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 industryas if the Parisian suburbs had been transported to an exotic shore the second is nautical in nature the third invokes the mythology of the centaur and ancient Greece butts up against modernday France. Gavarrys bloody and poetic narrative takes dead aim at the social political and personal roots of violence and argues for the transformative power of fiction.