Latest Review: Noir

Our latest review is of Olivier Pauvert’s Noir, and was written by Monica Carter, who works at Skylight Books, runs Salonica, and serves on the Best Translated Book judging panel.

Here’s the opening of her review:

Olivier Pauvert’s Noir — his first and only novel to date — brings nihilism, amorality, and fascism to a dystopian nightmare that manages to make the city of Paris seem less than pleasurable, and even downright frightening. Fans of well-written science fiction will be sucker punched by the direct prose that limns a suspenseful plot permeated with elements of splatterpunk goriness. If that isn’t enough, there is a dominant element of the metaphysical. After the protagonist discovers a gruesome corpse, he is arrested and then dies when the police van he is in careens off the road. He awakens to find that it is twelve years later and that he has not completely died but has returned as a ghost version of himself in the body of man who looks like he has Down’s Syndrome. Our protagonist remains unnamed, and we learn that it is necessary for him to wear sunglasses because, as he quickly learns, he kills any living thing that makes direct eye contact with him. While being chased by the National Militia, he discovers his power to kill with his eye contact. [Read the rest here.