Fred Vargas
Un Luogo Incerto

An outrageously ugly book.

I've always thought that an Artist, be it a writer, painter, musician, director, etc., up to a certain point in their artistic life produces for pleasure, and afterward, depending on each one's fortune, produces under contract.

Very few cases of those who have published final and great works (Kubrick, De André, Fante).

Here it is: this is a book written under contract. Badly written by an author who usually writes well. Not flowing, chaotic, cunning beyond all limits of decency.

Why cunning? Because it seeks caricatured sympathy (the usual... already elsewhere tiresome and not entertaining), without finding it, because it involves the very trendy and boring vampires according to a purely random scheme as well as too much like winking, and it constructs a tiny little story where the twists are worthy of a South American telenovela (discovering that he is the son of, who is also the nephew of... oh my goodness...).

Pity.

And, as a longtime devotee both of trash and camp (conscious trash) I can guarantee that this writing cannot be classified in any of the two categories. Firstly (no offense to women) because it is not typical for women to dedicate themselves either to trash or, even less, to conscious trash, then because any work that can be classified in the category of "sublime gaudy" has a component of fun, of stupidity, that would still make the reading (or viewing, listening) enjoyable and appreciable.

Here, my friends, you truly get bored to death.

I, who am not a woman (women, as we know, still have to finish reading the books) would normally have thrown it out the window by the thirtieth page. In this case, I forced myself to reach the end of the book, for the sole purpose of seeing how far—and for how long—the French writer, champion of sales and revenues, could take me for a ride. I guarantee you: a lot.

Stay away, as, unfortunately, one must stay away from most of the recent publications of the big publishing houses (big on sales, and too often small on content).

Amen.