The Scapegoat - Softcover

Pennac, Daniel

3.99

12,828 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860466117 ISBN 13: 9781860466113

Publisher: Harvill Pr, 1999

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The second Benjamin Malaussne novel set in Paris's explosive Belleville quarter.

His title is Quality Controller, but Benjamin's function at The Store is scapegoat for the rage of the customers. So sweet is his nature, so pathetic and eloquent his contrition, that most indignant victims withdraw their complaints. But there is also the matter of the bombs that keep exploding not far from where Benjamin is standing. Naturally, he becomes the prime suspect, even as he and his journalist girlfriend, Julie, have begun to unearth an even deeper mystery, a sinister and sordid conspiracy whose unraveling will expose yet one more seam in the dark heart behind the beguiling veneer of contemporary Paris.

Daniel Pennac's novels of life in the Belleville Arab quarter, which began with The Fairy Gunmother, are as funny as Damon Runyon's stories, as thrilling as Raymond Chandler's novels, and as wild as the best of Carl Hiaasen. With The Scapegoat, Pennac has once again struck just the right balance.

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About the Author:

Daniel Pennac was born in 1944 in Casablanca. He has written stories for children and for adults, as well as the four crime novels set in the Belleville quarter of Paris, of which The Scapegoat is the second.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Benjamin Malaussne's official job title is Quality Controller, but since nobody could possibly control the quality of all the goods in his Parisian department store, his real vocation is to serve as a scapegoat who can absorb outraged customers' abuse in a manner so pathetically affecting that the customers withdraw their complaints. It looks as if Ben's met his match, though, in the latest round of outrages at the store: a series of bombings that claim the lives of a garage mechanic, a pair of smooching senior citizens, a rabid pro-life lecturer, a sanitary-equipment representative. Not only is Ben unable to mollify the shoppers who survived the blasts; he's become the number-one police suspect. After all, he was on the scene of every explosion (except for one witnessed by his half-sister Thrse on his day off); his half-brother Jeremy sets fire to his school with a similar explosive; even his dog seems mysteriously implicated. In a more straightforward telling, Ben's new lover, the ravishing shoplifter he insists on calling Aunt Julia, would help him unravel the mystery and clear himself. But that's not exactly what Pennac (Better Than Life, 1994) has in mind. The first of Ben's four adventures to be published in the US is very French and more than a little precious, with clownish Ben, like Jacques Tati's M. Hulot, a charmingly jittery guide to the mercantile postmodern. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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