Heatwave by Victor Jestin
Review and Summary of Heatwave by Victor Jestin, translated by Sam Taylor.
“Oscar is dead because I watched him die and I did nothing.”
Heatwave by Victor Jestin (2021). Published in English by Scribner.
That quote I placed above is the saucy opener to this short novella—it’s technically classified as a novel, but since this book clocks in at only one hundred and twelve pages, I’m thinking it’s actually more in novella territory. I had never heard of this young emerging author from France before, so I was shocked to find this in the new section of my library. My library never used to have what was hip and in, but now they’re getting a lot of new books translated, which gives me quite a bit of joy.
Anyways, this book made quite a splash in France. It’s Jestin’s debut as a novelist, and he’s had a bit of a career as a screenwriter before this. So he’s had a bit of a background in writing content, and so this book won a bunch of awards for its writing. I picked this up largely because of the premise: our main character, a French teenager named Leo, immediately discovers the suicide and body of someone he knows personally as he goes out one night. Instead of doing the normal thing and calling the cops, he buries the body in a sand dune.
I’ve said a lot already, so let’s begin the review.
Note: there is a major trigger warning attached to this novel because of the suicide and finding the body of a friend.
Content
As mentioned before, this novella immediately begins with Leo discovering Oscar’s body. Oscar had a girlfriend, but people often saw him as weird. Leo and Oscar were technically friends, so the shock gets to Leo when he finds the body hanging from a tree. Something inside of him compels him to bury his dead friend, so he pulls him from his noose and buries him at the beach in the sand dunes, which probably wasn’t the brightest idea. What if a kid was making a sand castle or something and finds this corpse? I imagine that would be absolutely traumatizing for some random child.
The rest of the novella then follows Leo’s guilt at what he has done. As you’re probably confused at his actions, he is too. We find passages of him beating himself up about the circumstances of what has happened, leading to these existentialist questions of why he had to find Oscar and why did he have to be the one to bury him. Someone on Goodreads compared this to The Stranger by Albert Camus and quite frankly I agree with that comparison. It’s like a strange fever dream, which I guess this would be like what our main character is feeling.
What’s interesting about this book is that it’s only the twenty-four hours after Leo has buried the body. We see him interact with his vacationing family, where he debates telling them and decides against it in case it ruins their vacation, other people his age also at the beach, and then, most surprisingly of all, with Oscar’s girlfriend. This guy has a lot of guts to go see the dead guy’s girlfriend; I would’ve been an absolutely nervous wreck if I had done that immediately after failing to inform people you found the dude’s body.
With an open-ending, I found this book to be quite disappointing. It was simply too short. We fail to see Oscar’s body be found, and no one seems to be looking for him. Eventually our main character lowkey forgets about the dead boy he found and buried, returns to his vacation-camping life, but then he suddenly remembers what he’s done and then we bring back that sensation of anxiety. But it feels so disappointing because nothing actually happens. No one notices the missing boy. Even his girlfriend is kind of nonchalant about the fact she hasn’t seen him in a day. What if he was lost in the woods? Where are this kid’s parents?
The writing was good. I will say that. Leo’s underlying anxiety constantly thrums in the words on the page whenever he remembers his guilt about Oscar, which then makes the reader feel anxious. The descriptions of the French summer are luscious, I could feel the sticky humidity and the sand between my toes. At the end of the day though, I wished I knew Oscar’s story more. Perhaps this last section would be a great ending for a longer novel, one in which Oscar’s story is told first and then Leo finding the body ends it. To pass on this guilt and mental health issues—the one who often finds a body, especially if it’s a friend, will always feel some kind of guilt for the rest of their lives.
Overall Thoughts
A hard pass from me. Just as you start getting into the groove of the story, it ends abruptly and is then left open-ended. I think the grotesque description of finding the body could’ve been avoided since it’s not the greatest thing to read if you’re not expecting it, but Leo’s got to get the body down somehow in order to weirdly bury it. This is more of a psychological study, which I’m not as into, so if that’s your cup of tea then go for this book. Lots of feelings of guilt and the impacts of witnessing death on one’s psyche in this book.
