Name: The 6:41 to Paris
Rating: 4.375 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9781939931269

Jean-Philippe Blondel

Brilliant psychological thriller constructed like an intensely intimate theater performance, a high-wire act of emotions on rails.

The 6:41 to Paris

After decades, former lovers come face to face in a novel filled with a “suspenseful dread that makes you want to turn every page at locomotive pace” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). Cécile, a stylish forty-seven-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents in a provincial town southeast of Paris. By early Monday morning, she’s exhausted. These trips back home are always stressful, and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it’s soon occupied by a man she instantly recognizes: Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation almost thirty years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, their express train hurtles toward the French capital. Cécile and Philippe undertake their own face-to-face journey—In silence? What could they possibly say to one another?—with the reader gaining entrée to the most private of thoughts. This intense, intimate novel offers “a taut, suspenseful psychological journey from which there is no escape . . . Gripping” (Kati Marton, author of Paris: A Love Story). “Perfectly written and a remarkably suspenseful read . . . Absorbing, intriguing, insightful.” —Library Journal (starred review)

i wish there was a little less inner monologue, but still a pretty solid read

Erika Lor

Emmett

It's hard to find words to describe the range of emotions this has dragged this newly adult reader through. A stream of consciousness novel of a train journey in which the main characters say almost nothing to each other, where thoughts thrive on observation and memory alone? It is incredible enough that this novel exists at all, but it is even more astonishing what Blondel manages to achieve with the form and subject matter to do what he seems to do best: encompassing the tedium, the extinguished hopes, the frail promises and quiet despair of modern living under a clear-eyed but tender narrative gaze.

Sympathetic, even-handed and occasionally ironic, the novel is almost too accurately attuned to modernity's little traps and let-downs, the cul-de-sacs one finds oneself in at middle age. Just like in Exposed, Blondel uses two characters and two alternating points of view, and the excellent use of the first person secures a sense of discomfiting closeness to the reader's perspective, and the everyday language (there are few real metaphors, if any) makes that intimacy and contemporaneity even more inescapable. And just like Exposed, The 6:41 to Paris scrutinises the aimlessness of mature adulthood where life has seemed to pass by and yet also come to a standstill.

"No one ever warned us that life would be long.

Those easy slogans that make your heart beat faster, like "carpe diem" or "die young" - all that stuff was just nonsense. 

No one told us, either, that the hardest thing would not be breaking up, but decay. The disintegration of relationships, people, tastes, bodies, desire. Until you read a sort of morass where you no longer know what is it you love. Or hate. And it's not as unpleasant a condition as you might think. It's just lifelessness. With scattered spots of light."

It is not the clear angles of distinctive personality that are the most astute, but the almost-forgotten experiences that this novel brings into view - the occasional cruelties in the middle of the day, the jab of one terrible humiliation years ago that years after still (as the writer puts it) 'sends its kind regards', the slow but sure accumulation of regret and resentment, and apathy that puts off any drastic action. The monotony of routine and decay broken up by mentions of escape and recollected instances of momentarily losing their senses, barely stifling a scream, being overcome by destructive urges. But these are pure moments when we react and overreact; melodrama has no space here.

The 6:41 to Paris

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