Article

My own essays on contemporary French literature

Writing against the death of her lover: Céline Zufferey

Céline Zufferey's novel "Maxence" (Gallimard, 2026) is a fragmentarily composed writing project born from the anticipated grief for a lover, defying any conventional love narrative. In loosely connected chapters—lists, miniatures, observations, reflections—a portrait of a man emerges that is simultaneously a love story, a memory experiment, and a poetics-based self-examination, driven by the central tension between the desire to capture the ephemeral and the realization of the fundamental inadequacy of linguistic fixation. The narrator writes against the future loss by meticulously registering Maxence's body, voice, gestures, and everyday practices, while increasingly reflecting that every description remains reductive and transforms the living into a potential "tombeau." The interpretation reveals that this very insight into one's own failure becomes an aesthetic principle: the fragmentary form, the rhapsodic temporal structure, and the shifting address (between third person and intimate "you" to both the living and the anticipated dead Maxence) are not merely stylistic devices, but rather necessary responses to the text's ethical and epistemological dilemma. By systematically uncovering the four axes of reading—love narrative, critique of knowledge, autopoiesis, and reflection on time—and simultaneously uniting the semantic fields of body, archive, and prolepsis, the review reveals a poetics of pre-mourning in the novel, in which death does not appear as an event, but as a permanent inscription into the present, leading to an intensification of the everyday: the writing, intended to banish loss, thus itself becomes a medium of heightened presence, without ever resolving the fundamental contradiction between life and recording.

➙ To the article

Building bridges, deepening ditches: Pauline Dreyfus

Pauline Dreyfus's "Un pont sur la Seine" (2025), beginning with the catastrophe of a ferry accident in 1828, unfolds the story, spanning generations, of two village communities separated by the Seine, whose fates are intertwined in the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of a bridge. Through the Vernet family and its genealogical branches, the novel traces the transformation from an agrarian milieu to an industrial society and onward into a post-industrial culture of memory, with historical turning points—wars, the Popular Front, occupation, deindustrialization—inscribed as structuring forces in the lives of its characters. At the same time, the narrative insists on its own artificiality: characters appear less as psychologically singular individuals than as typified bearers of social positions, whose conflicts—for example, between a vintner and a factory worker, a Resistance heiress and a politician of memory—make the persistence of societal divisions visible. The essay explores how the central poetic principle of the novel lies in the multidimensional construction of the bridge: as a historical object, a topographical axis, a social diagnostic tool, and a philosophical metaphor that, in the sense of a self-reflexive poetics of history, does not foster reconciliation but rather produces and makes visible difference. In this dialectic of documentation and fiction, of historical accuracy and ironic distance, Dreyfus's text proves to be both a conscious continuation and a critical break with the tradition of the historical social novel: he demonstrates that the grand narratives of progress and connection fail in the face of micro-social realities and that every form of historical narrative—in the novel as well as in the museum project he conceived—must necessarily reflect on its own logic of construction.

➙ To the article

Brittany begins in the mind: A tribute to Jack Kerouac by Pierre Adrian

Pierre Adrian's "Le rêve inachevé de Jack Kerouac" (2026) reconstructs and reshapes Jack Kerouac's failed Brittany trip (1965) into a dual model of movement encompassing literary pilgrimage and self-discovery: Starting from Kerouac's genealogical obsession – the return to a Breton origin that proves unattainable – Adrian constructs an associatively structured, intertextually dense travel narrative that imagines Brest as a melancholic space of resonance between American Beat aesthetics and Breton culture; the "unfinished" Satori serves as a leitmotif of a poetics of failure, in which the missed enlightenment becomes productive. The essay demonstrates that Adrian's text is less a documentary reconstruction than a continuation of Kerouac's "Satori à Paris": While Kerouac's spontaneous prose records an immediate, disoriented experience, Adrian's writing appears as a reflective, centripetal approach that semantically charges the historical failure and transforms it into an elegiac narrative. Thus, the structural parallel between genealogical quest and existential uprooting is explored, and Brest is read as a topos of a "waiting possibility." The interpretation pursues the thesis that identity here is not genealogically but literarily constructed ("terre sans aïeux"). A certain tendency toward mythologizing, however, remains discernible: The interpretation affirms Adrian's reading, which, admittedly, accentuates the ruptures and ironies in Kerouac's work in favor of a coherent symbolic representation of failure. Overall, the interpretation of Adrian's transformation of a biographical failure into a literary myth shows and makes plausible that Adrian is less explaining Kerouac than productively continuing his unfinished nature.

