"At the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again - other than death some day."
A subversive, darkly psychological tale about a man obsessed with neatness and predictability pushed past the borders of sanity by a snowballing of seemingly trivial anomalies. Set in Paris, it feels like a 19th-century short story, and is perhaps akin to Maupassant or Chekhov in its powerful observation of human life. It is a disturbing read. If you do not want to be sucked into the black hole of Noel's increasingly bleak worldview, I suggest you stay well away from this particular novella. Nevertheless, its realism is original, and the sense of catharsis upon finishing it can prove surprisingly sweet.
