You may call us wops, vulgar foreigners, outsiders – but tremble, good people, for we shall crush you all! [loc. 1933]
Patience Portefeux, 53 years old and a widow, works as a French-Arabic translator for the Department of Justice, specialising in phone taps. She has two grown daughters at university to support, and retirement home fees for her mother to pay: there's never quite enough money. Patience, the daugher of immigrants, grew up in a criminal family and feels considerable sympathy for the criminals whose calls she translates. When she discovers that the nurse tending her mother is also the mother of a drug trafficker who's about to be busted by the police, Patience decides to intervene -- and ends up with a new dog (a former police drug-sniffer named DNA) and, subsequently, a ridiculous quantity of high-grade Moroccan cannabis resin. She turns out to be a pragmatic and efficient businesswoman, and remarkably competent at keeping her new business secret from her fiance, Philippe, who's just taken up his new role as Commander of the Drug Squad.
This was a very enjoyable, and often amusing, read. Patience is cynical, misanthropic and independent, capable of profound compassion but dismissive of 'the State' and its treatment of immigrants. The translation is smooth, colloquial and witty. I did feel that more could have been made of Patience's synesthesia: it's mentioned early in the novel ("My thing is that I taste and feel colours. [loc 127]) but never really comes up again. The final scene with Philippe felt like a cop-out (pun intended). And Cayre made me weepy with a few (non-graphic, non-explicit) sentences about animal euthanasia, which will likely stay with me long after the rest of the novel has faded.
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