Sensing the confusion and dread of all refugees

From such a frightening and courageous beginning, this short novel moves at a gentle but assured pace, unfurling relentless little frenzies of joy and upset, rendering scenes and characters with a complexity belied by the smoothness of its prose.

Monsieur Linh, having lost everything and everyone close to him, flees his own war-torn country and seeks asylum in the west to raise his infant granddaughter, his only reason for living. Unable to communicate in anything but his own language, assimilation comes slowly. He is settled in a refugee centre, tends to his child and breaks the monotony by venturing out into his new city for long walks.

One day, while sitting on a bench opposite a children’s playground, he is joined by a man named Bark, a widower still mired in grief. Though opposites in so many ways and able to connect only with smiles and gestures (and a single accidental and oft-repeated phrase: ‘good day’), these two men strike up an unlikely friendship, and the bench becomes a kind of sanctuary. They have some things in common, a shared war and similar intrusions of tragedy, but they find solace in the simple pleasures of a smoke, a strong drink on a cold afternoon, a song.

Then, just as the routine begins to turn comfortable, Monsieur Linh is called to a medical examination and is almost immediately moved, with his granddaughter, across the city to a locked-down hospital. Knowing his friend will be waiting, and that a life of incarceration is no life at all, certainly not for a growing child, his only thoughts are of escape.

Gorgeous, at times, in its description, one of the most attractive things about this book is its vagueness. Reading this is akin to being dropped into someone else’s dream. Country names and time periods go undefined. Everything is suggested, facts are left to float. This is a clever technique, and one executed with an exquisite, fable-like delicacy, pitching the reader into some of the confusion and dread that all refugees must feel upon arriving in any new place where language and landscape are impenetrably foreign. Clever too, and perfectly fitting, is the twist ending, though none of the poignancy will be lost even if the reader should solve the riddle before the punch-line’s landed blow.

Sometimes, a book hits all the right notes. Monsieur Linh and His Child is a sweet, sad and hopeful offering, a contemplation on love and loneliness, on the bonds of family and on just how wide the arms of friendship can stretch. It is also a study of the effects of war and of the depth to which trauma can afflict.

Already critically lauded as a filmmaker, Philippe Claudel, with this brief and beautiful 130- page novella, stakes a strong claim as one of the most original and compassionate French writers of his generation.