An unnamed woman works as a public address announcer in Paris’s Gare du Nord.  The job suits her.  No need for opinion or initiative.  She just has to say what she is told to say.  That’s it.  She communicates with thousands of people every day, yet not one of them communicates back.  She is invisible and she prefers it that way.

The woman at the center of Céline Curiol’s Voice Over leads a disturbingly solitary urban existence, yet she is almost continually affected by the people surrounding her.  A stranger’s glance in her direction, a shop girl’s dutiful inquiry, the way a waiter sets down a glass of water–they all register with her.  In particular, she is affected by the man with whom she has become obsessed.  Anyone who has been alone in a large city understands how the mind, without proper care, could easily slip out of control.  This is a story of what happens when it does.

The woman seems to have no close friends of any sort.  People pass through her life, but she just doesn’t know how to hold on to them.  In fact, she hardly cares.  She does allow herself to fall into strange, spontaneous interactions with a cross-dressing cabaret singer, an African man who picks her up on the street, an actress who happens to have the exact same name as she, a man who mistakenly believes she is a prostitute.  She drifts into these seemingly random, temporary relationships, and then just as quickly the people are out of her life forever.  Even if she bumps into them again, they don’t recognize her.

There is only one person she really cares about, and her desire for him is the focus of the novel.  Problem: he is in a live-in relationship with a woman named Ange.  Ange is beautiful, intelligent, perfect.  She knows she is inferior to Ange, but she won’t let that stop her.  She doesn’t need him all to herself.  She just needs him in her life.

So why might this woman be the way she is?  There was a childhood incident.  Her “right of passage,” she calls it.  You probably get the idea.  Is this backstory essential to understanding the character and what moves her?  I don’t think so.  It’s easy enough to accept the existence of a troubled person without getting into the textbook psychological roots.  We all know that story already.

One potential problem from the reader’s perspective:  many of this woman’s problems could easily be solved by the use of a mobile phone, but mobile phones do not seem to exist in this fictitious world.  The woman sees news of the 2003 blackout in New York City, and other events place the story in that year.  This story is happening in the age of mobile phones, yet the issue is never addressed.  It may have been believable that this woman would choose not to have one, so uncomfortable is she with human contact (though she is most definitely attached to her land line), but the issue is never addressed.  This may seem petty, but in this otherwise realistic work of fiction, it becomes impossible to ignore.

There is a well-known tendency in French literature and film to use subconscious self-destruction as a plot device.  Voice Over continues this madcap tradition.  What is it with these people?  Are they really this crazy, or do they just have a greater appreciation for crazy?  I’m content to let the French be French, but the melodramatic closing of the novel does nudge it a bit over the edge.  Again, not necessary.

So perhaps the novel is imperfect, but it hardly matters.  The writing is fantastic, and this fact outweighs everything else.  Curiol is highly skilled at weaving thought, emotion, dialogue and action together into an almost seamless flow of text, as if everything were being narrated by an objective, articulate bystander within the main character’s mind.  Credit must also be given to translator Sam Richard-I mourn my own inability to read this work in the original French, but Richard’s language helps mitigate the pain.  As Paul Auster writes in the translation’s Foreword, “The reader is both inside and outside at the same time, immersed in the inner life of the central character and yet vividly aware of the world that surrounds her as she floats through an all-too-real present-day Paris.”  What a pleasure it is to find a novel that is experimental in its use of language but still very readable.

At a dinner party hosted by her obsession and Ange, the other guests ask her what she does for a living.  With her hosts out of the room, she decides to lie and tell the others that she’s a prostitute.

She said it so well, with a mixture of professional pride and personal regret, that the others believed her-she sensed it at once.  There is a brief freeze-frame.  The man with the stoop feels a bit of a jerk now that he has his answer.  He manages a polite rejoinder, all the same:  And have you been in the business long?  Maybe he’s not quite so lacking in imagination, after all.  Quick as a flash, her voice steady.  Ten years, I started young.  Even the virulent husband is taken aback; a few more details, and he could almost feel sorry for her.  She knows that none of the four men will dare ask her how much she charges.  Besides, they have ceased to look upon her with kindness:  she is no longer innocent.  Only the two women continue to regard her with curiosity.  And then, all at once, a heart-felt cry from the wearer of Iranian veils:  life can’t be easy for you.  It isn’t sarcasm or disdain, but sincerity, and it plunges all present into what, from the outside, appears to be intense introspection.  At which point he returns with a strawberry tart, Ange, and nine dessert plates.

If this scenario and this passage appeal to you, read this book.  You won’t be disappointed.