With simplicity and ease, this very short novel by Robert Junod
takes up the themes of tragedy, fate and a love triangle in order
to write a quite dispassionate chronicle of everyday unhappiness
when confronted with exceptional events. It moves, incrementally,
from shades of grey to noir by focusing on the portrayal of the main
protagonists.
This first-person account is narrated by François, a father
who has still not understood why his seventeen-year-old daughter
Annie was killed over seven years ago. His best friend, Bertrand,
was convicted for the murder, a man who was also apparently the young
girl’s lover. Francois refused to believe this version of events
during the trial, in spite of his sincere love for his daughter.
It is also Francois who prepares to offer Bertrand a place to stay
and to support him when the latter has his sentence reduced, partly
due t6o good behaviour but mainly because he has an incurable disease
and has but a few months to live.
At the same time, François renews contact with Laurence,
Bertrand’s wife and a friend of long standing who, along with
her husband, acted as family friends and provided emotional support
to Annie and François when François lost his wife.
François thinks that it is time he was reconciled with Laurence,
a woman who, following Annie’s disappearance, no longer wishes
to see her husband. François himself has refused to mix in
the same social circles as Laurence since the loss of Annie, in spite
of the strong attraction he feels for this beautiful woman, the wife
of his best friend.
With its restrained tone, this novel is in the tradition of a
Simenon, and its simplicity conveys well the interior monologue
of a man who
has few interests in life to distract him from grief and personal
suffering. Detached, distant and with little else to occupy his mind,
the character of François lives only for these thoughts – devoid
of feverish excitement or anger.
A ‘domesticated’ roman noir, No
Forwarding Address is a story told behind closed doors and does not move beyond this
realm.
Everything comes back to the inner life of the central character
and his survival strategies. Because this short novel is precisely
about survival, in a world where the presence of death can be constantly
detected in the doomed lives described and where love and friendship
act as obstacles to the fulfilment of an ordinary life. There remains
but a faint nihilism - persistent but unalterable.
