Description
First published by Gallic in 2012, How’s the Pain? is now being reissued in the sleek Editions Gallic livery to reflect Garnier’s status as a true modern classic. The new edition includes an introduction by Booker-winner John Banville, who recently said ‘Garnier’s misanthropy is total, but always funny’.
Pascal Garnier’s brand of bleak yet entertaining noir is inimitable, and this story of an ageing ‘exterminator’ sent on one last job has been selected by John Banville as his favourite of the Frenchman’s works, of which a dozen have now been published and widely acclaimed in English. With its bizarre misadventures and shocking scenes offset with moments of humour and tenderness, How’s the Pain? showcases exactly why Garnier is an inspiration to so many great modern-day crime and literary fiction writers including Ian Rankin and A. L. Kennedy, and why his work has received such critical acclaim. The New York Review of Books will run a piece on his oeuvre in February 2020 and Crime Reads will run a piece by Brian Green on Garnier’s work around the same time. Garnier’s 2019 novel C’est la Vie was praised in the Wall Street Journal as ‘a jeu d’esprit of hard-boiled symbolism, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, T.S. Eliot and the Marx Brothers’ and also included in the paper’s end of year round-up. Other memorable praise for past books includes Marlyn Stasio’s description of Garnier’s work as ‘Deliciously dark ? painfully funny’ in the New York Times, while John Powers on NPR said ‘Garnier makes bleakness pleasurable. It’s fun to inhabit such a powerful mental atmosphere, however dark it may be, when it’s created with originality and style.’
