Hoppla! One, Two, Three

The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gerard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness can shed new light on a serious subject, and Hoppla! 1 2 3 tells its story three times, in three separate sections, each in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies - borrowed from tropical botany, the shipping industry, and ancient Greece. Gavarry's bloody and poetic narrative takes dead aim at the social, political, and personal roots of violence, and argues for the transformative power of fiction.