So weird! Environmental activism meets unfeeling professional espionage meets early human history meets woo meets rural French life.

Had a writing style / tone unlike anything I've read before, but it's hard to describe. Felt clipped, but wasn't really, by average sentence length. Short, vignette-y chapters.

The narrator / MC is so convinced of her own superiority. For my own preference, it toed the line exactly between "fun to watch someone being so competent, esp re: spy stuff" and "good god woman there's no way you're that good at everything you do." (To be clear, I think the former is fun when in genre and the latter just annoying.) YMMV on that, though; my mom DNFed about halfway through in part because she thought the bragging was so overdone as to make the MC an extremely unreliable narrator. 

Here's something. The main plot, of the mission, is a kind of unreality. Sadie is a fake person, doing fake things; she thinks of her targets as "not real" on multiple occasions. And the other sections, about the emails from Bruno, are also a kind of unreality: living in caves, meditating on our ancient ancestors. But they're different kinds of unreality, juxtaposed. Kushner creates an unsettling mood from the beginning and then amplifies it chapter by chapter. 

One of the things Sadie doesn't admit directly, but I think the book is nonetheless about, is the toll it takes on her to be continually assuming all these false identities. Maybe I'm just projecting my own disbelief that anyone could live this way. But she does mention how she finds ways to satisfy real needs within herself, even while staying undercover - her friendship with Vito, her affair with Serge. And she ruminates often on one particular previous assignment, which went badly because the targets successfully pleaded entrapment. Something there about your connection to loved ones on the present vs ancestors in the past, maybe. 

None of the actual plot hooks are ever resolved. We never find out: precisely who hired her, why, why they wanted nobody bureaucrat Pablo Platon dead, details of the fate of Le Moulin, who if anyone knew or suspected she was a spy, Lucien's reaction. She never meets Bruno. By the time I was near the end I wasn't really expecting we would, but worth noting in the review that this is not a novel which is concerned with giving the reader closure.

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Often poetic, in Sadie's little descriptions. I took note of some quotes:
> A big wind moved through the courtyard, stirring the tall and sturdy thistles, their purple tips bobbing like the needles of metronomes, and ruffling the green stinging nettles that clustered around the dry fountain and grew right up to the old Cagot door. 
> 142

> I had no interest in other people's children or in having one of my own. I had an IUD, and at most another decade to be careful. The only scenario I could imagine in which I'd become a mother was if I found a baby, orphaned, crying, maybe in a dumpster. In that scenario, I walking down a street in some city, and I hear this "waah, waah," issuing from a helpless little bundle of warm life in a heap of trash. 
> I have imagined that. It's a mental tic. It has no meaning. But it has created this uncomfortable feeling that someone, somewhere, is going to need me at some point.
166-7

> From the highway, tall craggy mountains stretched across a section of horizon like a diabolical curtain, sharp and jagged, frozen black flames against sky.
210

> ... shady neocon pundits, Bernard-Henri Lévy with his shirt torn open to the waist.
> "He gets them tailored without buttons," Serge said. "A shirt, for Bernard-Henri Lévy, is just two shiny draping panels of fabric that pool together at his navel."
page not recorded

> He inhaled, holding his cigarette between his third and fourth fingers, these lesser-used digits distancing him from the act of smoking, as if he were holding his cigarette with tongs. 
298

> There were the criminals and delinquents on the one hand, and one the other the intellectuals like Guy. Guy Das committed to rejecting society, while the hoodlums lived their rejection instead of thinking about it. 
321