Through the window
French author spins razor-sharp comedy of neighborly curiosity

Through the window
Jeffrey Mannix - 01/09/2025

This year’s quarter-century promises some anticipated social and political crescendos to reorder or disfigure comforts or traditions. It appears the bolts have been blowing out of everything, and disintegration is the new progress. The trend from U.S. crime fiction publishers of anti-intellectual product and excessive flummery is following the swirl of disparaging achievement so the unqualified don’t feel unequal. European crime fiction writers soar above only the rarest U.S. counterpart.

That brings us to the “Murder Ink” selection to start the new year, master French storyteller Antoine Laurain’s deceptively unfussy “French Windows.” The respectful 175-page eccentric mystery is ably translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie. 

This is a curious little book telling a story about a Freudian psychiatrist in Paris and his treatment of a scurrilous young woman. Making a subsistence living as a photographer, she is now unable or unwilling to take even one more picture.

Natalia Guitry, the unlikely patient, calls herself a street photographer, drinks at various times throughout the day after the first beer in the morning, does dope and goes out daily with her cameras to capture the street scene in Paris. She’s 30 years old going on to or coming down from some other age when it’s convenient, and particularly suited to play mind games with Dr. Faber. She sits cautiously at her first appointment on Faber’s therapy couch before timidly reclining, because she knows how this abracadabra goes.

Natalia is something of a vixen, a talent at whatever oddity strikes her curiosity. Psychoanalysis is her latest passing interest, because she’s lost her mojo. 

And Faber couldn’t be better cast: parochial about not leading a patient, not criticizing a patient, prompting patient self-analysis, remaining silent for the 60-sixty minute session if the patient doesn’t talk – all under the penumbra of Freudian sexual repression. 

Faber knows it’s all about the patient, and Natalia knows that, too. And after a few sessions, she has Faber craving more than he’s getting and turning to Google for guidance.

“French Windows” starts out curiously enough, as the patient/doctor relationship attempts establishment:

What can I do for you, Natalia?

I think my life is a failure.

And what makes you think that?

I feel as if I’m not fully alive. My professional life is a failure.

And what do you do?

I’m a photographer. She smiles apologetically.

Tell me about that. (“Now, at this precise moment, we are in analysis; the first real contact with the patient.”)

I’ve run out of work.

And why do you think that is?

I’ve lost my talent. (“I’ll put her with the Melancholic Depressives.”)

Can you remember the last photograph you took?

Yes.

What was it of?

A murder.

Ever careful not to violate Freud’s dictum of not showing surprise or questioning a patient, on the next visit, Faber proposes a course of therapy far removed from photography that he feels could be his own breakthrough in changing the dreaded melancholia for – oh, can he even say it? – normalcy.

At the next session, Faber is exuberant: “You say you watch the occupants of the five floors of the north wing of your building from your apartment window? I’m going to make a suggestion: a change of strategy for our sessions. Here’s what I suggest: you will bring a short, written piece each time, about life on one floor of the building. A true story, or one you’ve made up, it doesn’t matter which. And we’ll go from floor to floor, starting at the ground floor, then the first, second, third … Up to the fifth floor. Do you think you can do that?” 

Natalia agrees but sniggers a caution Faber’s way if he thinks her stories are going to tell something about herself. And Natalia insists she can’t bear to watch him read what she’s written and won’t bring stories with her but instead post them in advance of each session.

Right here is where this book becomes precious, funny and too short. Natalia’s stories of residents on each floor are so good, so real, that Faber is overwhelmed with curiosity, and we begin to wonder just who the patient in the therapy session is. Faber begins obsessively investigating the veracity of Natalia’s larger-than-life characters on each floor. 

“French Windows” is a wonderful, ironic comedy, and Antoine Laurain will continue to be thought of as a French novelist on the order of Georges Simenon with surgical ability.

I loved “French Windows.” Don’t miss this short, blade-sharp literary performance. And ask Maria’s Bookshop for your 15% Murder Ink discount.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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