A Playwright's First Novel Lets Objects Speak for an Unspeakable Loss

The death of two boys is revealed on the second line of the book, according to Le Temps's review — not through narration but obliquely, via the silver frame around their photograph, the same frame as on the gravestone. Michele Ruol, a dramatist by training, publishes his first novel with a structure borrowed from the stage: the story is carried entirely by objects, never by direct description of grief.

The novel is built from 99 short chapters arranged out of chronological order, spanning eighteen years before and after a car crash that destroys an ordinary family. Le Temps notes that the four characters are given no names, only roles: Père, Mère, Aîné, Cadet. Their story is that of an unremarkable household that one day collides with a poplar tree.

Absence, in Ruol's telling, is measured through the mail and the furniture rather than through statements of feeling. Two concert tickets to London, bought online for a date well after the accident, arrive in the post. A scratch on a piece of furniture recalls a forbidden indoor football match. According to Le Temps, the novel amounts to an archaeology of domestic life, reconstructed from the thousand small traces that an ordinary family leaves behind.

Le Temps describes the device — refusing pathos by routing the entire narrative through objects from the family's apartment and from the car itself — as what gives this debut its force.