Jean Broustra is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who stopped working his medical practice in 2007 and his book L'homme promenade was published the year before. It may well have come from one of his patients dossiers (although I am sure it did not) because it deals with a man who suffers a breakdown and is both paranoid and suffering from depression. The book takes the form of diary entries, letters and doctors notes, and charts the story of Maxime Duroc who suffers a mental breakdown and is treated in hospital by Doctor B Antarev a member of the society de Psychopathologie.

We meet Maxime in hospital and discover that after a period of delirium he has lost his memory of some key events, leading up to his hospitalisation. He has kept diaries and we learn about him from his journal entries, but there is a gap of a number of days and his doctor suggests that he concentrate on trying to complete his diary for those days. The doctors idea is that reading and thinking about the entries before those missing days could help the process. The doctor even suggests that he could help by transcribing some of the entries, a method that pushes the boundaries between patient and doctor, also between story teller and ghost writer. Maxime definitely has issues. He lost his left arm in a road traffic accident and now works as a parking meter attendant. He has an idea of being a writer and has a lifelong grudge against his parents who stopped him from going to college. He has become more reclusive, still living at home he has recently moved into the loft for more privacy. He cannot stand the sight of his mother, his father died some years earlier and Maxime was late for the funeral.

For most of the book we see the world through Maxime's eyes through his journal entries, but perhaps tidied up by doctor Antarev. Once his character is firmly established his story lurches into those crucial four days before his breakdown and it is a world of delirium, he appears to be stalked by a woman in black stockings, his new girlfriend Brigitte wants to go to Venice and after a night of love making, he finds himself driving towards the coast perhaps on his way to Venice. The novel then takes up a story of mysterious meetings, attacks on the beach: Maximes delirium causes him to mix reality with nightmares from his own paranoia and sometimes he repeats himself, changing the story.

Following the journal entries which takes up the majority of this short novel, there are notes on the case from Doctor Antarev and also a letter to his professional society where he raises questions on his own part in the story. He asks himself if his interventions were justified. Seeing the story from different sides, raises issues that might trouble professionals and patients involved in psychiatry, but the story pretty well stands on its own anyway. The novel consisting of shortish diary entries and changes pace for the period of Maxime's delirium, which I enjoyed. An intelligent thoughtful book which works on different levels. A four star read. ( )