p.284).

The narrator fears that he or his family may suffer if he fails. "When I read the pages of my account thus far, I see that I move around in words like tracked game on the run, sprinting, zigzagging", p.106. As late as p.261 we learn that his daughter, and his wife's mutism, resulted from a gang-bang while he was away. Soldiers and villagers were involved. When he delivers the report it's burnt before his eyes. He leaves with his family early the next morning.

I liked the book. It has that mixture of fable and realism that's rather common in Holocaust novels.

Other reviews

• Giles Foden (Uncertainty is a major theme of Claudel's novel, which is both fable-like and documentary in style. ... One aspect of his literary skill is his assignment of a whole package of experience to a single powerful metaphor. ... With his otherworldly expression, kindly smile and outlandish robes, the Anderer is an enigma. A flamboyant artist who comes to the village to draw its inhabitants, he stands in for all strangers, for the unknown in all its guises.)
• Caryn James (“Brodeck” is the Brothers Grimm by way of Kafka)
• kirkusreviews (Much of the action occurs in an isolated mountain village in the European heartland. The time is a convincing fusion of modern and medieval; while there are parallels to Nazi Germany, the peasant villagers belong in a Breughel painting. The eponymous narrator was not born in the village (a key point) ... Claudel constantly shuffles the chronological order and passes up opportunities for suspense as he presses his inquiry into the nature of evil. )

"The Investigation" by Philippe Claudel (Maclehose Press, 2014)

"The investigator" arrives in a town to investigate a spate of suicides. The weather and bureaucracy is against him. He has a breakfast of mild catastrophes. Vending machines misbehave. Officials are alternately officious and confessional. Time plays tricks. He's forgotten his name and others are only known by their titles. Later he meets the Psychologist, the Shadow, and maybe the Founder. He ends up in a place where individuals have been imprisoned in doorless, windowless containers strewn across a plain. He sometimes speculates on his situation -

• "Then, brutally, a thought came to him - bright, evident, incontrovertible: he was dead. He had died without realising it", p.31
• "He didn't have the damnedest idea of how to escape from this quite clearly fake universe, a dream universe which wasn't in any way life", p.120
• "This place isn't a high-end luxury hotel. This is not reality. I'm in a novel, or in a dream, and what's more certainly not in one of my own dreams but in someone else's someone complicated, perverted, who's enjoying himself at my expense", p.157
• "on this occasion the investigator made no mistake: for a few hours, he was busy dreaming. A true dream", p.174

There's the odd worthwhile passage - the Manager's monologue on p.96 for example, and I like "sometimes thinking is like running a washing-machine on empty: while it is a useful exercise for testing that it works, the dirty linen that has been left outside the machine remains so for ever in spite of everything" (p.168). The rest doesn't appeal to me - slow, unimaginative and predictable. Kafka it ain't.

• "his gaze hypnotised by the snow, which, beyond the glass, rushed its milky particles in trajectories that were elegant but entirely without logic", p.12
• "I'm the Policeman, not the Murderer! Each to his role!", p.50

Other reviews

• Toby Litt (Guardian) (It's kinder to read Philippe Claudel's The Investigation speculatively, as an interesting and timely experiment, than as what it ultimately is, a banal and rubbishy novel)
• David Annand (Telegraph) (Self-awareness is literature’s ultimate high-wire act. It takes sure-footedness and no little bravery to attempt a novel that can comment on its workings without undermining its magic. ... Philippe Claudel wobbles a couple of times but ultimately navigates the tightrope.)
• Allan Massie (Scotsman) (though the message is bleak, the novel is written with such relish, inventiveness, imagination and brio, that it is consistently entertaining)