Boxes is a psychological thriller that can be read in a day. Perhaps I should say devoured in a day - the novel is that compelling.
Boxes contains so many unexpected twists and turns, curves and curlicues, I’ll offer a few words regarding the tale’s starting point and immediately shift to a bushel basket of themes.
Framework - Fifty-something Brice Casadamont watches as four hefty men carry all the boxes stacked up in his Lyon apartment to their truck. Brice will meet up with the moving crew at their destination: his new home sweet home, a moldy old house in a quaint French village to the south.
With all those boxes, all the effort required to move, we could almost be reading about the trivial, everyday happenings in a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Almost but not quite - the first pages also provide hints that Brice’s backstory is anything but trivial; quite the contrary, the emerging picture of moody, taciturn Brice is dark and deeply disturbing.
Hard Drugs as Metaphor - Sprinkled throughout are such sweet and dangerous lines as "inured to boredom as others are to opium," and "plaster dust was gathering in his nose, making him want to throw up like after the first line of heroin." In his younger years, Brice indulged in more than his share of drugs, even the hard stuff. Although he's no longer injecting, popping, snorting or smoking, there's something hallucinogenic about Brice's new life as homeowner and village gentleman.
Fleeting Happiness - "He spent months trying to understand how this young gilded adventurer could have fallen for an old creature like him. She was beautiful, healthy, passionate about her work, made more money than him." Brice's honey, Emma, his wife for ten glorious years, was an international journalist hopping around the globe until tragedy hit - Emma, sweet Emma, happened to be in a building in Egypt that was blown to smithereens by terrorists. So sad. Emma's body was never found but Brice isn't about to give Emma up for dead.
Artist and Illustrator - Brice has made a career creating illustrations for children's books. There's a good bit of irony in this because when Brice was himself a child, he both feared and loathed other children. And even as an adult, he sees children as Nazis, ogres, vampires - sucking their parent's blood and wrecking adult lives. "They get us in the prime of life and ruin our secret gardens with their red tricycles and bouncy balls that flatten everything like wrecking balls."
Soulmate - As if drawn together like two powerful magnets, Brice meets and quickly develops a relationship with attractive Blanche Montéléger, age thirty-nine, a lady living alone in an old mansion at the edge of the village. Blanche has her own backstory, a murky, mysterious backstory. And Brice bears an eerie resemblance to Blanche's now dead father Louis. The plot thickens.
Cat's Eyes - The cover of the Gallic Books edition features a close-up photo of a cat's eyes - most appropriate since a cat turns up amid the boxes in Brice's house. Does the cat's presence help shift this Pascal Garnier tale to one of Gothic horror? A question worthy of any reader's consideration.
Brice on TV - "TV was TV. It was not what it showed you that mattered but the way you looked at it, like the ever-changing patterns of a kaleidoscope. It could still be watched when it was switched off."
Brice on the Beauty of Nature - "It was beauiful, and it was sad. It made you want to write a poem, or to shit."
Brice on Art and Life - "If you have an inner life you inevitably have a double life. It remained to be seen which of the two lives would gobble up the other." So muses Brice one evening. Brood, Brice, brood. I dare any reader to find a page in this thriller devoid of Brice's brooding.
Pascal Garnier's existential crime noir has been likened to Georges Simenon, Jean-Patrick Manchette and Albert Camus. With Boxes, by this reviewer's reckoning, the French author could also bring to mind Edgar Allan Poe. I urge you to pick up a copy to judge for yourself.
"He followed her up a stone staircase and found himself in a huge room lit by one miserable bedside lamp on a stool, beside an armchair with a book left lying on it. A portable heater struggled valiantly to warm the atmosphere in front of an immense fireplace as cold as the mouth of a corpse." Brice enters Blanche's mansion for the first time. I kept wondering right up until the final pages: What's the title of that book Blanche is reading?
French novelist Pascal Garnier, 1949-2010
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