2024 Book Review #10: L’Epaisseur d’un cheveu by Claire Berest

Found this one, which starts with a dramatic spoiler — the protagonist will kill his wife in just a few days — on my most recent trip to France.

What seems gruesome, and obviously is, doesn’t appear as such beforehand and is treated in a light, flowing, anecdotal manner.

The writer gives herself time to delve deep into the mechanisms of relationships, the microaggressions and reactions between those who live together. In this case the woman in the couple has had enough, while the man just can’t stand being rejected.

In a YouTube video about her book, the author said in French she wanted to dive into the paradox of how a fantasy of eternal love can turn into a burning realization of instant annihilation.

The guilty man is a Parisian book editor who can’t write but who loves to overedit, to clean up where it's not needed, with his livelihood increasingly on the line. His wife, who he’s never been violent to, barely makes any money, frequents the art world and former flames, and feels increasingly boxed in by her husband’s locked in romance, such as a yearly summer trip to Italy, or a weekly Tuesday night classical music concert.

Going back and forth between a detailed countdown, their youth and reacquaintance, the author shows how the fault lines of love can often be found in the cracks of its origin story, with each partner coming in and deciding to get together through strength but also weakness. It’s shown how partnerships can disintegrate if either party involved lets momentary bouts of anger and abandonment build up and add to each other.

It’s an autopsy, not of the woman’s body, with a murder scene which is told indirectly through a fitful police interrogation, but of a “psychorigid” man who has nothing left in him but despicable violence, and of how exactly a couple can shatter.

Berest used to teach in difficult French schools, calling it a “permanent war” before writing a fascinating book about the French school system and its internal class warfare.

This set her on a successful run as a writer, with a tribute she wrote with her sister about their great grandmother and a novel about Frida Kahlo called Rien n’est noir. L’Epaisseur d’un cheveu or the thickness of a hair strand, which in her book can derail a couple’s ten year love story, was published last year and is well worth a read, however grisly its method of discovery.