Congo Requiem by Jean-Christophe Grangé (review)

Grangé, Jean-Christophe. Congo Requiem. Paris: Albin Michel, 2016. ISBN 978-2226 -32608-9. Pp. 726. 25 a. The second half of the family saga that began with Lontano (2015) delves deeper into the infernal world of the Morvan clan. The tenuous resolution in the first half, which linked the Paris serial killings to decades-old Congolese murders by l’HommeClou , impels police sergeant Erwan Morvan to return to the Democratic Republic of Congo. He wants to better understand the mysterious events that happened between l’Homme-Clou and the Morvan family at the time. While Erwan is engaged in dangerous explorations abroad, his younger brother Loïc travels to Italy with his estranged wife to bury her father, an associate of the immensely powerful and ambitious Grégoire Morvan, the brothers’ father. Because the brutal murder of the Italian patriarch parallels that of a high-placed Congolese official who also had ties with Grégoire, the pair decides to conduct their own investigation into the gruesome death. Erwan’s sister Gaëlle has remained in Paris where she is approached by a former psychologist of hers. His strange behavior spurs Gaëlle into doing some sleuthing as well in order to find out what lies at the heart of the therapist’s seemingly amicable overtures. The destabilizing circumstances of the three disparate investigations test the siblings’ strength of character and resourcefulness, allowing them to reflect and evolve. Answers lead to more questions about Morvan family secrets and converge upon one truth: the mystery of l’Homme-Clou, the original trauma for the Morvan family, was never really resolved . Evocative descriptions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Paris, and Brittany contextualize the relentless plot. Historical references and political conflict provide a backdrop for vivid and darkly humorous characters. Grangé’s African continent is both alluring and terrifying, a lush climate with stifling heat, whose inhabitants exude optimism but are brutal in their determination to survive. There, decades of colonization, racism, ethnic conflict, and political corruption have fermented into an atmosphere of explosive violence which starkly contrasts with the cruel but subtle machinations of the European underworld operating beneath the opulence of the politically powerful. Violence erupts from unresolved historical and psychological conflicts , the origins of which lie in colonial Africa and the Europe of the early twentieth century. The author’s new literary focus on the interpersonal dynamics within a (albeit exceptional) family shows how, decades later, the past continues to mold the younger generations. The intense, dangerous world Grangé constructs entertains, while reiterating the cathartic purpose of his earlier work: that to diffuse a violence so pervasive it is necessary to recognize that its origins lie where the roles of victim and perpetrator were inverted. Compelling as this reflection may be, the author’s latest novel follows the unfortunate trend of an overload of epic action sequences complete with heavy machinery and artillery. In doing so, the writer sacrifices the chilling, more 208 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 209 psychological, terror of his earliest novels which kept the reader thinking about them well after the last page was turned. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius Grainville, Patrick. Le démon de la vie. Paris: Seuil, 2016. ISBN 978-2-02-1291285 . Pp. 275. 19 a. There is a period in life that many of us have gone through during our teenage years but never quite clearly remember, and perhaps never as poetically nor sensually described as the one in Grainville’s enjoyable twenty-fourth novel. It is a hot summer in a town juxtaposing the coastal edge of the Massif des Maures in southern France, and at the moment it is replete with British tourists. Two young adolescents, Louise and Luc, living in the full Mediterranean light of hope, are madly in love not only with each other but with nature, youth, and freedom as well. They have, however, been brutally confronted by adult reality and most specifically with the fact that Louise’s father Gilles and Luc’s mother Jeanne are having a most passionate and seemingly wellknown illicit affair. The teens, however, escape the dire menaces by frequenting the forest, the beaches, and an eccentric...