VERDICT: Great example of French noir fiction. Can you ever flee and escape your past or your present misery?

Pascal Garnier left us a few great examples of French crime fiction before he died. I reviewed here Moon in a Dead Eye, and I definitely plan to read more by him. In case you are not in the mood for some rosy romance, but for something much more noir and meaty, go no further, The Islanders will perfectly fit the bill!
The plot focuses on four characters:

Olivier is married to Odile. Two years before the book opens, he went through a detox treatment. We meet him first on the train to Paris: his mother just died, and he gets there for the funerals. The severe winter conditions will require him of staying in her apartment longer than expected Jeanne is living in an apartment next to Olivier’s mother. He knocks on her door one day to check something in the phone book, and big surprise: he is face to face with the girl he had a serious affair with, twenty year before! Well, more than an affair...
Rodolphe is blond and obese. He is Jeanne’s brother and lives at her place.
Roland is homeless. He meets Rodolphe by accident, and Rodolphe invites him at his place.
Oh, and la concierge Madeleine!! essential omnipresent French character!!

The four decide one night to have a party together. With lots of consequences…
I really can’t tell you more about the plot without revealing too much.
I really enjoy Garnier’s writing. I’m not too sure how he does it: it’s almost minimalist, it cuts to the point, there’s nothing too much, but just enough to twist together very interesting stories.
In this novel, he tackles the topic of solitude and homelessness at different levels: you may be homeless without a roof above your head, like Roland. But you may have an apartment and still never feel at home, always imagine and dream of a faraway island where things would be so much better than what you have right now. And if you got to that island, would you really be able to escape misery?
Add to that the fact of hopelessness, maybe due to some physical hardships, such as blindness or obesity, or alcoholism, and things get even more complex and noir. Anger and violence relentlessly get to Garnier’s characters, like a monster they can never fully tame, like their darkest hours in their past that eventually catch up with them, whether they remember them or not.

The first Garnier I have read that was a bit of a disappointment - there is bleak and then there is BLEAK, and this novel just wallowed in its own, inescapable hopelessness.

A man returns to Versaille to sort out the funeral and estate of his deceased mother, and chances on an old school-friend, who is wasting her life away by caring for her oversized and blind brother, who has for some reason – blame Christmas – taken in a homeless stray for the season. Two of these people will have the past brought more vividly to life than the others, while some will have a greatly reduced future… In possibly the best of the five or six Garnier books I've read so far, the claustrophobia of the author's usual setting is brilliantly conveyed with the lead man's alcoholism, and the semi-closed, snowed-in city at Christmastime. You also get the black drama of his oeuvre – a very bleak look at life that is at the polar opposite of heart-warming, yet is always engagingly written, and presented in compelling form. Here it's more along the lines of a straight thriller, and none the poorer for it. His concision, wacky yet sensible characters and world-view combine to create yet another fine read, but this time one more readily recommended to others. I wouldn't say he wrote bad books, but this is the best. Four and a half stars.

I’m a great fan of Pascal Garnier’s short noir novels, but this one just didn’t quite live up to expectations. Olivier comes home to bury his mother and something that should have been fairly straight-forward gradually spirals out of control when he meets an old lover. It’s as dark and disturbing as Garnier’s other books but I just wasn’t as convinced by it. Perhaps the absurd took over form the noir a bit too much. Nevertheless, it’s a good read, well-written and well-paced, with Garnier’s trademark wit and incisiveness.

I didn't think it was possible to be disappointed by one of Pascal Garnier's little noir gems, but The Islanders did not live up to the high expectations generated by Moon in a Dead Eye and The A26. This is not to say that The Islanders is a bad book. It is, in fact, a fun, dark Christmas read.

Strangely, although The Islanders is my least favorite Garnier book thus far, it hews most closely to such classic noir hallmarks as a fascination with the grotesque, anxieties about masculinity, and doomed characters who, to quote Otto Penzler, "are caught in the inescapable prisons of their own construction." Every action taken by the blind, obese, and malignant Rodolphe; his alienated sister Jeanne; and the enervated Olivier leads to their inevitable downward spiral. What bothered me was the close resemblance of Olivier's alcoholic madness to that so chillingly documented in the underappreciated 2006 film Bug, starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Having seen that movie, I was not as disturbed by Garnier's verbal depiction of the ant infestation and the sealing of the apartment as he probably intended the reader to be.

Nevertheless, those who have listened to one too many renditions of "Jingle Bells" will find The Islanders a welcome respite; just be sure to bring the bourbon but leave the eggnog behind.

I received a free copy of The Islanders through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you net galley. A well written and well translated novella. A quick read that is difficult to put down. The plot will remind you of other books but the treatment is typically French noir. A funny, weird, ugly, satirical ,.. tale of life and its craziness.