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    The A26: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir
    The A26: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir
    The A26: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    The A26: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir

    By Pascal Garnier

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    ‘Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He’s a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read.’ A. L. Kennedy

    Bernard lives with his sister Yolande who hasn't left the house since 1945. Bernard is now in the final months of a terminal illness. With no longer anything to lose, he becomes reckless—and murderous.
    Locally the A26 is under construction. Concrete still wet, it stands ready to serve as a discrete cemetery for lost girls.

    "A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince." The Sunday Telegraph
    "A most wonderfully wry noir murder mystery you'll not soon forget."—Durango Herald
    "Garnier's sly, cynical take on life will strike a chord with readers of every age."—Publishers Weekly
    "Ultimately a very dark novel, but a very impressive one."—The Complete Review

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallic Books
    Release dateFeb 11, 2013
    ISBN9781908313539
    The A26: Shocking, hilarious and poignant noir
    Author

    Pascal Garnier

    Pascal Garnier, who died in 2010, was a prolific author of books for adults and children, and a painter. He lived in the mountains of the Ardèche.

    Read more from Pascal Garnier

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    Reviews for The A26

    3.5/5

    28 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I quite like books which have numbers for titles or in this case road numbers. It is a short book, less than one hundred pages.In parts it is pretty gruesome. Somehow it didn't quite do it for me - the characters were not really believable, they couldn't have been in that house all that time, and there was no real atmosphere. Guilt and revenge are dominant and inevitably World War II.
    • 4/5
      I'm very grateful to Gallic Books for introducing me to the works of Pascal Garnier. The A26 is my second Garnier book, following The Panda Theory, and as was the case in The Panda Theory, the lives of the main characters in The A26, Yolande and Bernard, are dark and haunted by the past.The publisher's description of this book led me to expect Bernard to be the driving force of the story, yet it is actually Yolande who serves as its brooding center. She is a paranoid agoraphobe who has never recovered from her experiences in World War II(view spoiler). Those experiences circumscribe, and ultimately define, the siblings' lives for decades, until Bernard's terminal illness irrevocably alters their relationship, both with each other and with the outside world.The A26 was translated by Melanie Florence, and I found her use of British slang (e.g., bugger off, pinny, biro) jarring in a book set in France. I don't recall having the same problem while reading The Panda Theory, which was translated by Svein Clouston. Next up on my Garnier TBR pile is Boxes, also translated by Florence, so I will soon see whether this continues to be an issue.I received a free copy of The A26 through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      Mention of Garnier popped up on Twitter – I don’t remember who it was who RT’d it into my TL – but the description sounded interesting and I liked the look of the Gallic Editions paperbacks (there are eight, including The A26). So I bought one. It was… not what I expected. And sort of good. An aged brother and sister live alone in a house that is a dump – the sister hoards, and refuses to leave the house, after an event during WWII. The brother has been diagnosed with a fatal illness – cancer, I think – and has months to live. He retires from his job at the local railway station. And murders some people. Sort of accidentally, certainly unpremeditated. Meanwhile, the titular road is mentioned in passing as it is being built nearby. That original tweet described Garnier’s fiction as Ballardian, and I can sort of see the resemblance, but it reminded me more of some of the French noir Jacques Tardi has adapted. I wasn’t blown away, but I might try some more.

    Book preview

    The A26 - Pascal Garnier

    The third streetlamp at the end of the road had suddenly gone out. Yolande closed the eye she had glued to the shutter. The echo of the white light went on pulsing on her retina for a few seconds. When she opened her eye again there was only a black hole in the sky over the dead streetlamp.

    ‘I’ve stared at it for too long, and the bulb’s gone.’ Yolande shuddered and left the window. She had been watching the street not through a gap in the shutter but through a hole made specially. In the entire house this was the only opening on the outside world. Depending on her mood, she called it the ‘bellybutton’ or the ‘world’s arsehole’.

    Yolande could have been anywhere from twenty to seventy. She had the blurry texture and outlines of an old photograph. As if she were covered in a fine dust. Inside this wreck of an old woman there was a young girl. You would catch a glimpse of her sometimes in a way she had of sitting down, tugging her skirt over her knees, of running a hand through her hair, a surprisingly graceful movement in that wrinkled skin glove.

    She had sat down at a table, an empty plate in front of her. Across the table another place was set. The ceiling lamp hung quite low, and was not strong enough to light up the rest of the dining room, shrouded in darkness. You could sense, however, that it was cluttered with objects and pieces of furniture. All the air in the room seemed to be concentrated around the table, held within the cone of light shed by the lampshade. Yolande waited, bolt upright in her chair.

