‘Concision kills everything,’ says the femme fatale at the heart of this book. ‘What's essential always lies in the details.’ And yet this is a concise novel, which races through the evolution of a destructive love affair without lingering on the details, choosing instead to pick out the major highlights – or lowlights.

The setting is a nameless town on the Provençal coast, a kind of mini-Marseille where Paul runs a small restaurant in a square. His days are spent washing dishes, watching tourists, and ogling his waitresses – until the fateful morning he encounters Sylvia, and precipitates a downward spiral that takes in animal attacks, psychiatric hospitals, angry French painters, and manslaughter.

What's perhaps most interesting about L'été is how openly nonsensical Sylvia is as a character. No attempt has been made to disguise her as anything other than what she is: a paranoid male fantasy about the beauty and cruelty of women. She is described, breasts-first, in a hundred breathless scenes, flouncing in and out of the story in abbreviated dresses and acceding to rationed bouts of anguished, ecstatic lovemaking.

Paul, our enamoured restaurateur, is driven to pacing his rooms unshaven at three a.m. and exclaiming, ‘Dieu avait dessiné le monde avec la pointe de ces seins,’ which is his (or his author's) idea of waxing poetic. Sylvia herself, meanwhile, rather gives the game away by coming out with such motivational speeches as the following:

« J'ai besoin de vous voir boire, me chercher, souffrir. J'ai besoin de vous voir vous haïr, vous déchirer. Votre jalousie féroce, j'en ai besoin pour vivre. Les hommes disent que je suis belle, je ne les crois pas, ils disent ça à toutes les femmes. Je veux les voir souffrir, je veux les voir vomir de souffrance ! J'aimerais qu'ils s'entre-tuent pour moi ! »

[‘I need to see you drinking, searching for me, suffering. I need to see you hating yourself, tearing yourself apart. Your crazed jealousy is what I need to live. Men tell me I'm beautiful; I don't believe them; they say that to all the girls. I want to see them suffer, I want to see them vomit from suffering! I'd like them to kill each other over me!’]

Even treated semi-parodically, as in Martin Amis's London Fields, I find this kind of character ludicrous; it's best played for pure aesthetic effect, something like Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. Here, it asks to be taken seriously, which is impossible. The book does succeed in leaving you thinking – just less about the characters, and more about the ideas of men and women that seem to have animated it. ( )