Ranskalainen ystävä

Joel Raento gave up writing plays for a lucrative career as a celebrity speaker who mocks the establishment. After a crisis he holes up in Aronville, a provincial French town he finds ugly and smug, with a stray dog, the collected Flaubert and a muted CNN broadcasting terror and trade. He falls in with Marcel Daigneault, once a schoolteacher, now owner of a small haulage firm, who reads Baudelaire, struggles with his faith and has been drawn into driving for a local gang. The two misanthropes share a longing for elegance and self-respect and a nostalgia for the nineteenth century, and through Marcel's tales Joel sees how cruel people can be.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

237 pages in the original

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

France

First published

2009 by WSOY

Author's age

41 when first published

ISBN

9789510356098 (original)

More

Wikidata