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semble s’être inspiré, ainsi qu’aux lecteurs qui s’intéressent tout particulièrement aux problèmes d’argent et de pouvoir dans la société actuelle. Siena College (NY) Nathalie Degroult Carlier, Christophe. L’assassin à la pomme verte. Paris: Safran, 2012. ISBN 97910 -90175-05-1. Pp. 179. 15 a. Those who want the author’s discussion of this novel can hear him on YouTube if his video is still there when this review appears, but I will list the main influences he cites: Magritte, the epistolary novel, theater, and crime fiction.All involve masks of one sort or another, an exterior that hides a different reality or a void. The novel’s title references Magritte’s Le fils de l’homme, one of at least two paintings by the surrealist showing “un anonyme” whose face is hidden “derrière une pomme verte” (76). That quotation comes from the interior monologue of Sébastien, a beaux-arts student working as a night receptionist at the ultra-luxurious Right Bank hotel the Paradise. He spends much of his time during the week of the novel’s main action watching Craig, a British academic from an American university who specializes in French literature, and Elena, an Italian visiting Paris for a Florentine fashion house, whom Craig sets out to seduce. Then there is the Parma businessman who is mysteriously killed on the second night, apparently of a blow to the head, suffocation, and a slashed throat, the multitude of methods suggesting Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Sébastien equates events at the hotel to a ballet and a theatrical performance; Craig’s points de repère include Laclos, Marivaux, Simenon, Rostand’s Cyrano, and Arsène Lupin; Elena thinks in terms of circuses and films. Each of these grilles de déchiffrement implies an art that conceals reality. Even the businessman, who writes “Ti amo” on the postcard he plans to send to either his wife or one of his two mistresses, may be thinking of Umberto Tozzi’s hit song rather than expressing his real sentiments. (And is there a picture on that card? If so, could it be Magritte’s La carte postale, in which a huge green apple hovers over the head of yet another anonymous man?). Sébastien, Craig, and Elena report their experiences and thoughts as they occur, as does one of the maids, who thinks of the criminal as a performer:“bravo l’artiste,”she thinks (77). In a coda several months later, events take a new turn as recounted by a fifth narrator, whose letter to Elena begins a new plot of deception. The narrators’ cool tone and intellectualism keep our sympathies disengaged as we follow the workings-out of the deceptions and schemes, which are encouraged by the atmosphere of unreality in this luxurious hotel, where nothing seems entirely real. This short novel is more a substantial snack than a meal, but it is an amusing one. That no doubt is one reason it won the Prix du Premier Roman awarded by French literary critics. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit 264 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 ...

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