Artifice - Claire Berest
Translated from French by Sophie Lewis.
I think I fell in love with this book the moment I saw the table of contents. The chapters are titled with lines from one of La Fontaineās Fables - āThe Fox, the Wolf, and the Horseā - in a way that was immediately reminiscent of Italo Calvinoās If on a Winterās Night a Traveler. Given thatās one of my favourite books, Artifice immediately endeared itself to me.
And thankfully, the rest of the book holds up to what is a very superficial but very strong first impression. This was exactly the sort of literary thriller I regularly seek out but often struggle to actually find, and after finishing it itās definitely become one of my favourite books this year.
Once everything has unravelled it seems, on the surface, like thereās perhaps not much here. The mystery isnāt really a mystery at all (though none of them are, once you know the solution), the crime isnāt really a crime at all, and the characters donāt really do much. But the magic is in the getting there, and in the slow revealing of multiple layers of story and meaning that slowly peel away the artifice and leave us with a simple but powerful truth at the heart of things.
The marketing for Artifice describes it as āan astonishing French thriller with a jaw-dropping twistā. Obviously marketing is entirely in the business of hyperbole and canāt be believed, so we need to take this with a pinch of salt. There are twists here, and there is a big reveal towards the end, but itās one that youāll clock from about 100 pages earlier. But this is one of those books that makes you feel smart for having figured it out, makes you feel like you solved it rather than saw it coming (if thatās a distinction that means anything to anybody but me), and when my suspicions were finally confirmed I felt very satisfied by it.
Looking back on this now, a day after finishing it, I think this is close to a perfect novel. Thereās one slight hiccough, right at the end - practically on the last page - that made me raise an eyebrow, one tiny moment that I didnāt love. Without spoiling too much, thereās a theme running throughout the book that weāre told, in the closing moments, one of the characters has imagined the whole time. I donāt know if thereās perhaps a deeper meaning to this specific thing that Iām missing, and that if I had access to that meaning this would land better for me, but as it is it left a bit of a sour taste. And thatās a disappointing thing to happen in the closing moments of an otherwise brilliant novel. But it wasnāt enough to spoil anything for me, and Iāll still happily tell everyone whoāll listen that I think they should read this immediately.
This was, I think, the book from the CWA Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation longlist that I was most looking forward to reading, and Iām very happy that it lived up to my expectations for it