➙ To the article

Mesopotamia between archaic mythology, imperial present and postcolonial guilt: Olivier Guez

Olivier Guez's "Mesopotamia" (Grasset, 2024, German translation "Die Welt in ihren Händen," Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026) reconstructs, in the form of historiographical fiction, the life of the British archaeologist and colonial official Gertrude Bell as a nexus of two intertwined narratives: the emancipation story of an extraordinary woman and the violent genesis of modern Iraq in the context of British imperialism after the First World War. The novel traces Bell's path from the scientific exploration of Mesopotamia to her pivotal role in the political reorganization of the region, weaving historical figures such as T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and Faisal I into a dense web of diplomacy, mythology, and power politics. Central to this is the poetic construction of Mesopotamia as a palimpsest in which archaic civilizations (Sumer, Babylon) and modern colonial interests overlap. This deep layering functions simultaneously as an ideological matrix of imperial legitimacy and as an ironic refraction of its hubris. The interpretation highlights that Guez's actual argument lies in the structural analogy between archaeology and colonial rule: both operate as forms of epistemic appropriation that translate knowledge into power and thus produce political orders whose fragility becomes evident in the postcolonial epilogue—from the fall of the monarchy to the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. The cyclical temporal structure and the mythical overcoding are interpreted as narrative strategies that make the British project appear as merely an episode in a longue durée of imperial repetitions; in doing so, the tendency to read the Franco-British rivalry primarily as a mirror structure is emphasized. Overall, the review shows how Guez stages Bell as a tragic figure caught between knowledge and complicity, thereby formulating a fundamental critique of the illusion of imperial power.

➙ To the article

Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the work of Mathieu Belezi

Mathieu Belezi's "Cantique du chaos" depicts a post-apocalyptic world that has emerged from a biblically exaggerated flood event, and whose political and existential order is characterized by violence, emptiness, and uprooting: At its center is the aging desperado Théo Gracques, who, after a failed attempt to retreat as a hermit, flees with Chloé and her children across devastated Europe and America, while his present is incessantly intertwined with the lyrically condensed memories of his lost love Léonore and the death of their child; after further losses and increasing physical decline, his journey ends in a standstill at the Orinoco, where he dies and leaves his last poem to a young woman who keeps it in remembrance. The essay interprets this narrative arc as a triply structured poetics—between road novel, epic, and lyric cycle—in which being on the move is simultaneously spatial movement, the work of remembering, and the dying process. It precisely elucidates how Belezi, through the interweaving of a mythical opening hymn, prosaic chapters of escape, and poetic diary entries, establishes a "poetics of the end": writing here appears not as a representation of the world, but as the final autonomous act in a world without alternatives. The hybrid form is interpreted as a response to the depicted catastrophe—the baroque abundance of language against the emptiness of the devastated world, the lyrical transcendence of time against the linearity of decay, the female characters as bearers of action and tradition against the exhausted male narrator. By closely linking these formal and thematic lines, the review shows the novel not only as a dystopian narrative, but as a reflection on the conditions of literature itself: The “cantique” becomes the last, precariously continuing form of meaning-making in the face of total disintegration.

➙ To the article

All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, “Le Procès Pelicot”, which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

➙ To the article

Between myth and mass murder: German-French novels under the shadow of the Third Reich

Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970) and Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (2006), despite the 36-year gap and two fundamentally different literary temperaments, are both Franco-German novels in the most precise sense: Tournier sends his Parisian garage owner Abel Tiffauges as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he experiences Germany as a mythological mirror land – herds of deer like heraldic animals, Göring's hunting lodge as a "palais sur rails", the Napola castle Kaltenborn as the fulfillment of an Erlking obsession – until the Jewish child Ephraïm inverts all his symbols at the end and transforms himself into the Star of David in the last sentence; Littell equips his first-person narrator, Max Aue, an SS officer and mass murderer, with Alsatian origins, a French mother, a Sciences Po education, and Parisian collaborators, so that Franco-German hybridity appears not as a humanizing bridge, but as a prerequisite for complicity—whoever knows Racine and Hölderlin equally well simply writes mass murder in better French. The present contrasting interpretation argues that both novels share precisely this commonality: They reject the comforting narrative that National Socialism was something culturally alien, imposed on the Franco-German heritage from the outside, and instead force their protagonists—the fascinated Frenchman as well as the hybrid perpetrator—to recognize their own education, fascination, and language skills as a gateway to the Nazi regime. The review sharply distinguishes between Tournier's mythological alienation – the crime is sublimated into archaic patterns (Erlkönig, Christopher, inversion of signs) in order to become visible – and Littell's hyperrealistic immanence, which denies any mythological shield and draws the reader into a complicity through Aue's cultivated narrative tone, from which he cannot escape; the review suggests that this difference is not only aesthetically but also historically explainable: in 1970 Auschwitz was still indescribable, it was sublimated – in 2006 it was academicized and museumified, and Littell insisted on its unprocessability. As Franco-German texts, both novels are also examined in terms of their language policy: the German, which Tournier leaves in the novel as reverently untranslated foreign material (Napola, Reichsjägermeister, Jungmann), and the French, which Littell chooses as the written language for the German mass murder – a literary sacrilege that turns the “clarté française” against itself and thus illustrates the thesis of the review that the Franco-German cultural community cannot close the black hole in its history, but can only circle around it.

