From Publishers Weekly
Just has long observed the fault lines in human nature and a person's moral code. In his 15th novel (after the 2005 Pulitzer finalist,
An Unfinished Season), Just, using an unlikely hero, sets his journalist's eye on the ethically fraught war on terror. Thomas Railles is a 65-year-old American expatriate portrait painter of moderate fame who lives with his French wife, Florette, in a Pyrenees village. When Florette goes for a solitary walk in the mountains and is killed by Moroccan terrorists, Railles blames himself for her death: two of his childhood friends now work in intelligence, and he has pulled several "odd jobs" for them over the years, including one that may have inspired this belated "payback." When he eventually faces one of Florette's killers, Railles must decide whether to avenge her death or find a different peace of mind. "Forgetfulness is the old man's friend," he muses, but he is aware of the irony. The ethical questions of Just's tale add moral heft to an emotionally charged narrative.
Author tour. (Sept. 6) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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*Starred Review* The opposing forces of war and creativity drive Just's masterfully concentrated fiction. Following the acclaimed Korean War-era novel,
An Unfinished Season (2004), Just takes measure of the repercussions of 9/11 in a sinuous and intense drama set primarily in a small French village in the shadow of the Pyrenees. Thomas, a doctor's son raised in Wisconsin, is a renowned painter happily married to Florette, a local. Thomas is trying to slip free from his now-and-then involvement with the CIA without damaging his lifelong friendship with his spymasters, fellow Wisconsinites Bernhard and Russ. But a mountain stroll, by cruel chance, leads to a deadly encounter between Florette and cold-blooded Moroccan terrorists. While Thomas struggles with insurmountable grief, Bernhard and Russ vow to find her killers. Then, when Thomas is brought face-to-face with his wife's murderer in a harrowing interrogation scene emblematic of all the camouflaged abominations of the Iraq War, he must choose between revenge and decency. Throughout this riveting examination of personal loss and political criminality, Just brilliantly considers our longing for coherence, and the impossibility of escaping the long tentacles of war. Although, as he avers, both memory and forgetfulness are necessary for survival, one is the wellspring of art and compassion, while the other ensures that war is unending. Set to the indelible blues of Billie Holiday, in sync with the razor-edged knowingness of Didion and le Carre, and mythic in its evocations of fire and water, fog and stone, art and remembrance, Just's
Forgetfulness is haunting, clarifying, and imperative.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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