Status
Checked out
Publication
The Feminist Press at CUNY (2015), Paperback, 352 pages
Description
"Apocalypse Baby is a smart, fast-paced detective novel about a missing adolescent girl traveling through Paris and Barcelona. She is tailed by two mismatched private investigators: the Hyena, part ruthless interrogator, part oversexed rock star, and Lucie, her plain and passive--almost to the point of invisible--sidekick. As the search unfolds, the heart of contemporary youth culture is exposed"--
User reviews
LibraryThing member thorold
Apocalypse bébé is set up as a fairly straightforward crime story - the narrator, Lucie Tolédo, is a plodding private detective who finds herself out of her depth when Valentine, the teenage subject of a routine surveillance job, suddenly goes missing. To help find her, she enlists a legendary
Lucie's first-person narrative, with its noir affectation of detachment and superficiality, is intercut with third-person chapters from the point of view of other characters in the story, where we bore down at leisure into the depths of their personalities, with an airy disregard for the strict timekeeping requirements that normally apply to crime fiction. And we get to see the author's supreme contempt for just about everybody: Valentine's bourgeois novelist father, her dim but well-meaning stepmother, her beautiful but vain and selfish birth-mother, her pointlessly aggressive Muslim cousin, the various people on the right and left who try to take advantage of her whilst pretending to help. Even the superb Hyène turns out to have an untouchable dark spot in her background. And, just before it happens, we realise that all this bad stuff is piling up on top of a fifteen-year-old girl who, remarkable though she is, isn't in the least equipped to deal with it. And something really bad is going to happen as a result.
The very black message of the plot is, however, destabilised in turn by the lively rhythms of Despentes's prose, which turn the flatfooted profanities and clichés of street French into something that feels incongruously subversive and funny. As long as humans can turn a handful of words into a gesture of rebellion, we are meant to feel, all hope for our society can't be entirely lost.
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Big Scary Lesbian Detective known in the trade as "La Hyène", happily switching to the Dr Watson role for herself. Lucie's first-person narrative, with its noir affectation of detachment and superficiality, is intercut with third-person chapters from the point of view of other characters in the story, where we bore down at leisure into the depths of their personalities, with an airy disregard for the strict timekeeping requirements that normally apply to crime fiction. And we get to see the author's supreme contempt for just about everybody: Valentine's bourgeois novelist father, her dim but well-meaning stepmother, her beautiful but vain and selfish birth-mother, her pointlessly aggressive Muslim cousin, the various people on the right and left who try to take advantage of her whilst pretending to help. Even the superb Hyène turns out to have an untouchable dark spot in her background. And, just before it happens, we realise that all this bad stuff is piling up on top of a fifteen-year-old girl who, remarkable though she is, isn't in the least equipped to deal with it. And something really bad is going to happen as a result.
The very black message of the plot is, however, destabilised in turn by the lively rhythms of Despentes's prose, which turn the flatfooted profanities and clichés of street French into something that feels incongruously subversive and funny. As long as humans can turn a handful of words into a gesture of rebellion, we are meant to feel, all hope for our society can't be entirely lost.
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Awards
Lambda Literary Award (Finalist — 2016)
Stonewall Book Award (Honor Book — Literature — 2016)
Prix Virilo (2010)
Prix Goncourt (1. Auswahl — 2010)
Original publication date
2010
ISBN
1558618910 / 9781558618916
Local notes
Fiction