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

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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