The French novelist Dominique Fabre b. Open any of his novels and it can be heard. A colloquial melody both sad and droll, discreet yet somehow spirited. This latter quality especially creates the touching quality of his writing as well as its low-key suspense. Very little happens in his books and what happens is rather unexciting, yet one keeps on reading because his depiction of ordinary human beings caught up in the routines and minor mishaps of daily life so genuinely reflects the lives that most of us lead.
They hail from La Garenne-Colombes, a drab suburb located northwest of Paris. This suburb is neither one of the impoverished, unemployment-ravaged districts found in other, northern, outskirts of the metropolis; nor is it similar to the ritzy residential suburbs also located west of Paris but further to the south from La Garenne-Colombes. Fabre describes an area with no particular reputation whatsoever.
Moreover, it is undergoing urban renewal. The once-suitable, now-rundown apartment buildings where the three men had been brought up are going to be razed. Since their childhood in La Garenne-Colombes, two of the characters, Marco and the narrator, have moved around a bit, fallen in love a few times, had wives and then divorced, and eventually fallen back into loveβwell, more or less.
Their story will take on, if no feverish romantic intensity, increasing seriousness when she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Questions about attachment and responsibility take shape, and the man and the woman cannot avoid responding to them.
Almost despite themselves, they start coming face to face with each other. As the novel opens, the narrator has had a job, lost it, been out of work for two years, but again has an office job that mostly suits him. From his broken marriage, he has a son, Benjamin, who is now in his twenties and to whom he is attached.
