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A delight for anyone who wants something different
Book Review
By Derryll White
Vargas, Fred (2011). An Uncertain Place.
Fred Vargas has a very particular mind. She wants to know things and has a tested way of getting answers. She lets her characters lead her – sometimes down enchanting rural French garden paths, sometimes through spates of violent activity. But always the characters ferret out the answers.
Commissaire Adamsberg, Commandant Daglard, Lieutenants Retancourt and Froissy – they all take the author into abandoned places of the mind and hidden corners of the universe. Everything is available to the author’s vivid imagination and honed research skills. Fred Vargas always tells a great story while informing the reader of things previously unknown.
None of the characters are whole. They all lead actionable, interesting lives that embrace their psychological failings. The landscape shifts to Serbia, embracing the thousands of years of myth surrounding the vampire-laden small villages there. Vargas is aware of the ethnic troubles but expresses it simply as clan differences, leading to death.
Fred Vargas is a consummate artist. She paints large murals with carefully chosen words and her translator Siȃn Reynolds pays very close attention to the author’s meanings. This book is a delight for anyone who wants something different.
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Excerpts from the novel:
THE MIND – “I’m just trying to imagine his thought processes, Danglard. I’m trying to see how they think, the wardrobe-eaters, the foot-amputator, or the man whose uncle was eaten by a bear. The thoughts of mankind are like drills opening up tunnels under the sea that you never expected to come into existence.”
RECOGNITION – “But when you’ve seen something like that,” said Adamsberg softly, “a bit of it sticks and stays inside you. Any experience that’s too beautiful or too horrific always leaves some fragment of itself in the eyes of people who have witnessed it. We know that. In fact, that’s how you recognize it.”
“Recognize what?”
“Something either overwhelmingly beautiful or overwhelmingly terrible, Estalére. You recognize it by the shock, by the little splinter that remains.”
SUFFERING – “I don’t mean an ancient, traditional kind of fear, Arandjel. I mean someone who believes this literally, who thinks all the Plogojowitzes are authentic vampiri, and should be exterminated. Is that possible?”
“Yes, undoubtedly if he thinks this has caused all his misfortune. People look for an external cause for their suffering, and the more they suffer, the greater the cause must be. In this case, the killer’s suffering is immense. So his response is on the same scale.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
