A review by chalicotherex
Bird in a Cage by Frédéric Dard

4.0

She did not understand.
"Is he really dead?" she asked me.
"Yes."
It was a superfluous question. When a man has a hole in his head as big as that one was, it's pretty obvious he's ceased to exist.

Short and intense.

Finished the ebook early this evening after reading that lithub review this afternoon. "Effectively untranslatable: super-slangy, ultra-staccato and redolent of the work of the now hopelessly politically incorrect Céline" How could I not be interested?

Starts off with a fairly familiar plot: man finds himself at the scene of a crime and realizes the police will blame him despite his innocence, but rather than insisting on the truth, he digs himself in deeper by destroying evidence and covering up the murder. Only this time there's a twist:

seriously don't read this, it's too good: at the crucial moment our protagonist Albert extricates himself from the scene and makes a clean break from it all, only to find himself following the femme fatale into a midnight mass where she ropes in a new sucker to take his place... and he ends up getting involved in the crime all over again. At first the femme fatale only wanted him to provide an alibi for her, but as Albert gets more and more involved in the plot, she realizes he'd make a better suspect.

One of those novels where you can see the motives and mistakes of all the characters as clear as day, but that only makes it more intense. The only kind of dumb thing is the explanation and confession of how the body was moved, and maybe the ending because

the woman says that the poison is untraceable, but if it's not it would've been proof of Albert's innocence because he'd still be on the train to Paris when it was administered. Would an autopsy in 1961 have found the poison? I'm inclined to think so.