The less time I have for reading, the more I come to appreciate short novels, books that can be polished off over the course of a couple of three hour flights, plus maybe an hour at lights out.
I chose to read Unknown, by French writer Didier van Caulewaert, primarily on account of its length - 235 relatively small pages - and to a lesser degree for a plot that seemed to have Bourne-like potential. (And certainly not for the film tie-in cover, which is usually a turn off.)
Of course being a short novel isn't enough in itself - although sometimes I wonder if the publishing industry believes that if a thriller isn't a 380 page monster it's not worth printing - but when it packs as much in as Unknown does it is a particular pleasure. And Unknown really does pack a great deal iin. Multum in Parvo, as it says on welcome signs in Rutland. (England's smallest county).
The premise is a simple one: a man is released from hospital after a couple of days in a coma. When he returns home to his Paris flat, neither his wife nor his neighbour recognises him, and a man claiming both his name and to be his wife's husband unceremoniously kicks him off the property. Martin Harris suddenly finds himself very much on the outside looking in at his own life. Utterly bewildered and increasingly doubting his own memory and sanity he sets off on a frantic 36 hour race to answer a most fundamental human question that most of us only ever ask ourselves in the abstract: Who am I?
Of course in the modern world we leave more traces than we did a century ago - even if we perhaps know, and are known to, far fewer people, and so Harris is not entirely without resource. Even so, the only human help he can find is from a virtual stranger - the taxi driver who knocked him over causing his injury in the first place.
In the interest of suspense I can't say a lot more about the plot, but what I can say is that this is a clever and tense thriller, and one with a tremendous ending; the sort of ending that makes you rethink the entire narrative (like The Sixth Sense movie).
On top of the terrific plot, this is a philosophical gem (well, it is a French novel, after all). Before you finish, you too will be asking "who am I?" and dwelling on the fragile nature of the immensely complicated existences we lead in the modern world and the maze of electronic data and organic memory that forms our identity.
I loved this little book. I loved it because I read it in 24 hours, because it thrilled me with its tight and tense plotting and because it made me think. What more could you want from 235 relatively short pages?
