Description
Book SynopsisJean Echenoz’s sly and playful novels have won critical and popular acclaim in France as well as in the United States, where he has been profiled by the New Yorker and called the "most distinctive voice of his generation" by theWashington Post. With his wonderfully droll and intriguing new work Special Envoy, Echenoz turns his hand to the espionage novel which, when published in France, stormed the bestseller lists. Special Envoy begins with an old general in his dilapidated office in France’s intelligence agency asking his trusted lieutenant Paul Objat for ideas about a person he wants for a particular job: someone pretty, female, and easily manipulated. Objat has someone in mind: Constance, an attractive, restless, bored woman in a failing marriage to a washed-up pop musician. She is abducted by Objat’s cronies and spirited away into the bowels of France’s intelligence bureaucracy where she is trained for the mission to spearhead the destabilization of Kim Jong-un’s regime in North Korea. Will Constance survive her mission in Pyongyang? Will her feckless husband ever write another pop hit? Joyously strange and unpredictable, full of twists and coincidences, Special Envoy is, in the words of L’Express "a pure gem, a delight at all times, a comedy monument, a celebration of the French language."
Trade ReviewPraise for Special Envoy: "A shaggy tale that blends spy-novel pastiche with today's headlines. Fans of Echenoz will recognize his signature playfulness and affection for the offbeat caper." Kirkus Reviews Praise for Jean Echenoz: "Witty, passionate, Echenoz’s novels are often the opposite of realistic—playful fantasies in which characters bounce in and out of sight like acrobats on a trampoline, with plots that hopscotch wildly over time and space." —Max Byrd, New York Times Book Review "The most distinctive voice of his generation and the master magician of the contemporary French novel." —The Washington Post "Rarely has the difficult craft of storytelling been as well mastered." —Times Literary Supplement "A gentle tending to perversity links Echenoz to that other master of perverse detail, Vladimir Nabokov." —Los Angeles Times "There is an echo of García Márquez in these simple yet enigmatic pages. Echenoz gives us a slim series of elegant, tightly written tales, achieving a simple kind of magic.” —Kirkus