    ‘I saw the school bus this morning. The children were in every colour imaginable. Getting off the bus, they were like sweets spilling out of a bag. No, it wasn’t this morning, it was yesterday, or even the day before. They really did look like sweets. It brightened up just then, a dash of blue between the clouds. In my day children weren’t dressed like that. You didn’t get all those fluorescent colours then, not anywhere. What else did I see? Any cars? Not many. Oh yes, there was the butcher this morning. I’m sure it was this morning. He comes every Sunday morning. I saw him parking, the old bastard. He’s always trying to see in. He’s been at it for years. He never sees anything, and he knows it.’

    Beef, some stringy, some covered in fat, with a marrow bone to boil up for a pot-au-feu. It was ready, had been cooking away all day. Bub, bub, bubble. The pan lid was lifting, dribbling out greyish froth, a powerful smell, strong like sweat. ‘What else did I see?’

    Yolande showed no surprise at hearing the three quick taps at the door and the key turning in the lock. Her brother had always knocked three times to let her know it was him. There was no point, since no one ever came. But he did it anyway.

    Yolande was still sitting with an empty plate. The room was cold, the cooker was off. Bernard hung up his wet coat. Underneath he was wearing an SNCF uniform. He was around fifty, and looked like the sort of person you would ask for some small change, the time or directions in the street. He kissed his sister ‘Good evening’ on the back of the neck as he went round to take his place opposite her. Locking his fingers, he cracked his knuckles before unfolding his napkin. He had a yellowish complexion and big dark shadows under his eyes. His flattened hair showed the circular imprint of his cap.

    ‘Haven’t you started? You should have, it’s late.’

    ‘No, I was waiting for you. I was wondering when the school bus last went by.’

    ‘Saturday morning, I expect.’

    ‘You’ve got mud all over you. Is it raining?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Oh.’

    They were both equally still, sitting upright in their chairs. They looked at each other without really seeing, asked questions without waiting for an answer.

    ‘I had a puncture coming home from the station, near the building site. It’s all churned up round there. You’d think the earth was spewing up mud. That’s their machinery, excavators, rollers, all that stuff. The work’s coming along quickly, but it’s doing damage.’

    ‘Have you still got a temperature?’

    ‘Sometimes, but it goes over. I’m taking the tablets the doctor gave me. I’m a bit tired, that’s all.’

    ‘Shall I serve up?’

    ‘If you like.’

    Yolande took his plate and disappeared into the shadows. The ladle clanged against the side of the pot, and there was a sound of trickling juices. Yolande came back and handed the plate to Bernard. He took it, Yolande kept hold.

    ‘Have you been scared?’

    Bernard looked away and gave the plate a gentle tug.

    ‘Yes, but it didn’t last. Give it here, I’m feeling better now.’

    Yolande went back for her own food. From the shadows she said, without knowing whether it was a question or a statement, ‘You’ll get more and more scared.’

    Bernard began to eat, mechanically.

    ‘That may be, I don’t know. Machon’s given me some new pills.’

    Yolande ate in the same way, as if scooping water out of a boat.

    ‘I saw the butcher this morning. He tried to see in again.’

    Bernard shrugged. ‘He can’t see anything.’

    ‘No, he can’t see anything.’

    Then they stopped talking and finished their lukewarm pot-au-feu.

    Through the closed shutters, shafts of light from the street picked out occasional sections of the chaos cluttering the dining room. A network of narrow passages built into the heaped-up jumble of furniture, books, clothing, all kinds of things, made it possible to get from one room to another provided you changed your shape to move like an Egyptian. Stacks of newspapers and magazines were more or less managing to prop up this rubbish tip, which threatened to collapse at any moment.

    At the table, Yolande had swept the used plates, cutlery and glasses from the evening before into one corner. She was busy cutting pictures out of a magazine and sticking them on to pieces of cardboard to make a kind of jigsaw puzzle. By day the pendant lamp still oozed the same dead light as it did by night.

    ‘Bernard’s not gone to work today, he wasn’t up to it. He’s getting tireder and tireder, thinner and thinner. His body’s like this house, with seams hollowed out of it. Where am I going to put him when he’s dead? There’s not a bit of space left anywhere. We’ll get by, we’ve always got by, ever since I can remember. Nothing has ever left this house, even the toilet’s blocked up. We keep everything. Some day, we won’t need anything else, it’ll all be here, for ever.’

    Yolande hummed to herself, to the accompaniment of mice scrabbling and Bernard’s laboured breathing in the room next door.

    He was asleep or pretending to be. He was fiddling with a sparkling pendant on a gilt chain: ‘More than yesterday and much less than tomorrow.’

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