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The dog days of 1983. The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, dancing into the sunset. Hess, Ascher and Wolf are orphans chance has brought together in a small Baltic seaside town. Twenty years on, the long hot summer of the Israel-Lebanon War. Hess, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, finds himself in the Mediterranean, drinking to forget a wasted marriage. Wolf, haunted by his father’s murder, is drawn into the nebulous world of international terrorism. When Ascher, a failed artist, commits suicide, all the stakes are changed. Or are they? With the Cold War, sex and punk rock throbbing in the background, Hess must confront his past, seeking to salvage dignity from defeat.
Review
‘Canicule’ is the hot period between early July and early September; a period of inactivity where everything happens in the stillness of a long wait. But Armand is slick and gives us characters whose intense self-betrayals work like sentinels stationed in advance of an outpost, or perhaps after the outpost has been abandoned. It’s almost too easy to read, and what’s hard, unfathomable and devastating is kept away from us. It is a novel that proposes a subtle expectation of nothing too much, perhaps a distraction. It’s labour is invisible and turns up as a kind of lucky break, something found, an unplanned event, serendipity conflated with existential instability that winds down despite itself (or up) into the equivalence of a huge ash tree holding together earth, heaven and hell. (Richard Marshall, 3: AM Magazine)
A homage to 70s New German Cinema, Baader-Meinhof, and the Man Without Qualities… undercut with the bitter irony of a History that does nothing but repeat, like an orphaned Oedipus Complex on Zoloft. (Goodreads)
