Vie Française

by Jean-Paul Dubois

Translated from the French

by Linda Coverdale

Meet Paul Blick: born in France (but not Paris); son of a car dealer; provincial sociology student-cum-theoretical revolutionary; briefly employed (by his father-in-law); married and soon to discover adultery and other satisfactions of a desperate househusband as consort of a high-flying wife who conquers the world as CEO of a Jacuzzi-manufacturing company.

This not-so-extraordinary Frenchman is delivered to the not-so-extraordinary awareness of having arrived in middle age more a product of his times, his country, and blind chance than a creature of his own free will. Jean-Paul Dubois gives us a man whose life reflects the story – the mind and the heart – of a society coming belatedly, poignantly, and often hilariously to grips with the abiding pain and intermittent beauty of what living has become.

(From Publisher).

Jean-Paul Dubois was born in 1950 in Toulouse, where he still lives today. The author of many novels and collections of travel writing, he is also a reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur.

We are subjugated by the main character Paul Blick, who fills all the book, in spite of the many other characters. A chilly novel, bright, light even in seriousness.