I'm Gone

This short novel is a potpourri of genres--it's a mystery, a social commentary on life in Paris (with the requisite French digs at other countries, including the U.S.), a travel/adventure story, a meditation about love and lust, and a study of midlife crisis. Its main character, Felix Ferrer, a marginally successful gallery owner whose main preoccupation is his own ego, is interested in locating and then selling paleoarctic artifacts from a ship lost near the Arctic Circle long ago, when it became icebound. When the artifacts, his former partner, his wife, a succession of girlfriends, and his financial security all disappear within a short period of time, Felix rouses himself and sets out to regain the artifacts, and, perhaps, some control over his life. Echenoz is an immensely skillful writer. He creates a fast-paced narrative in which Ferrer ranges from his Parisian art gallery, to the Arctic, where he lives with a seal-hunting family (nice contrasts here), and back to Paris and Spain, and Echenoz makes these transitions seamlessly. His imagery is often striking, and there's a good deal of sardonic humor and light satire about Parisian life. His ability to make the reader see the world through the eyes of Ferrer, and his observations about people, are sometimes startling and original. Unfortunately, the "hero," Ferrer, is so blasé and so obnoxiously self-satisfied that it's difficult to care much about his world or what happens to him, and the whole novel feels smug. The unnamed narrator's snide and self-important asides degenerate rapidly from cute to annoying ("Personally, I've had it up to here with [a certain character]. His daily life is too boring."). The characters' casual cruelty toward everyone in a subordinate position, their universal lack of "engagement," and their treatment of women as objects further distance the reader and reflect the feeling that becoming involved or caring intensely about anything at all is somehow unsophisticated or bourgeois. Although the author is hugely talented and his book did win the Prix Goncourt, it lacks the vitality and sense of commitment I've come to associate with this prize. And if it's satire, it somehow rings too true. Mary Whipple

The first short chapter of Echenoz's novel struck me as self-conscious and awkward, perhaps a bad translation, and then . . . magic. I could not put this book down. No wonder this book was a bestseller in France. Echenoz has crafted a finely tuned, fast paced novel of intrigue and personal crisis, a combination that will take you to the end of its 193 pages in no time at all.Ferrer leaves his wife in the first sentence and embarks on a bizarre journey that takes him into the arms of women, across the tundra of the Arctic Circle, and through the streets of Paris. I won't divulge more of the plot because half the fun of this book is discovering why Ferrer is where he is, and what will happen next. The chapters zigzag through time, taking the reader backward and forward, sometimes sideways to another setting at the same point in time. And the translation I thought might be substandard? Wrong. This novel vibrates with witty observations that could not possibly be effective with a less than first-rate translator. The descriptions and insights, the way one builds to the next, are astounding. Some are simply hilarious: a pack of unruly sled dogs ignores shouts and whippings to devour a mastodon half frozen in the tundra; Ferrer's assistant Delahaye calls "to mind those anonymous, grayish plants that grow in cities, between the exposed pavements of an abandoned warehouse yard, in the heart of a crack corrupting a ruined facade; a Paris that has "still air rich in toxic gases."I highly recommend this book both for serious readers and those who want to sample something a little different from the mass market paperbacks lining the walls of airport bookstores.