LES CONVIVIALES:
THE RETIREMENT VILLAGE EXPERTS
Les Conviviales offers a fresh approach to retirement, allowing you to spend an active life in the sunshine. Here's a taste of what you'll find at Les Conviviales:
A SECURE GATED COMMUNITY
There's nothing quite like knowing you're protected and secure. With a dedicated caretaker-manager on site 365 days of the year, our residents can enjoy total peace of mind.
Pascal Garnier's black humor runneth over. The French crime author begins his novel with the above marketing plug for a retirement community in the south of France.
A fresh approach to retirement? Of course, such an approach boldly assumes, among other things, the mental stability of the residents - hardly a given for Pascal Garnier.
Anyone familiar with the author's noir novels will roll their eyes and chuckle, knowing the men and women who sign up to live in this community will be anything but protected and secure.
In the first pages we're given a foretaste of the peace of mind residents can expect with the aforementioned dedicated caretaker-manager, a gruff, beefy lout by the name of Monsieur Flesh.
Additional brief marketing blurbs laud homes equipped with all the modern amenities, the community's strategically located CCTV cameras, its clubhouse, its swimming pool, its social director arranging an assortment of activities and day trips - in a word, everything needed for a comfortable, happy life.
Counterpoint to sales pitches, the narrator peppers in caustic commentary, a sobering reality check. "The fifty or so little houses were lined up obediently on either side of a wide road, with gravel paths leading off to each house. Viewed from the air, it must have looked something like a fish skeleton."
I read the book and listened to the audio book twice. Once a reader clicks into the story's gallows humor, every page provides ample opportunities to laugh out loud, understanding not only will future residents become part of what the seller calls an ideal retirement community, but those unsuspecting souls have also entered a Pascal Garnier novel. Good luck, folks! You will certainly need it.
The first retirees to take up residence are Martial and Odette, a married couple who escaped their Parisian suburban neighborhood now overrun by screaming kids. However, stripped of their prior habits - going to market on Saturday, taking a stroll on Sunday, etc. etc. - in their isolation, they spend most of the day and evening sitting in front of the TV.
When they get wind of a new couple moving in across the street, their new game is guessing what their new neighbors will be like. And when those vivacious, trim newbies settle in, the group of four are all abuzz about their next new neighbor scheduled to become part of their community - a single woman. Ah, a single woman! The ladies think she must be a widow but the men are not so quick to agree.
When single woman Léa finally arrives, the resident community's varicose vein quintet is complete and Pascal Garnier can weave his noir magic.
Actually, the quintet becomes a sextet when another gal enters their gated community shortly thereafter - fortyish, artsy Nadine driving her little red Renault Clio. Nadine isn't a new resident; she's the group's recreational director. What a honey!
To prepare herself for his initial session with the residents, Nadine lights a joint and treats herself to a few puffs of home-grown weed. After all, she needs something to buck herself up with "before walking into the lions' den - even if the lions were toothless."
In his New York Review Books essay on Pascal Garnier's crime novels, John Banville wrote, "the general run of Garnier’s people consider themselves to be—well, the general run. They get on as best they can with their quotidian lives, hardly conscious of the anarchic and, more often than not, murderous urges boiling away behind their unremarkable exteriors. Even the most eccentric among them would insist that it is not they who are the problem—the world is." Oh, wow! John Banville's observations hit the bullseye - spot-on for Moon in a Dead Eye.
Pick up a copy. This short novel can be read in a day. You just might become an instant Pascal Garnier fan.
I wonder if Odette pictures herself as the above belly dancer when she reflects how she "felt like learning something, but she wasn't sure what. Italian, ikebana, yoga, belly dancing, Turkish cookery, surgery - anything, as long as it was new! So much time on her hands . . . Every day felt as long as a Sunday. This was her time, hers and no one else's, and she could do whatever she liked with it. Yet the vast virgin territory bestowed upon her was no more than a big lump of ice floating on an ocean of emptiness, melting a little more each day."
French author Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010
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