NEEDLING

I decided to re-read this polar by Eliette Abécassis. I needed something to read. I wanted it to be a novel with some sort of detective-like drive behind its narrative. I wanted it to be in French. (I’m a big fan of French thriller-detective genre called Polar or Noir.) I like Eliette Abécassis. I enjoy religious-theme thrillers, and she happens to be an excellent writer. I don’t find the whole book entirely credible, however I find it entertaining and engrossing, in the sense that – it’s been several years since I’d first read it and I’d forgotten the “twist” – once it grabs you, you have to keep going, keep reading, from one sentence to the next, whether in the morning with breakfast, during some off time at work when there aren’t any customers, or when your fellow work colleagues finally show up for their shift, and you have to go to the toilet and sit on the throne for as long as you think it possible before they start wondering what the hell you’re doing in there... reading... following the characters from one discovery to the next. At night, even though you’re tired from a long day’s work and you’ve got to open the store in the morning, you pour yourself a whisky and read as much as you can, though your eyes hurt and you’re a little bit drunk, and you might forget what you’ve read in the morning... you need to make some time, get to the next page, to the next chapter, to the next section, you need to know: Who killed Carl Rudolf Schiller!? Cut him in half, and left only the bottom half of his cadaver behind for the police to find. The story in this book takes place in the late nineties, mostly in Paris, but also in New York City, Israel, Germany, and Poland, via Rome. It revolves around the atrocities of WWII, what happened then, why it happened, Judaism, Christianity... collabos, résistants, faut résistants, Vichy... prisoners of death camps who survived, what they and their torturers became. Their families... It raises many questions, and gets you thinking about the Shoah. I didn’t realize this year is the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps when I started reading this book. I learnt about it while reading Le Monde last week.