Anne-Laure Bondoux, translated from French by Y. Maudet,
The Killer’s Tears
Delacorte Press, 2006.

Ages 14+

A haunting novel set in the bleak landscape of southern Chile, The Killer’s Tears unites three battered souls on an allegorical odyssey of murder, transformation, and redemption. Travelers on the journey are Paolo Poloverdo, “born” the day he finds his murdered parents; Angel Allegria, their killer; and Luis Secunda, an educated wanderer from Valparaiso.  The story chronicles Angel’s remorse and his growing attachment to Paolo, as he seeks forgiveness on the child’s remote farm and competes with Luis for the boy’s awakening need for tenderness and love.

It is a tribute to Bondoux - winner  of a Batchelder Honor and France’s prestigious Prix Sourcières - that  she is able to generate sympathy for Angel, a crook capable of killing even innocent children in a wood.  Powerful prose, themes of metamorphosis, and a deeply compassionate stance prevent the novel from becoming a bloodbath.  “It’s not easy being alive,” Paolo says in his own and others’ defense, “It’s complicated, twisted, and kinked, just like the dead trees of the Pampas.”

This acknowledgment  of life’s complexity provides a moral compass for the book, which takes place in a land  “tough, desolate and abused by the wind,” but which also “resemble[s] lace in the cold Pacific waters.” Angel may be a murderer, but he is also Paolo’s savior.  Luis may be a teacher, but he also betrays, abandons, then befriends. Paolo may attempt suicide, but he is restored by a hug and lullaby. A forest may shelter, but its trees supply a guillotine and confront Angel with the most brutal moments buried in his past.

The absence of clear answers in the book (even Paolo’s age is withheld)  make this meaty turf for teens, who should relish the author’s mockery of a small-town mayor who says, ”What was simpler than setting apart good from evil, good people from bad people, and honest people from dishonest ones?” Bondoux suggests on every page that nothing on earth is simple, and  that if we can acknowledge the oxymoronic possibility of lace in the ocean, birth at “ten?”, or a killer’s introspective “tears,”  perhaps we can - in an effort to humanize, to comprehend brutality - transform and forgive anything that crosses our paths.

Ann  A. Grandin
July 2007