Cherokee [Hardcover]

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."

It has been nearly ten years and still there is only one Amazon review of one of the most entertainingly written books I've ever read, by a writer whose skill with language and storytelling ranks with Barthelme and Nabokov. Please, read that 10-year old review, and then come back for what I believe it misses.

Ready? Ok. Yes the plot is a bit complicated and replete with colorful characters that can be a little difficult to keep straight. But none of that detracts in the least from the fun. Like Echenoz's delightful "I'm gone," "Cherokee," is simply an unbridled scream. This results not so much from the preposterously quirky plot twists, which are plentiful, but from Echenoz's virtuoso descriptions and masterful command of language wielded more playfully than I thought possible. Who else would stop in the middle of a fistfight to describe a folded road map blown across the parking lot: "Then the road map gained a sort of momentum under the feeble wind, crawling on its belly in spasmodic creasings like a giant earthworm on Benzedrine, with a mechanical frozen rhythm suggesting the posthumous spirit of a decapitated duck." Or would describe a room as one in which "hung a greenish, slightly shiny tissue that gave the hall the atmosphere of an empty, badly cleaned swimming pool, in the basement of a tropical grand hotel fallen on hard times." Or describe a character who watches "...the same dog running after the same branch that the same single man threw and threw again. George felt like the dog, but without a branch; like that single man, but without a dog." Or of an older Englishman: "His smile was not arrogant, but rather resigned, and revealed a row of overlapping teeth, leaning, after the fashion of his hair, in all directions like old gravestones." Or someone watching passersby as "...casting the distracted glance of a vacationing ethnographer." Who else, tell me, would write "...the chilly night, regularly drilled by the orange beams of streetlamps toward which Brownian colonies of phototropic insects gravitated." Not to mention Echenoz's occasional, brilliantly over-the-top passages such as: "...the countryside let itself be gently crushed by a sky streaked with filaments of fine, milky, linear, almost translucent clouds like saliva or albumen, diffracting orange-pink tones in that great, calm clarity of a pale blue approaching obscurity, in which traces of jet engines faded and by a mimetic process became mixed in with the clouds. In the distance, on the placid declivity of a field ridged with pen-and-ink furrows, a tractor advanced imperceptively." You can just see the yeoman translator, Mark Polizzotti, slumping in exhaustion over his desk after a passage like that.
Even though language play is its raison d'etre, the story of Cherokee is ripe for adaptation by, say, the Coen Brothers, for a whimsical, semi-nonsensical, noir-style Paris policier scored with the jazz tunes it references, including the title track.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars