"The Quartet" is a novel by Belgian Francois Emmanuel, translated by Euan Cameron.
This novel becomes thrilling when
a corporate
psychologist started investigating a senior manager who has a disquieting effect that lingers long after you have closed the book. The time is in the aftermath of World War II. The eerie legacy of the past and the way there is no escape from even the most seemingly random of connections fuel a story about private grief and the greater tragedy of the Holocaust.
The story is beautifully told, nevertheless, it is one of sadness as the reader is introduced to the fall of
Matthias Just, the protagonist. His collapse is the dissolution of the company's string quartet, alongside the revelation of papers in his home that contains instructions of vehicles to be used for the extermination of humans. Musical notations are overlaid on the papers.
Matthias Just is a manager of a French branch of a multinational German company. He is under suspicion for strange behavior and possible mental illness. The psychologist, the unnamed narrator, slowly begins to understand the true horror of Just's predicament, based on memories of his father's role in murdering Jews which he found out from the fourth member of the quartet group.
When Matthias meets one of the quartets and finds out certain past about his father, he starts to decipher bits and pieces of the texts that came to his hands. Slowly he unravels the fact why he is being pursued and what this has to do with the nature of the music, and the revelations about a German company in France with links to the Nazi death camps.
Complex questions regarding the integrity of the papers need answering, including ownership and who the real victims are. They underpin uneasy feeling of the book, somewhat disturbing.