Lou Villars

Lou Villars is the protagonist of the novel. Despite this, she is the only main character who does not give her own version of the narrative. Instead, the life and personality of Lou Villars is constructed by the other characters in the novel, most significantly by the amateur biographer Nathalie Dunois who wrote a self-published biography of Lou called “The Devil Drives”. In Nathalie’s version of Lou’s life, Lou was obsessed with Joan of Arc and traumatized by the mysterious fate of her mentally ill brother, although none of the other authors within the narrative make these claims.

Lou was a junior athlete before becoming a performer at the Chameleon Club in Paris, a champion race car driver, a self-employed mechanic and, during the war, a torturer at the Gestapo headquarters of Nazi occupied Paris. Doubt remains at the end of the novel whether Lou...