The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Pascal Garnier's The Front Seat Passenger -- the fourth Garnier title Gallic Books has brought out in the US this year, with one more to come .....
(They're two ahead in the UK.)
I've noted before that he's the author-discovery of the year for me, and this one more than the reaffirms my opinion -- damn good stuff. Nice to see Marilyn Stasio take a quick look (scroll down for review) at two of these in The New York Times Book Review a couple of weeks ago, but these should really be getting the essay-treatment some place like The New York Review of Books or Bookforum.
A note also regarding the translation of the title of this one: The Front Seat Passenger may sound considerably more harmless than La place du mort, but, as suggested in my review, I think it works very well, and is the better option than the perhaps stronger English-approximation, 'Riding shotgun' (which would evoke rather the wrong idea); unfortunately, there's no equivalent English idiom for the 'death seat' next to a driver.
I've noted before that he's the author-discovery of the year for me, and this one more than the reaffirms my opinion -- damn good stuff. Nice to see Marilyn Stasio take a quick look (scroll down for review) at two of these in The New York Times Book Review a couple of weeks ago, but these should really be getting the essay-treatment some place like The New York Review of Books or Bookforum.
A note also regarding the translation of the title of this one: The Front Seat Passenger may sound considerably more harmless than La place du mort, but, as suggested in my review, I think it works very well, and is the better option than the perhaps stronger English-approximation, 'Riding shotgun' (which would evoke rather the wrong idea); unfortunately, there's no equivalent English idiom for the 'death seat' next to a driver.