➙ To the article

Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Manor Dory

The novel reveals how Jewish identity functions simultaneously as a historical protection and as a normative inscription on the body, placing the individual in an irresolvable tension between diaspora and Israeli belonging. A son writes to his dead father in a foreign language, demonstrating how history, origin, and power are indelibly inscribed on bodies, names, and desires—and how one can only escape them by retelling them. Manor Dory's "Le Gorille" (Grasset, 2026) explores how identity is produced through historical, bodily, and linguistic inscriptions—and how these inscriptions cannot be overcome, but only transformed. The starting point is the constellation of an autobiographically grounded epistolary novel in which a son writes to his dead father in order to escape his grasp and simultaneously recreate him in literary form. From this starting point, the essay reconstructs the central lines of movement in the text: the childhood experience of a physically and symbolically different father (non-circumcision, name change from Reinhard to Ezer), the author's own adolescence as a phase of violent approach to this very body and simultaneous resistance (culminating in a psychiatric episode and homoerotic impulses), and adult life, in which genealogical, political, and erotic conflicts converge in a transnational existence between Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris. The interpretation reads the novel along the lines of the thesis that different power structures—family, religion, state, masculinity—function homologously insofar as they mark, discipline, and make legible the body; circumcision acts as a paradigmatic figure, but is expanded through names, languages, and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the poetics employed: the choice of French as the “private” language of writing, the mosaic structure as a reflection of a non-linear memory, and the figure of deadnaming as an intersection of Zionist naming politics and queer-theoretical thought. At the same time, the review highlights the central paradox of Jewish existence, which the novel encapsulates in a concise image: what ensured survival in Europe (the uncircumcised body) signifies exclusion in Israel—a historical reversal realized in the father's body and made explicit in the son's writing. From this perspective, writing itself appears as an ambivalent practice: not as liberation from violence, but as its displacement into a self-determined form, as a “translation” that makes loyalty possible only through betrayal. The ending—the announcement of an uncircumcised, multilingual child—is interpreted as a deliberate interruption of a context of inscription, the continued influence of which the novel simultaneously reflects upon and does not negate.

➙ To the article

Francia as a new Marianne: Allegory of a kaleidoscopic France in Nancy Huston's work

Nancy Huston's "Francia" (Actes Sud, 2024) is a novel that is both narratively focused and thematically expansive. At its heart is the transgender protagonist Francia, originally from Colombia, whom the novel follows as a sex worker in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris on a May day. This strictly defined timeframe forms the stage for a multifaceted panorama in which seventeen male clients—from diverse social, cultural, and biographical backgrounds—appear one after another, revealing their hidden needs, traumas, and self-deceptions. Through flashbacks, Francia's own story unfolds, from her birth as Rubén, through her transition, to her self-chosen identity, which, in the name "Francia," is programmatically intertwined with the country of France. The novel thus constructs a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary French society, in which issues of migration, gender, masculinity, and social inequality intertwine. The interpretation suggests that Francia can be read as a "new Marianne," a modern allegory of the French Republic itself: her body, her hybrid identity, and her social position encapsulate the contradictions of a country marked by postcolonial diversity, social tensions, and collective trauma. Accordingly, the essay argues that Francia is not merely an individual figure, but a symbolic projection screen for national self-understanding. It particularly highlights the dual perspective structure—the expansive inner view of the men versus Francia's sober, professional external perception—from which an implicit critique of male self-interpretation emerges: the men appear less as autonomous subjects than as driven by desire, fear, and societal expectations. Central to the analysis is the thesis of the universalization of "prostitution" as a social principle ("tout le monde est pute"), which negates the moral distinction of sex work and instead interprets exchange, need, and performance as universal human practices. This interpretation reads Huston's methods of multiperspectivism, polyphony, and metafictional self-reflection (the character of "Griffonne") as a poetics program: literature itself appears as an act of empathy and appropriation, ethically risky but epistemologically productive. Overall, it portrays the novel as a text that is both political and profoundly empathetic, one that does not doactically resolve societal conflicts but rather condenses and makes them visible in the figure of Francia—as a "new Marianne."

