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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Pages: 98
Started: 28 June 2024
Finished: 28 June 2024
Summary:
By the time Aimée--petit, wealthy, thirty-five years old and highly skilled at martial arts--steps off the train into the small yet prosperous town of Bléville (essentially "Doughville" in French), she has taken on a new persona, a new hair color, and a new goal. As she begins to charm her way into Bléville society, she slowly uncovers a web of greed and crime that she, skilled and lawless, is in a unique position to interrupt. Narrated in a dark and distant tone that frustrates the reader by denying them any real glimpse into Aimée's head, Femme is a sharp roman noir novella that is both delightful and gritty.
Thoughts (SPOILERS):
I was pretty taken aback by this novella. The first chapters were gratuitously sexual, the paradigm of the black widow cliché--a pretty woman killing men, getting her way through her feminine wiles, and changing her appearance (plus a strangely erotic description of the protagonist messily eating a huge greasy meal and rubbing her breasts in a pile of cash? I was not a fan of that part). Despite the cliché Aimée certainly seemed like a badass; she was mysterious and competent and interesting, which continued into her introduction into the town and her ability to fend off strange men and make herself desired and influential in a new social sphere by relying on her wits. Again, the gratuitous sexuality continued, with the central and eccentric yet impoverished Baron's first appearance involving his genitalia.
The turning point of the novel was definitely its weakest point. While it was possible to get a sense for Aimée's obscure purpose in the first third of the novella, in the central portion of the story her psyche seems impenetrable. Several townspeople die of food poisoning (after which she runs into the Baron, overcome by shock, and despondent), and then she cons the Baron into trying to blackmail everyone involved, in response to which she gets the townspeople to pay her to murder the Baron. The blackmail scheme does make sense, but her intense reaction to the poisoning and then her back-and-forth in regards to the Baron is hard to understand. One possible way of explaining these plot points is that they're all fully intentional--that Aimée started the poisoning, faked her shock to be able to gain sympathy from the Baron, and then got him to blackmail people all so she could offer her services to the rich men of the town.
This complete control is hard to believe, though, considering her unprecedented breakdown when she tries to kill the Baron. She is overcome with sympathy, and hardly able to do it, and ends up instantly changing all her plans to instead get the rich men who hired her to go to jail for their crimes. This presents her in a moral light--she wants bad men to go away, but does not want to kill the Baron, a strange yet innocent person. So perhaps part of the overall scheme was her own machination, but her abrupt change of heart in regards to the Baron could not have been--which is not a choice I like. In this unprecedented change of heart, it seems the author is suggesting that beautiful women can be murderers, but not fully immoral ones, which is not a message I find particularly interesting if the psychological transition is not genuinely explored.
The end of this novella was insane. After being threatened by the rich men in the town, Aimée ends up killing everyone even vaguely attached to the capitalist exploitation and crimes that occurred in Bléville. It's a lengthy, gritty, dark scene that reads exactly like a noir film. Very cool, lots of interesting deaths and gore. Of course, by the end Aimée has killed too many people to be redeemable so she has to die as well (an end I thought was a little unimaginative, if logical for the story).
The arc of this novella was a bit sparse in my opinion; it was interesting to not be able to see into Aimée's head, but her actions could have spoken for her change of heart in a more satisfying way if another 30 pages had been added to the middle of the story. That being said, this was an aesthetically captivating story and I quite experiencing it as well as thinking about it analytically (Capitalism! Gender! Sexuality! Crime! Death! Morality!). I would be hesitant to recommend it to casual readers, but I believe fans of noir fiction and classic literature would find it as fascinating as I did.