Théodore Solier is an amateur photographer who lives his life just below the surface, literally, and figuratively. He observes the world through window panes and himself in the reflection of subway cars, and his most salient personality trait is an inability to say important things at the time they should be said. He is also in utter dependence on his mother. Until he meets Leo, that is.
Leo is able to draw him out, and introduces him to the women and the boulevards of the Paris of the Twenties. When Leo is arrested by the Gestapo right in front of his eyes, Théodore does not know what to do or say. He recoils once again. After that, if he does go out, it is tentatively, to take photographs. When he looks through the lens, and takes a picture, his emotional self opens and shuts, like a camera, and he is almost able to live in the moment. When Leo returns from the camps and is helped out of a transport vehicle outside the Hotel Lutétia, Theodore takes a photograph. As he aims and shoots, he stumbles and falls, overwhelmed by the sight of the skeletal man. But though he apprehends Leo’s painful state, he is unable to reach out to him. Shuttered back in his home, Theodore develops the photo quickly, and oddly, though his aim is perfect, he does not capture Leo on film. Theodore’s next and only chance to capture his life will be just as it ends.
This novel was picked as the number one novel of the “Rentrée Littéraire” for 2002, the much coveted placement that launched the career of another young novelist, Michel Houellebecq.