Leaden penetrations, as when a hard and horrible truth finally bashes its way in front of your attention, are the most burdensome but blessedly, the most rapid to pass. The big stuff; getting shitcanned over a ludicrous idea; the death of a pet; a compound- fracture car accident; being foreclosed. Or an insidious thin noise, everpresent, heard just behind every word being spoken to you, as what happens during a slow and maschocistic break-up. This is how Separation, by Dan Franck, makes every page ring in sadness and anger, but all the more so, by making his essential truths draw out in cathartic strokes.
The breakup realizes immediately on the first page, and as you look through the smoke of the bomb that just blew up in your hands you spend the next two hundred pages trying to fathom the casualties. Not one thing ends happily, and Franck makes it detestably good. Each page squeezes the heart a little tighter, as the narrator and his wife of seven years separate. The one-up-manship thrilled and disgusted; the couple break-up all over Paris and the melancholy rollick which by the end has your lungs as wet as the slaughtered couple.
The book was found for me at the library, when we were looking for books set in France ahead of an upcoming trip. Franck scores wonders. Each savory place and setting was kept crisp and inspired, and it kept me awash in memory. The narrator's battlegrounds with his wife are made just the more evocative. I finished the book with scortched hands.
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