And My See-Through Heart by Véronique Ovaldé

Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter

Paperback, Portobello Books, 2009, ISBN: 1846271819
Price: £10.99

Patricia Mckee

Véronique Ovaldé, an editor in Paris and author of  six novels, has become admired for her blend of realism punctuated with surreal imagination and fantasy. Her brush of stylistic imagery paints a narrative filled with original similes and comedic passages, which pull the reader through an otherwise dark murder mystery that is set against a backdrop of Very Big contemporary issues.

Fourty-something Lancelot is an anti-social romantic with a self-confessed Oedipus complex and a tendency towards hypochondria. Like Meursalt in Camus’ The Outsider, he is a protagonist to whom things happen rather than one to make things happen; a character for whom the outside world of objects and ideology are very much beyond his control. His story is one of existential determinism, simultaneously exploring the determining effects that a mother can have on future relationships, as well as the external factors that can determine the fate of a lover.

His furniture keeps disappearing into what he nonchalantly presumes to be a parallel world, while people seem willing to let themselves be stirred by abstract political issues that appear to him as beyond individual concern. A chronic daydreamer, Lancelot automatically thanks coffee machines and apologises to people who bump into him. Although his masculinity might not boast of that same quality as the Knight of the Round Table’s whose name he shares, Lancelot does nonetheless retain a valiant chivalry in his ‘see-through’ honesty and trusting nature: attributes that prove to be a double-edged sword when trying to dig deep into the evasive history of  his lover.

Indeed, the story begins as Lancelot is yanked out of his vegetative half-life, the day a high heel shoe falls onto his head from the sky. The initially foul-mouthed Cinderella he meets upon returning the symbolic item, provides the passion and excitement that was so sorely missing from his life. He suddenly leaves his wife of seventeen years to embark on a new journey with Irina, the high-heeled, lipstick-wearing femme fatale whose fatality becomes all too literal in the first few pages of the novel, when we are prematurely told that she dies. Her death leads him down a rabbit hole of duplicity, delusions, deceptions and dodgy dealings where time skips back and forth as he attempts to unravel the secrets of his lover’s past. He enters a world where everyone he meets seems to be part of a big conspiracy, knowing who he is, and above all who she was, better than he ever could.

Initially, the plot seems to point to adultery and a fairly unoriginal take on Simone De Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, whereby a devoted wife awakens to realise the man she has been with for years is in fact a stranger. We then have to read through unconvincing and yet recurring thriller subplots that throw in the possibility of a murder: these seem unsatisfying as the police are side-lined and our unlikely detective, whose existentialist ‘laissez-faire’ approach is cradled by a heavy dose of anti-depressants, is incapable of leading any kind of effective inquest.

The dénouement happens of its own accord because, as one character comments, “this is not a soap opera”. Véronique Ovaldé thus gracefully descends from her fantastical and thrilling detective tale into a reality infinitely more shocking because of its far-reaching implications and true echoes in the world we live in. This novel is an enjoyable read throughout, with its chief accomplishment being that, though political, it refrains from forcing any ideologies down readers’ throats. At the same time, Ovaldé still provides us with an education and the potential for opening minds.