Folk tale

    This is an enormously impressive book. It has been hailed as Philippe Claudel's masterpiece, and though I don't know his other work, Brodeck's Report is so extraordinarily fine that it would be hard to better it. I finished it on Saturday and read another novel straight through yesterday, but mentally I am still in the mountains with Brodeck and in this book which is both beautiful and terrible.

     Apparently set just after the second world war and in the border lands between France and Germany, it reads more like a fable or a Brothers Grimm fairytale from nameless mountain country where a village is almost cut off from the outside world. Apart from a few modern references, it could be describing life a century or two ago, and this timeless quality and the village's remoteness is part of the book's strange magic.

    Brodeck has survived truly dreadful events, and now in more settled times he has returned to his home and subsists as a recorder of natural data for a faraway Administration. When a mysterious and eccentric visitor to the village meets a violent death, Brodeck is charged by the mayor with writing a report of the incident; in doing so, his own story and that of the village is revealed.

    At once simple and profound (and all credit to the translator who has produced a seamless work), the book dissects with the sharpest of scalpels and so with great delicacy the idea of 'otherness', of what it is to be a stranger, someone from 'the outside', and in its spare, lucid prose it is extremely powerful. I can't recommend it too highly.