03: A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams—full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up—reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer—one of the great stylists of his generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A disaffected French teenager identifies with the "slightly retarded" girl he watches from a distance in this elegant and strangely absorbing novella. The text is one very long paragraph, in which the 12th-grade narrator, stuck in the uninspired backwater town of Montpe rilleux, observes the girl, "locked in her state of unteachable ignorance," being led each morning by her mother to the bus stop. The narrator finds "ineluctable similarities between her predicament and my own," namely that the two are bound as outcasts against a harshly critical, unjust world that doesn't understand or appreciate them. The drab, oppressive society full of phony adults, misunderstanding, wasted talent, and general failure grates against this youth who, save a nascent desire to become a writer, feels generally deficient and finds a kind of tormented reprieve in the "sorrowful compassion" he feels for the girl who can't return his love. Valtat's narrative proves to be a moving experience of being in someone else's shoes.
