Novel review: Alain Damasio - La Horde du Contrevent (2004)

Finished it a week ago. Was a quick read. About as good as what people told me, but faultless.

I can only try to describe the good parts, so peculiar this novel is: the way it is organized (with a good dozen of quickly alternating PoVs), the strange yet buttery smooth writing style, the invented or borrowed vocabulary you instantly grok from the context and some of the more developed characters (Golgoth especially) are what granted it a place in my personal must-read French canon.

It'll be much easier to list its faults:

• The addition of women to the group is very immersion-breaking to me, and not only due to the arduousness of the task, but because of the dissensions and jealousy they would actually cause in a group of people forced to live such an ascetic life; like a deployed army.
• Related to that, the addition of "love" (almost always too vulgar to call it that way; more like a hippie commune) felt bolted-on and pointless. It simply doesn't meld with the story, very much like an afterthought.
• Some of it - the style, rarely, the fantasy wind/life concepts more often - triggered my self-indulgence radar, which isn't good. My mind didn't dwell on it, fortunately.

I'll add that I found the ending a bit long, yet I still couldn't stop reading it. Despite these very real complaints, I think it's between 8.5 and 9.

PS: this was never translated in English and I doubt a faithful translation is even possible.