Yves Ravey: Trois Jours chez ma tante (2017)

The title Trois jours chez ma tante recalls the Goncourt-winning Trois jours chez ma mère by François Weyergans, although here things are very different. Marcello was forced to leave France twenty years before over a money laundering scheme he was involved in. Since then he's been living in Liberia and not returned to see his aunt, who's been sending him substantial sums of money every month, and has not even returned to express concern over his mother's death. But now that his aunt has decided to disinherit him, he at last returns to Lyon for three days to dissuade his aunt. He is, as might be expected, an unreliable narrator.

The whole book is in the first person, so we only have access to his mind, although only part of it, as he's retaining things from his readers, making them believe things which might not be true. With Ravey, psychology takes a back seat, being of minor importance. Do we believe what he tells his aunt Vicky – who's in a medically supervised old folks' home – that he's become a new person, that he needs money to run a school in Africa, helping to educate poor, vulnerable children? Lydia, Marcello's ex-wife, is now very friendly with Vicky, which makes Marcello suspicious, and he rejects out of line the idea that he's the father of her twenty-year-old daughter: we never find out the answer to that one, as we never find out who the new heir is, or indeed several other things – that's not the way Ravey plays his game.

And yet there's a strong atmosphere of suspense right until the end, which doesn't exactly conclude the story, and leaves Marcello caught trying his best to forge his aunt's signature. And what the book very strongly suggests is that Marcello's 'school' is a sweatshop where he gets distressed young children to make money for him. Ravey makes no judgements, although his books are peopled by villains trying to fool the gullible.

And, of course, it's written in very simple language, simple sentences. But it's by no means a simple book. One reviewer describes Ravey as a writer of detective stories in a similar way that pointillistes paint. That's a very good observation.