Command Performance by Jean Echenoz
A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.
Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom manoeuvring.
At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then coopted by one of the party's less savoury factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party's own leader--and that's when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems.
In his latest outing, Jean Echenoz, one of France's most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature.
A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.
Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom manoeuvring.
At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then coopted by one of the party's less savoury factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party's own leader--and that's when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems.
In his latest outing, Jean Echenoz, one of France's most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature.
A thrilling, inventive, playful, and unorthodox detective and caper novel, the latest work by a French master.
Gerard Fulmard is a loser. A disgraced former flight attendant, he attempts the métier of private detective, with spectacularly disastrous results, then begins working for an obscure political groupuscule beset by an outsized share of infighting and backroom manoeuvring.
At first employed as an enforcer, Fulmard is then coopted by one of the party's less savoury factions, sinking in deeper and deeper until he finds himself the reluctant assassin of the party's own leader--and that's when things really start going downhill. Meanwhile, projectiles crash down from the sky, corpses turn up in perfect health, main characters suffer sudden death, and nothing is as it seems.
In his latest outing, Jean Echenoz, one of France's most respected contemporary writers, toys with the tropes of genre fiction and high literature.
