How's the Pain? [Editions Gallic]

by Pascal Garnier, Emily Boyce (Translator), John Banville (Introduction)

Overview

How's the Pain? is an off-kilter, blackly comic novel about an unlikely duo of a soon-to-be-retired assassin and a deadbeat young man, from the 'slyly funny' [Sunday Times] Pascal Garnier.

'Deliciously dark ... painfully funny' New York Times 

Death is Simon's business. And now the ageing vermin exterminator is preparing to die. But he still has one last job down on the coast, and he needs a driver.

Bernard is twenty-one. He can drive and he’s never seen the sea. He can’t pass up the chance to chauffeur for Simon, whatever his mother may say. As the unlikely pair set off on their journey, Bernard soon finds that Simon’s definition of vermin is broader than he’d expected ... 

Veering from the hilarious to the horrific, this offbeat story from master stylist Pascal Garnier is at heart an affecting study of human frailty.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910477922
Publisher:	Gallic Books
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pascal Garnier, who died in March 2010, was a talented novelist, short story writer, children’s author and painter. From his home in the mountains of the Ardèche, he wrote fiction in a noir palette with a cast of characters drawn from ordinary provincial life. Though his writing is often very dark in tone, it sparkles with quirkily beautiful imagery and dry wit. Garnier’s work has been likened to the great thriller writer, Georges Simenon.

Emily Boyce is a translator and editor. She was shortlisted for the French Book Office New Talent in Translation Award in 2008, the French-American Translation Prize in 2016, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 2021. She lives in London.  

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Pascal Garnier 

'At once extremely violent, irresistibly funny, and inexplicably moving, in the subtle way that only genuine art can manage to be' John Banville, New York Review of Books

'Garnier's take on the frailty of life has a bracing originality' Sunday Times

‘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’ The Guardian

'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 

'Combines a sense of the surreal with a ruthless wit' The Observer 

'Tense, strange, disconcerting and slyly funny' Sunday Times 

'A brilliant exercise in grim and gripping irony, it makes you grin as well as wince' Sunday Telegraph 

'A mixture of Albert Camus and JG Ballard' FT 

'Bleak, often funny and never predictable' The Observer 

'A master of the surreal noir thriller – Luis Buñuel meets Georges Simenon' TLS

‘A jeu d’esprit of hard-boiled symbolism, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot and the Marx Brothers’ Wall Street Journal

'Brief, brisk, ruthlessly entertaining . . . Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable' NPR

 '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 

From the Publisher