The tale is simple, if grim: a disenfranchised teenage boy from the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris rapes and murders the manager of the supermarket where his mother works. But Gerard Gavarry is a writer who knows how literary inventiveness can shed new light on a serious subject, and Hoppla tells its story three times, in three separate sections, each in a different tone or mode and with different sets of images and vocabularies. The first relies on tropical images and the characters speak in a lexicon borrowed from the coconut industry--as if the Parisian suburbs had been...

A literary exploration into the serendipitous convergences underpinning the writing of a novel (here, G?rard Gavarry's masterful "Hoppla 1 2 3"), this rare and revealing glimpse into the creative process pulls back the curtain on the composition