A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry
, the French crime novelist who died much too young in 1995, continues to attract new followers, and a cloud of cultish devotion now surrounds the dozen or so slim novels that he left behind. Flinty, sexy, and pacy, they reek evocatively of the 1970s and 1980s in seedy Parisian settings—the waft of hashish burn! the funk of cheap sex!—or in woeful French provincial towns, and they after all—but they are fantastic entertainments, too, in that ish way, and they stand up, I believe, as genuine literary artefacts; his unique take on Noir is as good as anything in . Serpent’s Tail have been doing a splendid job of issuing new translations—you might start with or , but anything with that name on the spine is worth a rip.
