The setting of the story is an isolated hamlet of three houses and a stable for cows in the French countryside. However, most of the story unfolds in the kitchen/dining room of the main house. Readers used to stories that are driven by a mix of narrative and extensive dialogues among the protagonists will have to adjust their expectations to a novel that does almost entirely do without dialogues or even verbal statements. This text rather requires readers who are perhaps unusually patient since typical pages look like the ones shown in the picture on the next page.

            The main cast of characters includes seven people.

• Patrice Bergogne, in his early 50s. He is the owner of the hamlet, a farmer raising cows, for which he needs the stable.
• Marion, his wife. After finishing occupational school, she now works as clerical staff in a small print shop in town. It is her fortieth birthday that is planned to be celebrated.
• Ida, their ten-year old daughter.

• Christine, or, as she is affectionally called by Ida, Tatie. She takes care of Ida after she returns from school, and before her parents return from work. She is “a Parisian artist [painter], exuberant and batty” (p. 13). She has become old and dislikes the comments her paintings generated in Paris. So, she rented a house from Bergogne, whom she had known since he was a child.
• Three brothers, with the key figure being Denis, helped by Christophe and Stutter, the youngest, who used to spend some time in a psychiatric hospital.

The “Birthday Party” is being arranged by Patrice, Ida, and Christine for the fortieth anniversary of Marion. Patrice had met Marion about ten years earlier on the Internet. “He had believed when he met Marion that it would be impossible between them, wondering how she could fail to see they had nothing in common … wondering how she could even think of being interested in him” (p. 81). In fact, by the time of her fortieth birthday, their marriage had become inactive. They would barely talk to each other, and Patrice’s sexual needs had become so unfulfilled that, on the day of Marion’s birthday, while being in town to buy a computer as a gift for her, Patrice still managed to fit in a quicky with a prostitute. It made him feel guilty, but the need prevailed.

            Before Marion returns home from her work to celebrate her birthday, three men turn up at Bergogne’s house. Christine’s dog does not bark, because Stutter had stabbed him to death in the stable. He is assigned by Christophe to keep an eye on Christine in her house. After all, what would follow has nothing to do with her. Denis and Christophe later impose their presence on Patrice while waiting for Marion’s return. Patrice is speechless about what happens: “Who are you? … What’s going on here?” (p. 173). He has absolutely no clue about what is happening to him in his own house. Essentially, he, Ida, and Christine are taken prisoners by people who they do not know, and whose purpose of doing so remains entirely in the dark.

            On p. 237, Marion is still driving home in her car, singing loudly to the music coming from the radio. When she eventually drives up in the courtyard, she wonders about the unknown cars that are parked there. Upon entering the house and seeing Denis and Christophe, Patrice sees “Marion’s body frozen, Marion’s collapse, Marion’s death in her expression, her movements, as though everything has stopped – and everything stops for her for a fraction of a second, her face locked on Denis’s, Christophe’s … Patrice sees all this and it’s as though he understands everything, everything is resisting him but he understands, through Marion’s face and the collapse …” (p. 241).

            What happens is that Marion’s past, roughly 30 years before she got to know Patrice (with Ida as her infant daughter), a past she had not agreed to talk about with her husband, catches up with her. Marion had been willing “for all those years playing the idea of a couple rather than being a couple” (p. 293) in exchange for an escape from her past, especially from Denis, who had spent ten years in jail for a murder in which Marion played an important part. When he went to jail, Marion (already pregnant with Ida) took the opportunity to leave this toxic relationship behind her by putting as much geographical distance between her previous life and what was to become her future life. It was only by an unforeseeable chance that an acquaintance of Denis came across Marion in a karaoke club, without letting her know that he had recognized her. He told Denis, who carefully started, helped by his brothers, to ambush the family on Marion’s 40th birthday. Denis wants to humiliate her, to destroy even that “idea of a couple,” he wants to punish her for fleeing while he rotted in jail. But most of all, he wants Ida, his daughter.

            From p. 459, the time for the final showdown had arrived.

But also soon, the gunshots.

Soon death will come knocking at the hamlet just as it comes knocking everywhere, for it is at home everywhere, at home when it wants to be, making itself comfortable in apartments where it’s never set foot or even deigned to cast an eye …

Soon: seven shots ringing out in the emptiness of the night, four of which will hit their target, the others getting lost somewhere in a piece of furniture or a wall.

One reviewer called what followed a “bloodbath.” My impression rather was that of an old-style final gunfight in a dusty Western cowboy town (such as Tombstone) with the good guys facing the decisive battle with the bad guys, in which the good guys emerge victorious, but not unscathed. Police and firefighters are about to enter the courtyard when a final fateful twist produces the conclusive bullet that puts an end to this showdown.