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Pascal Garnier Pascal Garnier was born in Paris in 1949. The prize-winning author of over sixty books, he remains a leading figure in contemporary French literature, in the tradition of Georges Simenon. He died in 2010.
Melanie Florence Melanie Florence teaches at The University of Oxford and translates from the French.
Emily Boyce Emily Boyce is in-house translator and editor at Gallic Books.
‘Wonderful… Properly noir’ – Ian Rankin
‘Garnier plunges you into a bizarre, overheated world, seething death, writing, fictions and philosophy. He’s a trippy, sleazy, sly and classy read’ A. L. Kennedy
‘Horribly funny … appalling and bracing in equal measure. Masterful’ John Banville
‘Ennui, dislocation, alienation, estrangement - these are the colours on Garnier’s palette. His books are out there on their own: short, jagged and exhilarating’ Stanley Donwood
‘The combination of sudden violence, surreal touches and bone-dry humour have led to Garnier’s work being compared with the films of Tarantino and the Coen brothers’ Sunday Times
‘Deliciously dark … painfully funny’ New York Times
‘A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard’ Financial Times
‘A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony; makes you grin as well as wince’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon’ Times Literary Supplement
The A26
How’s the Pain?
The Panda Theory
‘Small but perfectly formed darkest noir fiction told in spare, mordant prose … Recounted with disconcerting matter of-factness, Garnier’s work is surreal and horrific in equal measure’ Guardian
‘Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny’ Sunday Times
‘Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit’ The Observer
‘Devastating and brilliant’ Sunday Times
‘Bleak, often funny and never predictable’ The Observer
‘Reminiscent of Joe Orton and the more impish films of Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol’ Sunday Times
‘A guaranteed grisly thriller’ ShortList
‘Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining … Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable’ John Powers, NPR
‘This is tough, bloody stuff, but put together with a cunning intelligence’ Sunday Times
‘Garnier’s world exists in the cracks and margins of ours; just off-key, often teetering on the surreal, yet all too plausible. His mordant literary edge makes these succinct novels stimulating and rewarding’ Sunday Times
The A26
How’s the Pain?
The Panda Theory
by Pascal Garnier
Gallic Books
London
A Gallic Book
The A26
First published in France as L’A26 by Zulma, 1999
Copyright © Zulma, 1999
English translation copyright © Gallic Books 2013
Translation supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Department of the French Embassy in London. www.frenchbooknews.com First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gallic Books
How’s the Pain?
First published in France as Comment va la douleur? by Zulma, 2006
Copyright © Zulma, 2006
English translation copyright © Gallic Books 2012
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Gallic Books
The Panda Theory
First published in France as La Théorie du panda by Zulma, 2008
Copyright © Zulma, 2008
English translation copyright © Gallic Books 2012
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Gallic Books
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention
No reproduction without permission
All rights reserved
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-910477-58-8
Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books
Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)
The A26
by Pascal Garnier
translated from the French by Melanie Florence
For Isa and Chantal
The third streetlamp at the end of the road had suddenly gone out. Yolande closed her eye, which was pressed up to the shutter. The echo of the white light went on pulsing on her retina for a few seconds. When she opened her eye again there was only a black hole in the sky over the dead streetlamp.
‘I’ve stared at it for too long, and the bulb’s gone.’ Yolande shuddered and left the window. She had been watching the street not through a gap in the shutter but through a hole made specially. In the entire house this was the only opening on the outside world. Depending on her mood, she called it the ‘bellybutton’ or the ‘world’s arsehole’.
Yolande could
