With Michael Collins, one knows that you should never expect to literature fun, light and bouncy, a novel Summer punctuation smiling. No, Michael Collins is where souls are languishing, where the spirits take a tortuous path and never in the line they would have hoped. He draws the characters relate gross disorder, always inclined to miss something, and often their lives.
Placing a recurring stories in the eighties, he presents here an ultimately banal scene right away: E. Robert Pendleton, a professor at the University of Bannockburn was also missing something: his writing career. Stranded in the darkness of a job with the routine and depressing superficiality, he is regularly confronted his professional failure resurfaces when her friend turned enemy Allen Horowitz, bestselling author and master of bestsellers.
At their last meeting, Pendleton knows it is time for him to commit suicide. Surprised not to have thought earlier. Proceeded to act ... and misses his suicide. Too.
In a coma, yet he left behind a will that binds it despite Adi Wiltshire, a student struggling later on to complete his doctorate, his life as a vegetable. Because she had sided with of Horowitz, Pendleton leaves him the burden of being the legatee of his work.
And rummaging in his cartoons Adi finds a novel published at the author, "The Scream," a sort of autobiography of a murderer. Discovering a true masterpiece, Adi Horowitz joins to republish "The Scream". A success.
But soon, there is a reconciliation of the story and murder, real one, a 13 year old girl, which occurred ten years earlier, at the time of the first edition of the novel Pendleton ...
Guilt, ambition, hypocrisy, manipulation ... Characters in questioning, vague identities, shoved, the atmosphere is dark, souls are gray. Even the police officer placed on the investigation, escaping his memories and his family life, pursued also by his personal failings and his obsessions.
No light but a sharper art to develop a picture deep, carefully thought out and realistic. Collins is a fascinating writer, even if it takes us into dark corners, although we did see the dark so much so that white would end almost by us blinking.
more accessible than "The die emerald" or "guards the truth," "The Secret Life of E. Robert Pendleton is still a novel dense, extremely well built, with an intelligence that commands admiration. Of the great literary quality ...
