The Case of Lisandra P. by Hélène Grémillon
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book was written in 2013 but it wasn’t translated into english until 2016, most likely to feed the demand for ever-more psych suspense/marriage thrillers in the wake of gone girl on the train fever.
but like anything that comes at the end of a massive wave, it’s more made up of leftover flotsam and jetsam than something that’s gonna bowl you over with its impressive force.
and it’s a shame, because this book is very close to being very good, but it ultimately ends up taking on too much and getting bogged down in itself. and maybe part of it is translation, which is something i always have to consider, but with psychological suspense, in order to provide the most successful narrative, the story needs to be sleek and taut and riveting, and this one was like a ball of tape being batted across a catfur-covered carpet picking up too much dead weight to maintain its forward momentum.
the premise is hot: the year is 1987 and lisandra, the beautiful young wife of successful psychoanalyst dr. vittorio puig, is found dead after falling six stories from the window of their buenos aires apartment. dr. puig is the primary suspect, and is quickly arrested and incarcerated for murrrrderrr. however, one of his patients, eva maria, is determined to prove his innocence, and she embarks on her own amateur investigation into lisandra, dr. puig, and a handful of his other patients, aided by the juicy recordings of their therapy sessions.
eva maria is a wonderfully unreliable narrator. her daughter was one of the desaparecidos who went missing during Argentina’s Dirty War, and she has been grieving for five years over her loss, emotionally abandoning estéban, the grown son who still lives with her and drinking heavily to prolong her mourning. she quickly becomes obsessed with her investigation into lisandra’s death, using the thrill of voyeurism and her seemingly noble intentions to fill her daughter’s absence and displace her grief temporarily.
the patient tapes uncover several likely suspects who may have wanted to see dr. puig framed for murder, but they also reveal crimes and secrets that hit eva maria close to her own emotional damage.
on the one hand, setting this story in such a tumultuous time and place is smart because it lends the darkness of these historical atrocities to the atmosphere of a smaller-scale tragedy while it explores the linked psychological aftermath of traumas both personal and national.
but this benefit is undermined by a series of strange structural choices that give a more gimmicky presentation to the book. some of them, like the inclusion of the sessions as transcripts, work well because they give a necessary immediacy to the revelations contained therein, but then there are eva maria’s handwritten notes, some pictures, a chapter where eva maria’s interior monologue is broken up by her counting the stairs as she climbs
and the final chapter is a stream-of-consciousness account of what is running through lisandra’s head as she falls, story by story, broken into six segments, ending with GROUND.
all this does is add an awkward playfulness to the book, awkward because it’s typographical levity juxtaposed against horrific war crimes; the stylistic equivalent of a squeaky toy at a funeral. and while i do appreciate the shape and content of that last chapter, there’s not enough ephemera to make it seem worth it, but there’s too much for it not to be jarring and feel half-assed. for example, there are only two pictures, but that makes the decision to have any pictures even more bizarre, as they contribute nothing to the story by being there.
why
bother?
with the short chapters and the transcripts, it reads a little screenplayish and while the individual transcripts make for solid introductory character studies, so few of them contribute to the linear narrative, that it’s just a collection of stories of historical atrocities, troubled relationships both romantic and familial, affairs, political horror, and jealousy that bulks up the story without adding any nutritional value.
and the ending is just silly.
lots of readers liked this more then i did, so odds are good you will disagree with me. if it had just tried to be a straightforward psych suspense thriller, i’d have cut it more slack, but the fact that it brought more ambitious goals to the table and then not only failed to deliver on their promise but basically abandoned the attempt altogether to settle for some silly and messy conclusion – that bothers me more than a swing and a miss.
low three for me
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