Abandoned @ 38%

I tried skimming after my last update and I only managed to get another 20 pages in before wanting to throw the book across the room and deciding that I really didn't care. I'm sorry about giving up on this buddy read, Themis-Athena, but I have to give you props for being able to put up with this book. I can't find anything interesting in it and I don't care about any of the characters. Je m'en fiche royalement et c'est une vraie perte de temps. 

I'm giving up on Senécal as an author. He just doesn't write stuff I want to read.

And I'm too annoyed to write this half-assed review in French.

Previous updates:

221 of 642 pages

97 of 642 pages

21 of 642 pages

Before starting

This book just seems long and boring. I'm debating between dropping it entirely and just starting to skim to see what happens.

I find zero of the characters sympathetic. None of them are even interesting. Even Pierre is just a socially maladjusted man who has warped ideas on psychiatry and thinks it's normal to shake his teenage daughter to the point that she has to threaten to hit him over the head with her drinking glass if he touches her again.

So far all I'm getting from the story is that far too many people have empty lives that can only be filled with sensation because they lack the introspection and will-power to make anything of their lives and are incapable of picking up a book. Pretty plate and pathetic, in other words.

I'm sorry Themis-Athena for being so slow with this book. I've just been doing *gasp* other stuff than reading, so I haven't finished any books in ages, and my progress in the individual books I've been reading has been at a snail's pace. 

That said, I've found that Chloé voices the perfect description of the reality TV show Vivre au Max:

"C'est le comble de la niaiserie humaine.*"

* For the non-francophones (cheating with google translate): "It's the height of human nonsense." Of course, that doesn't convey exactly the same sense since I'd translate niaiserie as something closer to foolishness than nonsense, but hopefully you get the idea.

A French buddy read with Tannat (who doesn't seem terribly inclined to make progress rapidly with this book, either) -- and since it's not only a book originally written in a language other than English, and in a language different from my mother tongue (plus, a book by a Québecois, i.e., non-Anglo-Saxon author), I'm also counting it towards square 7 of the 16 Festive Tasks (International Human Rights Day).

Vivre au Max is the first half of a two-part novel entitled Le vide ("the void," "the emptiness").  It's also the title of a TV show which, if it were real, would make the likes of Jerry Springer look like innocent choir boys.  The show promises to fulfill three candidates' wildest and most unreachable dreams per episode (at least 2 out of 3 of these dreams, or "trips," typically being sordid beyond compare): "au max" is a word play on both "to the max" and its creator's and host's name -- Maxime Lavoie, former president and CEO of a ski apparel company founded by his father; a position, that Max (a would-be humanitarian and intellectual) had taken on only half-heartedly to begin with, and quickly got fed up with when he realized that his high-flying notions to turn the company into a model of social virtues -- at the shareholders' cost -- were not going to be put into practice in any way that would have counted.

Max Lavoie is one of three men on which the story centers; the other two are a cop named Pierre Sauvé, who is investigating a quadruple shooting that initially looks every bit like a case of violent domestic revenge, and a psychologist named Fédéric Farland, who ... well, let's just say that having gotten bored with life's ordinary thrills, he is seeking ever more exotic and dangerous ones.  Of the three protagonists, I really only ever took to Pierre -- certainly not Frédéric, whom I hated pretty much from the first page of his appearance (and not merely for his utter amorality and contempt of life); and while I was unsure initially about Max, he lost my sympathy when I had clued into where the story was headed.  Not that I feel very much like bothering to find out: I still don't get what, deep down, Mr. Senécal's point in writing this book ultimately might have been, but I don't care about two of the three principal characters, and if the story is headed anywhere near where I think it is headed, it's not the sort of thing I need in my life at all.

That said, the buddy read has accomplished its primary goal, in bringing back the fun of reading something in a different language than German or (mostly) English.  So Tannat, if / whenever you finish this and aren't too ennuie on your part, I'd definitely be up for another one ...

So, alright, Maxime Lavoie was a somewhat unwilling heir to his father's position as president and CEO of Lavoie Inc., but vowed to do good with his fortune and, having apparently found this to be an unresolvable conflict he goes and creates a TV show compared to which Jerry Springer's is a paragon of virtue ...?  WTF?

And was it this show's theme ("realize your most unreachable dream") that gave Nadeau the idea to kill her ex-husband and his new girlfriend and twin sons?

And what's up with the four killers who sent Nadeau and the cops guarding her to her death?

It occurs to me, btw, that since the author is Québecois and the book was written in French, I can use this book as my read for International Human Rights Day for the 16 Festive Tasks: "Read a book originally written in another language (i.e., not in English and not in your mother tongue), –OR– a book written by anyone not anglo-saxon."  So that's what I'll be doing.