Mathieu knows how to take us from a small-town hockey match to a corporate boardroom, but Connemara — despite Sam Taylor’s smooth translation — lacks the passion or the rigor to give the story more than a surface gloss.
The author invokes the song as an invitation to his readers to transcend social and cultural differences, and to better understand the lives and perspectives of those who might feel a connection with it ... Mathieu articulates this voice with ferocious wit and empathy for his characters, ordinary men and women leading modest lives ... There is a kind of desperate joy and wry pleasure in his writing, as well as genuine affection for the people of the Grand Est region.
