Cherokee

This offbeat French novel (which won the Prix Médicis in 1983) is hard to pin down. It more or less follows the story of George Chave, a tall but otherwise nondescript middle-aged Parisian collector of jazz records. He lives off a meager inheritance until one day he meets a woman, falls in love, and discovers the need for greater income. This more or less leads him to a job at a very strange detective agency, where he is involved in searches for a rare missing parrot, a runaway wife, the heir to a great fortune, and becomes entangled in a weird cult. Along the way one meets geriatric booksellers, giant thugs, intrepid policemen, suspicious private eyes, a homicidal cousin, actors and actresses, an odd Englishmen, a police informer, and several others. That, in a nutshell, explains what's wrong with the book-there are too many characters in too small a space and keeping track of everyone's agendas gets to be rather a chore. However, the prose is both dry and humorous, and worth reading for its' own sake. You have to love a book that starts with, "One day a man came out of a shed."