➙ To the article

Genealogy of Hate: Autobiography, Antisemitism and the Poetics of History in Édouard Drumont and Christophe Donner

As this essay demonstrates, Christophe Donner's novel "La France goy" unfolds a genealogical narrative project in which individual family history and collective ideological history intertwine: The starting point is the first-person narrator's archival search for his great-grandfather Henri Gosset, which quickly expands into a far-reaching reconstruction of French antisemitism since the late 19th century. Through Gosset's social mobility and his entanglement in the circles of Léon Daudet and Edgar Bérillon, the family is directly integrated into the ideological network of the time, while in parallel, Édouard Drumont's biography unfolds as an "anatomy of hatred," revealing how personal failure, social humiliation, and media strategies condense into a powerful antisemitic narrative. This network is complemented by counter-figures such as the anarchist Marcelle Bernard, as well as by the genealogical perspective on the grandfather Jean Gosset, whose death in a concentration camp brings the historical threads to a brutal culmination. The interpretation argues that Donner's method is neither purely autobiographical nor classically historical, but rather, as a kind of "genealogical archaeology," develops a reflexive poetics of the archive in which documents, fiction, and self-observation intertwine, systematically subverting the boundaries between self-biography and biography. Central to this is the thesis of a structural continuity of antisemitism, which is not asserted discursively but demonstrated narratively by making visible ideological, linguistic, and affective sediments across generations. Donner's literary achievement is seen in not only morally condemning antisemitism, but also revealing its aesthetic and narrative appeal: Drumont's success is understood as the result of a narrative logic that transforms diffuse resentments into a coherent story. This leads to a sophisticated critical approach that understands writing itself as an ambivalent power—as a medium of both ideological seduction and enlightened counter-work—and reads the novel as a whole as an attempt to gain a form of historical knowledge that transcends mere factuality through the literary exploration of genealogical entanglements.

➙ To the article

Resurrection: Ecstasy, Delusion and Revelation in the Works of Cécile Delacoudre

Cécile Delacoudre's novel "La Baptiste" (2026) tells the story of a Parisian techno producer who experiences a radical, boundary-pushing encounter at the intersection of artistic self-empowerment, social downfall, and religious ecstasy: Anastasie Hirsch, bipolar and anti-medication, increasingly interprets her life as a messianic mission, in which music becomes liturgy, the techno scene a sacred space, and baptism the central—simultaneously saving and destructive—pattern of action. The narrative arc leads from an excessive birthday night in the shadow of the Notre-Dame fire in Paris, through a series of social losses (custody, relationships, artistic autonomy), to the final catastrophe in the mud of a techno festival, where vision, self-dissolution, and an ambivalent moment of possible "resurrection" merge. The essay reads this narrative not as a linear pathography, but as a deliberately open constellation of three equally valid interpretive frameworks: an ethnographic study of the techno-culture milieu, a phenomenologically precise inner view of a manic-psychotic episode, and a serious, i.e., unironic, religious narrative. The argument emphasizes that the text systematically suspends the distinction between madness and wisdom (in the Pauline sense): the unreliable first-person narrator provides no corrective external perspective, but rather compels the reader to consider clinical diagnosis, mystical experience, and poetic imagination simultaneously. It is precisely in this epistemic undecidability, according to the implicit thesis of the interpretation, that the novel possesses an aesthetic and ethical radicalism: it rejects both reduction to illness and transfiguration into prophecy, instead revealing the feedback loop in which every social defeat intensifies religious excess and every ecstasy generates new destruction. Thus, the final scene – rising from the mud holding another's hand – appears less as a redemption than as a minimal, fragile counter-figure to the failed grand narratives of art, religion, and therapy: a remnant of possibility that keeps the question of "resurrection" open without answering it.

