06h41 by Jean-Philippe Blondel (review)

Blondel, Jean-Philippe. 06h41. Paris: Libella, 2013. ISBN 978-2-283-02605-2. Pp. 240. 15 a. This novel could be described as an old-fashioned love story, something of a brief re-encounter. The title refers to the departure time of a morning train from Troyes to the Gare de l’Est. The chapters alternate between the first-person narrations of a woman and a man who are seated next to each other on the train. The woman, Cécile Duffaut, is in her mid-forties, married with a daughter in her late teens, and the head of a successful business she founded in organic health and beauty products. She is highly attractive, self-assured, and a positive thinker. Her seating companion is fortyseven -year-old Philippe Leduc, who is divorced (with two children who have little interest in him), and who sells televisions in a hypermarché. He was quite a ladies’man in his youth but is now overweight and balding. He is a self-described loser who has never really accomplished anything or had any sense of values. As we learn in the course of their parallel interior monologues, they were once lovers but have not seen each other since they broke up during a trip to London twenty-seven years ago. In addition to finding out more and more about their lives and relations with family and friends in the present, we discover progressively the details of what happened in London all those years ago. The work becomes a psychological detective story as we piece together the events and their reactions to them. Suffice it to say that Philippe behaved like a real cad and his unfeeling mistreatment of Cécile traumatized her forever . Some good came of it, though. What he did to her led her to reform her whole life. Instead of being a passive wallflower with low self-esteem, she transformed herself into an assertive and attractive go-getter who succeeded in both her career and personal life. By a kind of poetic justice, Philippe, on the other hand, has gone steadily downhill . Throughout the text, Cécile and Philippe pretend not to recognize each other but keep wondering whether or not to renew their acquaintance. By the time he makes the first attempt at communication,they are almost in Paris.Cécile spurns his advances at first, but he manages to make an awkward apology for what he did in London.After they get off the train, she starts thinking about re-establishing relations after all. The reader is left in suspense as to what they will do next. The story holds our interest throughout as we participate in each protagonist’s self-analysis and follow the traces of what occurred in London. One is intrigued as well about the significance of an absent third character, Mathieu Coché, who keeps reappearing in their thoughts. Like Cécile, Mathieu lived in Philippe’s shadow when they were young, but he later became a famous television star. He is now dying of cancer. Perhaps his tragic fate gives the other two a sense of the irretrievable loss of time in human life and a greater appreciation of relationships past and present. University of Denver (CO) James P. Gilroy 260 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 ...