Gallic Noir. Pascal Garnier

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      Pascal Garnier Pascal Garnier was born in Paris in 1949. The prize-winning author of over sixty books, he remains a leading figure in contemporary French literature, in the tradition of Georges Simenon. He died in 2010.

      Melanie Florence Melanie Florence teaches at The University of Oxford and translates from the French.

      Emily Boyce Emily Boyce is in-house translator and editor at Gallic Books.

      ‘Wonderful… Properly noir’ – Ian Rankin

      ‘Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He’s a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read’ A. L. Kennedy

      ‘Horribly funny … appalling and bracing in equal measure. Masterful’ John Banville

      ‘Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement - these are the colours on Garnier’s palette. His books are out there on their own: short, jagged and exhilarating’ Stanley Donwood

      ‘The combination of sudden violence, surreal touches and bone-dry humour have led to Garnier’s work being compared with the films of Tarantino and the Coen brothers’ Sunday Times

      ‘Deliciously dark … painfully funny’ New York Times

      ‘A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard’ Financial Times

      ‘A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony; makes you grin as well as wince’ Sunday Telegraph

      ‘A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon’ Times Literary Supplement

      The A26

      How’s the Pain?

      The Panda Theory

      ‘Small but perfectly formed darkest noir fiction told in spare, mordant prose … Recounted with disconcerting matter of-factness, Garnier’s work is surreal and horrific in equal measure’ Guardian

      ‘Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny’ Sunday Times

      ‘Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit’ The Observer

      ‘Devastating and brilliant’ Sunday Times

      ‘Bleak, often funny and never predictable’ The Observer

      ‘Reminiscent of Joe Orton and the more impish films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol’ Sunday Times

      ‘A guaranteed grisly thriller’ ShortList

      ‘Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining … Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable’ John Powers, NPR

      ‘This is tough, bloody stuff, but put together with a cunning intelligence’ Sunday Times

      ‘Garnier’s world exists in the cracks and margins of ours; just off-key, often teetering on the surreal, yet all too plausible. His mordant literary edge makes these succinct novels stimulating and rewarding’ Sunday Times

      The A26

      How’s the Pain?

      The Panda Theory

      by Pascal Garnier

      Gallic Books

      London

      A Gallic Book

       The A26

      First published in France as L’A26 by Zulma, 1999

      Copyright © Zulma, 1999

      English translation copyright © Gallic Books 2013

      Translation supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Department of the French Embassy in London. www.frenchbooknews.com First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gallic Books

       How’s the Pain?

      First published in France as Comment va la douleur? by Zulma, 2006

      Copyright © Zulma, 2006

      English translation copyright © Gallic Books 2012

      First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Gallic Books

       The Panda Theory

      First published in France as La Théorie du panda by Zulma, 2008

      Copyright © Zulma, 2008

      English translation copyright © Gallic Books 2012

      First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Gallic Books

      This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

      No reproduction without permission

      All rights reserved

      A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN: 978-1-910477-58-8

      Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books

      Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

       The A26

       How’s the Pain?

       The Panda Theory

      The A26

      by Pascal Garnier

      translated from the French by Melanie Florence

      For Isa and Chantal

      The third streetlamp at the end of the road had suddenly gone out. Yolande closed her eye, which was pressed up to the shutter. The echo of the white light went on pulsing on her retina for a few seconds. When she opened her eye again there was only a black hole in the sky over the dead streetlamp.

      ‘I’ve stared at it for too long, and the bulb’s gone.’ Yolande shuddered and left the window. She had been watching the street not through a gap in the shutter but through a hole made specially. In the entire house this was the only opening on the outside world. Depending on her mood, she called it the ‘bellybutton’ or the ‘world’s arsehole’.

      Yolande could have been anywhere from twenty to seventy. She had the blurry texture and outlines of an old photograph. As if she were covered in a fine dust. Inside this wreck of an old woman there was a young girl. You would catch a glimpse of her sometimes in a way she had of sitting down, tugging her skirt over her knees, of running a hand through her hair, a surprisingly graceful movement in that wrinkled skin glove.

      She had sat down at a table, an empty plate in front of her. Across the table another place was set. The ceiling lamp hung quite low, and was not strong enough to light up the rest of the dining room, which remained shrouded in darkness. You could sense, however, that it was cluttered with objects and pieces of furniture. All the air in the room seemed to be concentrated around the table, held within the cone of light shed by the lampshade. Yolande waited, bolt upright in her chair.

      ‘I saw the school bus this morning. The children were wearing every colour imaginable. Getting off the bus, they were like sweets spilling out of a bag. No, it wasn’t this morning, it was yesterday, or maybe the day before. They really did look like sweets. It brightened up just then, a streak of blue between the clouds. In my day children weren’t dressed like that. You didn’t get all those fluorescent colours then, not anywhere. What else did I see? Any cars? Not many. Oh yes, there was the butcher this morning. I’m sure it was