Le manuscrit inachevé by Franck Thilliez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le manuscrit inachevé by Franck Thilliez Nathalie G. Cornelius Thilliez, Franck. Le manuscrit inachevé. Fleuve, 2018. ISBN 978-2-265-11780-8. Pp. 525. Like the chess match it references, the seventeenth thriller of the French master of suspense is a strategic game which opens with two seemingly disparate events whose trajectories create paths of relevant truths and false clues to be explored by its readers. On the outskirts of Grenoble, a high-speed chase ends in the death of a carjacker unaware that his vehicle's trunk contains the corpse of a faceless woman. The resulting investigation embroils officers Vic Altran and Vadim Morel in a macabre case that tests their sanity. In Northern France, Léane Morgan returns to the Côte d'Opale to care for her husband, amnesic since he was mysteriously attacked during his quest into the disappearance of the couple's daughter four years earlier. When Léane decides to retrace her husband's tracks, she finds herself in a predicament that increasingly resembles the gruesome novels for which she has become famous. Thilliez's latest thriller, like his prior works, is informed by science. It examines memory's impact on identity through character studies of traumatic amnesia, cryptomnesia (where memory images are misinterpreted as original creations), and hypermnesia (photographic memory). These aberrations control the novel's perpetrators and detectives alike, compelling them to act in this page-turner. The mathematical obsessions and intellectual preoccupations of Thilliez's novel are reflections of its characters' tortured mentalities. Their penchant to push the limits of the body and mind contaminates the reader's thoughts. Numerical puzzles, secret codes, palindromes, and allusions to the works of great crime authors challenge the readers to find their way among the novel's many clever twists and complications. As the reader strives to penetrate layers of identities and secrets of its characters through its textual language, the novel's nesting-doll structure deconstructs the literary genre in which it participates. Léane's latest novel mirrors the fictitious thriller in which she participates. Most significantly, there is a prologue to the Léane Morgan-Vic Altran cases. This preface, supposedly written by the son of successful crime novelist Caleb Traskman, indicates that Traskman deliberately left off his manuscript's ending before committing suicide. It is the son who finishes the manuscript and publishes it complete with its cryptic numerical and palindromic notations. This warning issued to the reader that the closure provided is provisional at best, and the blurring of the question of authorship, cleverly challenge the readers' vigilance, in turn implicating the reader in the creation process. The result is great fun. The novel's ludic twists are most effective. Much to the readers' amusement, revulsion, and at times, frustration, they are ultimately left to ponder the consequences of the thriller's conclusion well beyond the last page, while looking forward to Thilliez's next foray into interactive literature. [End Page 251] Nathalie G. Cornelius Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French