Article 353

by Tanguy Viel Narrated by Jamie Renell

Overview

This atmospheric noir novel retraces the steps that led to a murder off the coast of Brittany, probing the relationship between law and justice.

In a depressed town on France's northern coast, a man named Martial Kermeur has been arrested for the murder of real estate developer Antoine Lazenec after throwing him overboard. Called before a judge, Kermeur goes back to the beginning to explain what brought him to this desperate point: his divorce, his son's acting out, layoffs at his job, and, above all, Lazenec's dazzling project for a seaside resort. The temptation to invest all of your severance pay in a beautiful apartment with a view of the sea is great. But still, it has to be built.

In this subtle, enthralling novel, Tanguy Viel examines not only the psychology of a crime, but also the larger social ills that may offer its justification.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

11/19/2018
Martial Kremeur, the narrator of this beguiling noir from French author Viel (Beyond Suspicion), isn’t surprised when the police arrest him a few hours after heaving Antoine Lazenac out of Lazenac’s fishing boat and leaving the man to drown miles off the Brittany coast. What follows is Kremeur’s explanation for his crime to the judge presiding over his case. Kremeur, a laid-off shipwright employed as a groundskeeper at a rundown château, gradually reveals how he got conned into investing all his cash in an ocean-view apartment in a building complex that Lazenac, a slick property developer, was promising to construct on the site of the château. After six years, Kremeur realizes that Lazenac has no intention of doing anything. Meanwhile, Kremeur’s 17-year-old son is feeling the strain his father is under and acts out. Arresting metaphors enliven the spare prose (when Kremeur signs the papers sealing the real estate deal, “it felt like I’d had the Shroud of Turin authenticated by Christ in person”). Viel should win new American fans with this elegant effort. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Sharp and memorable…a dark fable that reads like one of Georges Simenon’s “romans durs” or psychological novels, which winningly fuse together lean prose, queasy atmospherics, raw emotion and moral conundrums…[Viel] satisfies with a potent concoction of mystery, complexity and tightly coiled tension.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“Mesmerizing and powerful…a biting social drama, a gripping psychological thriller and an incisive morality tale…elegantly written, there is a beautiful simplicity of style that makes this so readable you will probably want to devour it in one sitting.” —NB
 
“[A] beguiling noir…Arresting metaphors enliven the spare prose…Viel should win new American fans with this elegant effort.” —Publishers Weekly

“Fresh and absorbing…grippingly told.” —Library Journal

“A surgically slim masterpiece…everything crime fiction used to be and ought to be…a brilliant story.” —The Durango Telegraph

“A spare and lyrical tale of revenge and injustice.” —CrimeReads, 14 Crime Novels to Read This Month

“[Article 353] reads effortlessly and grippingly…an exceptionally well-written novel that completely and easily sucks the reader in.” —The Complete Review
 
“A subtle interrogation of the ways justice is conceived of and delivered.” —Ploughshares

