L'enquête

de Philippe Claudel

The novel's plot is deceptively straightforward: an Investigator, sent by his institution to analyze a worrying trend in suicides in a large enterprise in some middle-sized town, is caught up in a bureaucratic horror story while attempting to fulfill his mission. But this provoking and disturbing novel takes the reader on an investigative journey into the depths of existentialist probing: What comprises an individual? How much are we each ourselves and how much a product of circumstances, subject to external forces that we do not, or possibly cannot, control?