Have to Start。

GREY SOULS (Les âmes grises)


Philippe Claudel (French 1962-)



This is ostensibly a detective story, about a crime that is committed in 1917, and solved 20 years later. The location is a small town in Northern France, near V., in the dead of the freezing winter. The war is still being fought in the trenches, within sight and sound of the town, but the men of the town have been spared the slaughter because they are needed in the local factory. One morning a beautiful ten year old girl, one of the three daughters of the innkeeper, is found strangled and dumped in the canal. Suspicion falls on two deserters who are picked up near the town. Their interrogation and sentencing is brutal and swift. Twenty years later, the narrator, a local policeman, puts together what actually happened. On the night the deserters were arrested and interrogated, he was sitting by the side of his dying wife. He believes that justice was not done and wants to set the record straight. But the death of the child was not the only crime committed in the town during those weeks. More than one record has to be set straight. Beautiful, like a fairy story almost, frozen in time, this novel has a hypnotic quality.



Want to use this story as the inspiration and base of my final work.


These two words are very attractive to me, either to separate them or put together. They are both containing sadness and a massive power of being a simple noun. Look through the book, I found the story was not only very gloomy just as the title of the fiction, but also visualized, which I saw there was like a painting on a vast canvas with different tonal grey, and all the characters were in the painting, still and quiet. There was snow all over the painting, and made the colours of characters became thousands of dots on them, just like Suerat’s painting. Beyond the painting there was a shadow as the shape of a top hat cover the painting, changing its brightness with the plot… The all locked in the frame, in the freezing winter.

Grey, the colour, evokes me of London. Varies tones of grey, some is beautiful but some is like taking all the happiness I have got. It is not black or white, but always neat and soft, which you will never notice you are in it.

Souls give me the idea of characters from plays or fictions directly, especially the ones who die, disappear or exist in a spiritual way. Loneliness extremely silent, light, and very feminine.

From here, I am going to have a journey in my own winter wonderland.

Please do tell me if any thing, story, or person has the similar quality of what I just described.

Continuing ......