This is a dark little odd little novel. It’s hard to feel sympathy for anyone in the story, really. The main character is a man with a perpetual cold. All the women he gets involved with, he states, come down with it some point. This could be interesting, but it is never explored, just treated as a fact. So it’s no surprise when his wife of one year comes down with a cold as they drive towards a friend’s birthday party for a weekend away.


He doesn’t seem to really love her, nor her him. He doesn’t seem to feel very strongly about much, really. We don’t get to know her well, and they separate when, in the misery of her sickness, she asks him to get a separate room at the hotel they end up stopping at, then urges him to go on without her.


I read the whole book, expecting to like someone, or feel some sort of emotion toward someone, but the book, like the main character, seems too self-absorbed to interact with much of anyone with any depth. The strangest part was, after I read the book, reading the comments on the back cover that say “The honesty of emotion in The Unforeseen is matched only by its subversive intent.” Uh – I found very little emotion other than mild befuddlement, and if thinking life is meaningless is “subversive, well, maybe that counts, as this character seems completely aimless.


Just weird, and kinda unsatisfying, even though it has a major twist at the end, even that comes off as quite anticlimactic, then the book ends. Don’t bother with this one. Maybe it is better in the original French, but I doubt translation would change the entire feel of the book.