➙ To the article

The world as surface, the surface as world: trompe l'œil and ekphrasis in the work of Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal's novel "Un monde à portée de main" (2018) follows Paula Karst, a young Parisian woman who learns the art of trompe l'oeil at a Brussels institute and later works as a decorative painter in film studios, church restorations, and villas, until she finally contributes to a monumental reproduction of the Lascaux cave paintings. This essay reads the novel as the literary counterpart to its own theme: just as Paula's painting aims to obliterate itself in favor of a deceptively realistic surface, Kerangal's prose also proceeds ekphrastically and illusionistically—conjuring colors, materials, and visual spaces so sensuously that the reader forgets the words behind the world. The perfect trompe l'oeil requires not only the moment of deception but also that of disillusionment—only when the eye recognizes the illusion as art does the work unfold its true beauty. From there, the interpretation expands the question to the relationship between original and copy, which is radically subverted in the novel, from the Brussels training to the Egyptian funerary statue in the Turin museum: The copy is not a lie, but a creation of reality – and Paula's work on Lascaux ultimately poses the oldest question in art history anew: What is an original if the cave paintings of prehistory themselves wanted nothing more than to make the world so real that one could touch it?

➙ To the article

Where the trauma begins: Camille de Toledo

Camille de Toledo's "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (Verdier, 2020) develops a multifaceted literary investigation from a shocking moment—the discovery of her brother's hanged body in Paris in 2005—intertwining mourning, family chronicle, essay, and poetic evocation. The novel follows its narrator, Thésée, over the course of years in a dual movement: into the present of a traumatized body and simultaneously backward into the genealogical depths of a family marked by loss, silence, and concealed Jewish heritage. Starting with three boxes containing photographs, letters, and the manuscript of her great-great-grandfather, a "poem-inquiry" unfolds, revealing how historical violence, suicides, and repressed memory are inscribed not only narratively but also physically in the bodies of descendants. The review interprets this formally hybrid work as a performative poetics of the transgenerational: the non-linear temporal structure, the synchronicities of the dates, the shifting pronouns, and the incorporation of documentary voices realize precisely the entanglement of past and present that the text asserts. At its core lies the reinterpretation of the Theseus myth: the labyrinth is no longer an external place, but rather the interior of the family history, the "Ariadne's thread" a fragile web of archival material that only emerges in the act of writing. By returning at the end—in a radical inversion of chronology—to the great-great-grandfather's suicide in 1939, the novel marks the origin of the wound and reveals that knowledge is only possible through return: through arriving at the place from which everything originated. The essay emphasizes that Toledo thus provides neither a psychological nor a sociological explanation of suicide, but rather establishes a literary form of knowledge that gives voice to the memory sedimented in matter. Literature appears here as a place of “revival” – not as a resolution of trauma, but as a reconnection with the dead, as a careful mending of a broken thread that makes a “vie nouvelle” conceivable in the first place.

➙ To the article

The Monster and its Double: Pierre Rivière in Michel Foucault and Ismaël Jude

The review focuses on two radically different but inextricably intertwined books: the documentary volume “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère”, edited by Michel Foucault, which makes the historical triple murderer Pierre Rivière visible as a focal point of competing discourses, and Ismaël Jude’s “grief” (éditions verticales, 2022), which performatively attacks precisely this discursive containment. While Foucault's book embeds Rivière's prison-written memoir within a polyphonic archive—legal files, medical reports, historical commentaries—thus demonstrating how a life becomes a "case" through institutional language, Jude propels this constellation into the present and dismantles it from within: His narrator reads Foucault, rewrites his terms (parricide becomes matricide, sororicide, fratricide), and transforms herself into the repressed female doppelgänger of the murderer. The review does not merely highlight this contrast as a difference between two methods—here the analytical distance of genealogy, there the furious, corporeal, language-destroying counter-speech—but as a kind of dialectical movement: Foucault shows how discourses appropriate a text; Jude shows that this critique itself remains a form of appropriation. The focus shifts decisively: Where Foucault reads the text as a battleground between justice and psychiatry and emphasizes its “strange beauty,” Jude insists on what disappears in the process—gender-specific violence, the bodies of the victims, the possibility of another, non-male voice. The review's argument derives its strength precisely from the fact that it does not pit these two perspectives against each other, but rather understands them as a necessary tension: It shows how Foucault's project creates the conditions under which Jude can write at all, and simultaneously how Jude shatters these conditions by radicalizing writing itself into an act. This creates a picture of a literary-theoretical constellation in which a central question becomes increasingly acute: If—as with Rivière—text and action merge, who then controls their meaning? And who is heard—or silenced?

