This, like a lot of what I’ve read lately for some reason, is a fictionalized retelling of real events. The people are real. The author was an accomplished journalist, and took no liberties in retelling the key moments of this story.

It’s a waking nightmare.

The story is of Bernard Valcourt, an avatar for the author, who is a filmmaker and journalist holed up in the Hotel-de-Mille-Collines in the leadup to and the first moments of the Rwandan genocide. As he and Gentille, a woman who works at the hotel fall in love, the world around them falls apart.

AIDS is rampant in Rwanda at this moment, and several economic, cultural and religious factors make it nearly impossible to combat. Here is a man named Méthode, knowing he’s going to die of AIDS any day:

Méthode wanted to die clean, drunk, stuffed with food and in front of the television. A triumphant end for a life of thirty-two years, an end he was no longer afraid of because he would rather die of AIDS than be hacked up by a machete or shredded by a grenade. “That’s the fate waiting for all Tutsis. We have to leave or die before the Holocaust.” Since the sickness had been keeping him in bed, Méthode had been reading everything he could find about the Jews. Tutsis and Jews — same fate. The world had known the scientific Holocaust, cold, technological, a terrifying masterpiece of efficiency and organization. A monstrosity of Western civilization. The original sin of Whites. Here, it would be the barbarian Holocaust, the cataclysm of the poor, the triumph of machete and club.

Several characters in the book express a desire to die with dignity or at least a minimum of suffering, though they are each resigned to the fact that they will be killed. This dark and terrifying atmosphere permeates everything in the novel – even the romance between Valcourt and Gentille is doomed from the beginning.

Courtemanche does not look away from the horror when it begins. There are several graphic and difficult moments in this book – extreme, detailed descriptions of sexual and physical violence against adults and children. The writing is somewhat detached (likely Courtemanche the journalist coming through), which gives these scenes a specific kind of brutality:

At the beginning of the massacres, almost all Tutsis shared a single reflex: the militiamen would not dare attack the house of God. By the tens of thousands, from all the hills and all the hamlets, they had run, walked and crawled through the night, and with a great sigh of relief had squatted in the choir of a church, or the entrance of a presbytery, or in a classroom with a crucifix looking down from the wall. God, the last rampart against inhumanity. But in this gentle springtime, God and more notably most of his pious vicars had abandoned their flocks. The churches became Rwanda’s gas chambers.

This was published in French in 2000, but the English translation didn’t appear until 2003, the same year as Shake Hands with the Devil. It shares a few qualities with that book, including a cynicism that the West and the United Nations understood the scope and stakes in Rwanda in 1994, the incompetence and ineffectiveness of the aid that was provided, and a strong distaste for the Belgian soldiers stationed in Kigali. An unnamed version of Roméo Dallaire appears in this book in a somewhat unflattering light — he’s portrayed as frustrated and handcuffed by the UN – a bureaucrat that can offer no help or justice.

It’s a beautifully written and translated novel. Unforgettable, no matter how hard you might want it to be otherwise.