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172941450
Publisher:	Everand Productions
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Nobody wants to fall overboard fully clothed into the ocean anywhere in the world, even close to shore—it’s such a surprise for the body to find itself in this new element. One moment, the man is on a bench in a boat, chatting at the stern rail while rigging his lines, and the next he’s in another world, with gallons of salt water, numbing cold, and the weight of wet clothes making it hard to swim.
Our boat was still slowly put-putting along, with little waves gently slapping against the hull. There were rocky islets in the distance that would soon be awash, while terns and seagulls circled overhead to see what we had caught, as if we were a trawler. In this case, a lobster and two crabs. Which is what was in the pot when we hauled it up, the two of us hoisting it over the rail—because there were still two of us at that point. People seeing us might have thought we were two old friends, as we raised the lobster pot together and checked the crabs struggling and beating against the wire mesh while we lowered the heavy pot into the cockpit. He was the one who pulled the lobster out and tossed it into the bucket quickly enough to avoid its claws, which started snapping at the plastic sides. Pleased as Punch at catching a lobster, he said: Kermeur, this is my first lobster, I’m giving it to you.
Today, I couldn’t say if it was that thing he said or something else, but I know that not long afterward I was watching him flailing in the water, ignoring the splashes he was raising. Maybe he thought it was a bad joke. Maybe he thought he could make it to some rock or other that might be dry at low tide. Even the laughing terns perched on the sharp ridges of the few distant rocks jutting above the horizon seemed to think that what had just happened was normal, I mean a guy falling into cold water and trying to swim fully dressed, gasping and yelling to me for help: Kermeur, goddammit, come help me! Kermeur, what the hell are you up to? And he added “asshole” and “fucker” and “son of a bitch,” thinking this would spur me to action. No dice; that was out of the question. I could already sense that even the seagulls, looking as white and cold as nurses because they never blink, even the seagulls approved. I’ve since thought that to really understand what happened at that moment, you’d have to ask a seagull.
I stepped into the wheelhouse and pushed the throttle lever, alone now at the helm of a thirty-foot Merry Fisher as if I were piloting my own boat, sitting in the leather chair behind the salt-spotted window, the crabs lying resigned at my feet. From the outside, I’m sure people would have taken me for an old fisherman accustomed to going out on his boat every day, silent by nature and spare in his movements, while the noisy wake behind me drowned out his screams. Then I pushed the lever a little harder, and with four hundred horses propelling us, the boat and I covered the five miles to the harbor in barely a quarter of an hour. You sure can’t swim five miles, especially in water as cold as it is off our coast in June.
I moored the boat at the same place from where we’d taken it an hour earlier, Dock A, Slip 93. There wasn’t anyone, or hardly anyone, in the harbor that morning, and I behaved as if nothing were out of the ordinary. I tied up the boat as if it were mine, climbed the iron gangway to the quay, and got into my car in the parking lot. Surely, I thought, someone would have watched the whole scene from a window or behind a curtain. In the car, I remember telling myself that at that moment the whole thing was being written with black ink in someone’s observing eye.
I wasn’t surprised when the police rang at my door a few hours later. I couldn’t say if it was the gendarmerie or the national police, but there were four of them, two guys in uniform at the door and two others, a little more discreet, in the van parked at the end of the path. I must have a pretty guilty conscience to not be surprised to see the law swoop down on me like a vulture, already sinking its talons into my shoulders. And thinking back now, even if I’d seen them coming from afar, even if I’d spotted them on the highway with binoculars and figured they were coming for me, I wouldn’t have done anything different. Even if they’d been following me since dawn, I would have done the same thing, heaved Antoine Lazenec overboard the same way and brought the boat back in the same way, following the channel to the yacht harbor while respecting the green and red buoys like railroad signals, with that seagull still perched on the boat’s stern rail, maybe waiting for me to pay it to leave. As if the gull, with its round, unblinking eye, insisted on being part of the story, like an unshakable witness prepared to testify in any courthouse in the world. And I felt like telling the gull that I would go to the courthouse of my own accord, that I wasn’t planning to evade the law.
I felt like telling it that I’m a seagull too, I glide above the water, aware that I don’t have much flesh left, so I fly over the sea and the boats in the harbor, and I’m a seagull now, a seagull in the fog hanging over the port. I can make out the city starting to appear, but it seems written in a language I don’t understand, an alphabet made of renovated buildings and open windows, and it’s only on the ledges that I can see the crumbs that are left. Yeah, I’m a seagull and I’m also waiting for dawn, for people to put their garbage bins out on the street, because people here have learned that you can’t put them out overnight, that you can’t just stuff your rubbish in bags and toss them outside. No, you have to keep your bins inside all night next to your bed, to make sure no seagull comes and pecks them open. You have to live with the smell of your bins, the reek of everything prepared,digested, and discarded but that keeps on rotting beside you until dawn. That’s the price of having seagulls around here. With the police and the arrest, everything happened quietly. They said the stock phrases you use at times like that. I got my coat from the hallway and followed them without saying anything. I think it started to rain a little then, a windless drizzle that makes no sound when it hits the ground and even wraps the air in a kind of strange softness from penetrating matter and quieting it. Just as I was holding my wrists out to the cops as if it were an old habit, I took one last look around, at the ripped-up earth and the sea beyond. I told myself that I would have time to look at it, the sea, through my cell windows. Then the two cops shoved me into the back of the van and sat me on the plastic bench bolted to the sheet metal. It was uncomfortable in the van as it crossed the bridge, jolting at every pothole in a road worn by the weight of trailers hauling ten-ton boats. Looking through the rear window that the drizzle was fogging, you’d have thought the sky was trying to squeeze through the wire mesh to seek shelter too. It was like a sheer curtain drawn over the town—like our story, I told the judge—it wasn’t fog or wind, just a curtain that can’t be torn hanging between us and things.

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