Book Title: The Moment Before Drowning
Author: James Brydon
Publisher: Akashic Books
Number of pages: 239
Genre: historical fiction, mystery
Release Date: July 3rd 2018
Favorite Book Quotes:
“Life, M. le Garrec, so quickly becomes a net. All we experience is the perpetual nullification of the drives. This is, I suppose, the price we must pay for participation in society. That is: to go to work in bleary-eyed stupor, to read the newspapers and develop personal opinions about current affairs, and, once every few years, to mark our cross on a ballot paper, as if that were a sign or guarantee of equality.”
“Even when I reached the outside, where the great sky receded infinitely above and where no sound from the warren would ever penetrate, I could still hear that same shriek. I stopped walking. It no longer made any sense to try to escape because that noise was now in my head. I could hear it reverberating in the recesses of my memory, burrowing down inside of me like a virus, infecting me, digging into the circuits of recollection from where I knew it could never be expunged.”
“No, Lambert is quite specific about it. Pain doesn’t stop just because someone talks. It’s always there.”
“I am, he says, always fully aware both of myself and of the world around me. I am always, therefore, responsible for what I do and for what I feel, and I choose the latter just as much as I choose the former. My emotions are not absolute and incontrovertible phenomena; they are chosen reactions to particular situations. My sadness, joy, or rage are all free choices which emanate from the perception of myself and my surroundings that I undertake to adopt.”
-This is undoubtedly true. So often nowadays, we always have some sort of excuse for how why we act a certain way. We say we are never in control of our emotions and can’t help what we do. However, it really is how we choose to act in a given situation. Yes, we can say that we chose to act a certain way because some outside force made us do it that we weren’t consciously aware of. Even if we say we didn’t have control over how we react to situations, we are possibly unconsciously choosing to react a certain way, but not owning up to the fact that we chose to do so.-
“I try to hold onto her. She is the only thing that keeps me from dissolving. She gives me shape. Without her, there are only the endless identical minutes passing by me, falling around me like snow, burying me, lying over me like a pall until I too fade and am forgotten.”
“She was the sort of girl you could easily overlook. And yet there was something about her that struck me when I was with her…and that was an almost radiant quality of goodness.”
“The air is so thick with dust that it clogs my throat. I feel like I’m underwater. Like I’m drowning”.
“The Farm took her out of the world and enclosed her within its walls. Her universe became the disintegration of her own body and the limits of its pain.”
“In the quietness of the night, shivering at my desk, I wonder what the difference is between loneliness and isolation. I always saw the latter as a precondition of serious thought: a necessary distance from the chatter of the world.”
Goodreads Synopsis
In 1959, a French Resistance hero investigates a murder in a small Breton town, while awaiting his own trial.
December 1959: a furious anticolonial war rages in Algeria. Captain Jacques le Garrec, a former detective and French Resistance hero, returns to France in disgrace, traumatized after two years of working in the army intelligence services, and accused of a brutal crime.
As le Garrec awaits trial in the tiny Breton town where he grew up, he is asked to look into a disturbing and unsolved murder committed the previous winter. A local teenage girl was killed and her bizarrely mutilated body was left on display on the heathland in a way that no one could understand.
Le Garrec’s investigations draw him into the dark past of the town, still haunted by memories of the German Occupation. As he tries to reconstruct the events of the girl’s murder, the violence and guilt intertwine with his own recollections of Algeria and threaten to submerge him.
My Review:
3.5/5 stars** I received this book in exchange for an honest review from Akashic Books. **
As you may know, I typically read young adult fiction but lately I have been trying to venture out into reading other genres.
Unlike a lot of young adult books I’ve read, this was not a quick read. It took me about a month to read, but don’t let that deter you from reading this book. I had to really take the time to read this book in order to fully understand what the characters had gone through/were going through.
The plot of this story appealed to me because you have the main character, Captain Jacques le Garrec, on trial for the crime he committed in Algeria, and yet he was called upon to investigate the murder of a teenage girl in his hometown of Saint Elizabeth.
As you read, you experience all the turmoil Le Garrec feels concerning his trial and how it compares to solving the murder of his hometown. The book only takes place over a span of a week, but it also includes flashbacks of Le Garrec and what he has been accused of, to other characters in relation to the girls murder.
This book was a roller coaster for me regarding my interest in it. There were many moments where I felt that things could’ve been left out or been explained better.
However, the author did do an incredible job of keeping you guessing about who killed the girl that you never expected.
Even if I wasn’t fully amazed by this book, I did enjoy how the author wrote The Moment Before Drowning
As I have always said in previous books that I have read, even if I don’t personally give a book 4-5 stars, I would recommend this book to people who like historical fiction.
I hope that you enjoyed my review and be sure to check out this book!
Happy reading!
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Living in a World of Book Quotes 