The Confidant by Hélène Grémillon 243 pages

The Confidant was a book club selection and will forever reside on my best-books-ever read list. Strangely enough or maybe sadly enough I was the only one to feel that way. That may have been due to some questionable choices the author made. First Grémillon didn’t take the time to set up the transition between narrators and there was enough confusion behind this to cause all of us to have to go back and reread and some to just give up. Secondly, the author wrote the last chapter in prose form so that some of the members skipped over it thinking the author was just quoting poetry or starting a new book. But the last chapter put everything into perspective and delivered the final twist. Without it the book just hung there.

The Confidant begins in 1975 Paris. Camille, pregnant and abandoned by the baby’s father has just lost her mother. She receives a letter in the mail telling the story of Louis and Annie—neither of whom she knows—who lived in Nazi Occupied France more than thirty years before. The letters continue to appear weekly and eventually the connections between them are revealed in a huge, life altering way.

What I loved most besides the actual story of course was how easy it was to empathize with the characters totally independent of the absurd choices they were making and the havoc they created for others. The plot was so intricately woven that one deviation, just one tiny deviation would have changed the entire story. It just doesn't come much better than that.