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The Last Laugh of Edouard Bresson by Amelie Antoine: book review

 

The Last Laugh of Edouard Bresson (2018) is set in Paris and Le Havre, France, from 1979 to 2017.

 

Edouard Bresson, a famous comedian, is described as ‘the most unpredictable stand-up comic’ in France. Although his charisma is always predictable, his performances never are.

 

The novel begins in Paris just before a sold-out show of more than fifty thousand people, and ten million watching at home. It then takes readers to the start of Bresson’s life, as a stuttering 10-year-old boy with an angry, complaining father Lucien and mother Monique who favoured Edouard’s brother Jonathon, six years younger. Jonathon adores Edouard, and always will. 

 

Now, at 48 years old, and at the height of his career, with an ex-wife Magda and an estranged 23-year-old son Arthur, the show finishes. At the stroke of midnight, it will be April 1, April Fool’s Day – a day for practical jokes and fooling around. Edouard Bresson is planning something big for April Fool’s Day. He vanishes in the streets of Paris.

 

Part 2 is narrated by Arthur Bresson, after his father disappears. Was it his father who jumped off a ninth-floor balcony? A practical joke, a prank?  Just like all the other pranks he made over the years? But his manager Herve identified the body. Surely, he knows about the joke. 

 

Then Arthur receives a letter from his father, dated April 1, with clues. Does Arthur know enough about his father to be able to understand the clues to what really happened on that final day? Arthur is ‘torn between a desire to get to know this whole new side of his father – a generous, altruistic, sensitive side – and frustration at his inability to reconcile that kind of devotion with the way he neglected his own son.’

 

For readers too, there are clues. 

 

And so, with these clues – of people, places, letters, and notes – like a treasure hunt, it tests whether father Edouard knew his son Arthur, and how much Arthur knows his father through past childhood memories. Are the memories the same for both of them? Arthur gradually understands the choices that his father made. In discovering his father, he discovers himself – and the perception his father has of him. 

 

This is an intriguing, psychological journey through people’s lives and how they connect. I think it could have gone into more depth, but nevertheless, it  will keep readers going until the end. 








 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

 

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