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A review by catmeme
The Confidant by Hélène Grémillon
2.0
Revenge! Madness! Betrayal! I stayed up a good portion of the night with this book because I'm a sucker for a good revenge story, especially one with possibly unreliable narrators, so I'm a little crestfallen I'm not rating it higher.
I can't even place the blame entirely with the indistinguishable character voices and sometimes stilted prose, which felt more like translation flaws. The story gripped me from the start and I didn't put it down until it was over; the author was doing a lot of something right.
And yet, here is the estimation that this book was only ok. The real problem for me was that so much of this character-driven narrative relied on shocking actions in order to achieve its emotional impact.
The characters were so minimally developed and their motivations so plainly delineated that it was a lot like looking at an anatomical model of the circulatory system: the human shape is outlined, and you can see the red arteries and blue veins as they exist within the body, but there is little else there to indicate the true complexity of the organism being studied.
Except that's where the attraction to stories of betrayal lies for me--in seeing all the layers that make up extreme and not always justifiable acts. What The Confidant does is expose one level of that process and let the reader assume the rest is there.
I can't even place the blame entirely with the indistinguishable character voices and sometimes stilted prose, which felt more like translation flaws. The story gripped me from the start and I didn't put it down until it was over; the author was doing a lot of something right.
And yet, here is the estimation that this book was only ok. The real problem for me was that so much of this character-driven narrative relied on shocking actions in order to achieve its emotional impact.
The characters were so minimally developed and their motivations so plainly delineated that it was a lot like looking at an anatomical model of the circulatory system: the human shape is outlined, and you can see the red arteries and blue veins as they exist within the body, but there is little else there to indicate the true complexity of the organism being studied.
Except that's where the attraction to stories of betrayal lies for me--in seeing all the layers that make up extreme and not always justifiable acts. What The Confidant does is expose one level of that process and let the reader assume the rest is there.