BOOK REVIEW / In Brief

Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, trs Barbara Wright, Harvill pounds 13.99. Jean, the narrator of this prize-winning French novel, happens to hear of a suicide during a brief stopover in a Milan hotel. Eighteen years later, his decision to 'disappear' from his own life prompts him to think again about the suicide; he has learned that the dead woman, Ingrid, was someone he knew. Lying low on the outskirts of Paris, Jean reconstructs what he knows of Ingrid, shoring the fragments against his ruin. Modiano wrote the screenplay of Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien, and his territory is loss, guilt and the legacy of the Occupation. This book is a fine interweaving of two histories, leading you on like a detective story, and imparting emotion with cool clarity. Nicolette Jones

Feminine Parts by Toby Forward, Duckworth pounds 14.99. The author achieved notoriety when his earlier works appeared with Virago under the pseudonym Rahila Khan: the publishers understood the author to be an Asian woman; in fact, he was a white Church of England vicar. This, Forward's first adult novel, is sharply observed and fast- moving. It is also sadistic and morally repugnant, its larger themes - sex, death and religion in a multi-cultural society - almost entirely lost in a welter of irrelevant images and conflicting subplots. At least it does provide a conclusive answer to one of life's perennial questions: yes, vicars do masturbate. Jo-Ann Goodwin

Zeph by A L Barker, Hutchinson pounds 13.99. When her mother dies and her middle-aged father goes off with a voluptuous West Indian woman, teenage Zeph inherits the family house. She wants to be a Writer and to turn the house into a sort of Bohemian salon, but settles for whoever turns up, thus providing Barker with a circus of oddballs and a vehicle for fanciful maunderings about the creation of fiction. Characters flit across the pages, their tones of voice unconvincingly similar, their manner superficial. There are some laughs; there was also, for me, much furrowing of the brow. Melanie MacFadyean

Lucie's Long Voyage by Alina Reyes, trs David Watson, Methuen pounds 9.99. The author's pseudonym comes from Julio Cortazar's novel La Loutaine ou Le Journal d'Alina Reyes; with him she shares an affinity for fairy-tale. In this successor to The Butcher (a story of adolescent passion) Reyes's heroine Lucie falls in love with a mountain bear then finds herself, with a child, in a mysterious city on the brink of collapse, listening to an old man's story of love for a woman he calls Lusi. The 'voyage' becomes the metaphorical one of womanhood; Lucie/Lusi equals Lucy the primitive ape, who walks by every woman's side as an animal sister through history. The erotic prose sits well in the fantastic surroundings. Graham Thompson