A slow, musing, sweet read. I have come to the conclusion that all novels set in Paris require that the reader keep a street map of the city at hand, as the geography is always detailed: streets, avenues, train stations, parks, squares... Fabre gives us other neighborhoods many Parisian novels do not: the 17th arrondissement, not the 1st or the 7th, peopled by ordinary working folks - office workers, nurses, students, middle-aged divorced people living - and trying to make sense of - ordinary lives. There is little Drama with a capital D here: an aging single man, trying to figure out whether the curtain is coming down on his life, while wondering if F. Scott Fitzgerald was right about there being no second acts. Online dating, a young adult son about to fly the coop, and a couple of friends with whom he shares some history of a deteriorating neighborhood, downsizing, divorce, depression. That's about it. But it turns out to be enough, after all. One friend - the one they worried about - makes it out in one piece. The other is stable and content. He and his son talk. A date grows into friendship and more. And yes, they still live in Paris where you can find a bar for a coffee or a drink within a few steps almost anywhere. Another little gem from New Vessel Press. ( )

I am so glad that I purchased this book. I heard about the author and read a review of this book. It was enough for me to take a chance on not only a new author, but also a translated book. Reading a translated book, I believe you must trust that the translator was able to capture the spirit of the book in its original language.

This book was quick and enjoyable read. The only thing I will about the plot is that is the story of a middle aged man, living in Paris, France and how he tries to find new meaning in his life. ( )

Guys Like Me is Dominique Fabre's second novel to be translated into English. Like 2008's The Waitress Was New it is immersive and satisfying.

There is a different experience this time around. Fabre drops us into the mind of his protagonist...I never noticed a name for him...in a first-person, stream-of-consciousness narration. All of us have a lot going on in our minds most of the time; I've noticed about five different topics flit through my mind in the last minute. So, too, in a half a dozen sentences our narrator will comment on the state of the Seine, reflect on the need to have a meal with his son, remember places he had lived, talk about filling out a landlord's social security paperwork, only to return to talking about the Seine and how it makes him feel good. Pronouns switch their targets, sentences change subject and/or predicate partway through. It struck me as exactly how our internal monologue runs when we don't have to organize it for the consumption of others.

Yet, somehow, Fabre takes this and molds it into an impressionistic discourse on middle age, loss of hope, loneliness and trying to recover a life that, somehow, got away from one. A bad divorce years ago left our narrator in a state where, as he says of himself, "That day, without knowing it, I'd signed up for years of not living." That condition might have lasted the rest of his life had not events caused him to notice the "few million guys like me" who messed up their lives without meaning to and who believed, as he did, that you only got one shot at life, that there was no second act. “But I still believe there are, from time to time," he muses and, because of that little measure of hope still remaining, he starts to open himself to the possibility of living and loving again.

It's a story where very little happens and, yet, there's such a genuine quality to the thoughts of this ordinary, middle-aged man that I think many of us will find it easy to relate to him and be satisfied with watching the slow shift of his life.

Recommended. ( )