It's a risky thing, to re-read a book that you read and liked when you were a teenager. On the plus side, you may understand new meaning, that your younger self was too inexperienced to get; on the flip side, your older and less naive self may be horrified at what pretentious rubbish you used to like.
I took the risk, partly because I wanted to right an old wrong: I'd read Madrapour in German translation back then, and wanted to re-read it in original French. The story is about 15 passengers and a stewardess who board a mysterious flight to a no less mysterious destination, Madrapour. The main protagonist is Vladimir Sergius, a British linguist and polyglot of Ukrainian descent. The passenger list on this charter flight is quite international and exquisit: We have businessmen, state officials and high-class tourists from France, Britain, Germany, Italy, the US, Greece, and India.
The beauty of the book is that it has a strong chamber play flavour: The 16 characters are seated in First Class in a circle on the plane and have to cope with each other and the increasingly surreal and absurd circumstances of their flight, with practically no way to get some privacy (there's the galley and the Economy Class, leading to the rest rooms). So it's all psychology and high-concentration drama, my favourite.
Because of the international nature of the flight, it's rewarding to read the book in original version, and I'm glad I did. Merle let's some of the characters use their native tongue every once in a while, mostly German, English and of course French, and the whole German/French affair just gets lost when you translate the whole thing (in retrospect, I wonder how the translators handled the tricky parts at all; I cannot remember that bit).
But even beyond the language delights, the book lived up to my memory: It has memorable characters and exchanges and is well-paced. There is a slight slump in tension somewhere in the last third, where the story and the characters don't progress much; but it quickly recovers and builds to its inevitable climax. The only serious reproach I have is that the passengers don't explore the mystery thoroughly enough, a lot of pragmatic questions and possible answers remain unsaid; Merle gives its story a spiritual and mystic spin instead. Overall, good job!