Readings From Readings at Borders
Monsieur Linh and His Child by Philippe Claudel review
The writer-director of I've Loved You So Long brings his oblique touch to a delicate study of friendship between two old men This novella, by an award-winning French writer (the author of Brodeck's Report , winner of last year's Independent foreign fiction prize) who is also the writer-director of the Baftawinning film I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), would be extremely difficult tomake into a film not only because itfeaturesa narrative "trick" that would translate awkwardly to the screen, but also because the author takes pains to avoid pinning down the story to one particular decade or location. The side-effect of this deliberately nonspecific narration is to give the story a hazy, romantic quality, like Vaseline on a camera lens or the sepia tint of an oldphoto. Lack of specificity can read, in other words, as sentimentality: sentimentality about Indochina, and about war, from which the protagonist, an old man named Monsieur L...
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