a photographer, a woman and snowflakes – Liberation

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With “The Unknown Woman of Vienna”, Robert Goddard gives us a tantalizing and well-crafted story that we quickly forget once the last page is turned.

Well, it’s true, we couldn’t resist the pleasure of highlighting another Goddard this week, even if Robert has nothing to do with Jean-Luc. Apart from the fact that his name has two “ds”, Robert Goddard is a British author of very square detective novels, not at all revolutionary, not at all “vigil of his century and ours” as Freed wrote it on Tuesday on Jean-Luc Godard. Rather the kind of good student who publishes well-crafted and effective novels. We opened his latest book, the stranger of Vienna, baited by the title. Since our last stay in Vienna, cradled by the memory of the spy novels of John Le Carré and Joseph Kanon or the stories of Stefan Zweig, the Austrian capital exerts an intense romantic fascination on us. If, in addition, an unknown person gets lost, then the happiness was announced as total. But experience has shown us that you should never get carried away with a simple title: Vienne occupies only about thirty pages out of a total of 438. There remained the unknown, and this one remains unknown long enough so that we are unable to close the book before knowing what it is all about.

Dream about being surprised

We make it short for you. Ian Jarrett is a photographer passionate about his job but a bit on the sidelines. “Taking photos was more than a livelihood. They were an integral part of my life. The impact of light on reality never ceased to feed my imagination. And how a single image, a single shot, could capture the very essence of a time and a place, a city, a war or a person, was ingrained in my consciousness. One day maybe, for the space of a second, I will trigger the shutter on the perfect photo.

He has toured his married life and dreams of being surprised. Sent by a magazine to Vienna, he finds himself one day alone in a snowy park in the city, when she appears. The unknown. “Suddenly, as I had just stabilized the camera, a figure emerged into the image on the south side of the cathedral, wearing a red coat buttoned up to the collar to protect against the cold. The kind of frame you dream of getting. I pressed the shutter and thanked my lucky stars. At this stage, we are on page 13, it is the climax. There are 425 pages left and they will be devoted to looking for the unknown who will evaporate after a torrid night (well, we like to imagine it because the scene is unfortunately dispatched in a few lines). We pursue the book eagerly because we really want to know the end of the story. It’s honestly not unpleasant. Except that once the book is closed, the story evaporates with as much lightness as the snowflakes on Vienna’s Stephansplatz.

The Stranger of Vienna, Robert Goddard (translated from English by Laurent Boscq), Sonatine, 448 pp., 23 euros.

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