➙ To the article

Trace instead of monument: aesthetic revolt and the birth of a true book in the work of Cécile Guilbert

Cécile Guilbert's debut novel, "Le Musée national" (Gallimard, 2000, cited as LMN), is told from the first-person perspective of Juliette Cramer, who, after abandoning a legal career, leads a seemingly marginal, but in reality radically self-determined life as a museum guard in Paris. Between tennis courts, a love affair, chess games, and above all, the intense contemplation of paintings, she develops an attitude that understands art not as discourse, but as direct experience. The novel does not follow a conventional plot, but rather unfolds as a series of observations, reflections, and aesthetic experiences that intensify as the narrative moves between the Petit Palais and the Musée d'Orsay, ultimately culminating in Juliette's decision to abandon mere note-taking and write a "true book"—the very book the reader is currently holding. This essay reads the text as a triply coded project: as a social novel that dissects the spectacle and media culture of the late 1990s with satirical precision; as an aesthetic manifesto that advocates for an immediate, physical-sensual perception of art against academic over-shaping; and as an autopoetological novel that reflects on and performatively enacts its own genesis. The descriptions of the paintings are read as key passages in a poetics of "pure seeing," the social satire as a critique of a cultural establishment that replaces experience with event. By finally interpreting the novel's ending as a self-referential turning point—the book read as the result of the narrated decision—the interpretation makes it plausible that LMN tells less a story than it experiments with a form of existence: literature appears here as the last resort for escaping institutional control over perception and language.

➙ To the article
From the film "Leurs enfants après eux"

The dignity of perseverance: literary rehabilitation of the France périphérique in the work of Nicolas Mathieu

In “Leurs enfants après eux” (Actes Sud, 2018), Nicolas Mathieu tells the story of a generation growing up over four summers in the dying industrial region of Lorraine: In the fictional town of Heillange, Anthony, Hacine, and Stéphanie drift between gravel pits, disused blast furnaces, and familial fault lines through a youth whose promises – advancement, freedom, self-definition – prove to be structurally blocked, so that even their most intense experiences of love, violence, or friendship remain constantly bound to the gravity of a space that no longer produces a future; the novel condenses this experience into a choral panorama in which individual biographies appear less as autonomous life stories than as variations on a collective fate of invisibility. In contrast, “Connemara” (Actes Sud, 2022) shifts the perspective to the present and to a different phase of life: Using Hélène, the seemingly successful social climber, and Christophe, who remained in his original social milieu, Mathieu tells the story of the illusion of social mobility itself – Hélène’s return from the Parisian elite to the provinces reveals her upward mobility as a story of alienation, while Christophe embodies the flip side, a life of continuity without departure, so that their fleeting reunion makes visible the impossibility of a coherent identity between origin and self-conception; the titular place of longing remains pure projection, a name for a life not lived. The essay reads both novels as a diptych that elevates the geographical space of périphérique France from mere backdrop to epistemic center: space appears here as an instrument of knowledge in which the contradictions of French meritocracy materialize, and the characters act as bearers of social positions whose scope for action is predetermined by origin, class, and symbolic orders. Mathieu's poetics are described as a tension between social-realist precision and literary economy—as a writing of ellipsis that, through choral structure, free indirect style, and the imbuing of landscape, body, and everyday details, generates a universal resonance without ever tipping into abstraction; at the same time, this writing insists that the implicit social critique lies not in explicit theses, but in the narrative form itself, in convergence without catharsis, in the "malgré tout" of precarious happiness, or in the "cœur en miettes" of an unfulfilled existence. This creates the image of a work that neither morally privileges ascent nor stagnation, but understands both as variants of the same double bind – and herein lies the political power of its literature.

➙ To the article

Burning Edges or Why Jeanne Rivière Sleeps with Nicolas Mathieu

Jeanne Rivière's "Lorraine brûle" (Gallimard, 2025, cited as LOB) paints a picture of an unnamed first-person narrator in her early forties who leads an uncertain life in post-industrial Lorraine between Metz and Nancy, a life shaped by bodily experiences, motherhood, and subcultural practices: As a single mother of twelve-year-old Tarzan, an office worker, and a drummer in punk bands, she moves through a landscape of disused blast furnaces, supermarkets, swimming pools, and illegal concerts, while friends like the radically self-determined Lynn, the anarchic Nora, and above all, the terminally ill Baya, form a female counter-image to the bourgeois order; Baya's death from pancreatic cancer forms the emotional center of a loosely structured annual chronicle spanning from January to summer, its episodic structure rhythmized by recurring swimming passages, so that death (physical decay) and movement (body in water) overlap as an underlying axis. Against this backdrop, the essay reads the novel as a programmatic "poetics of fragmentation": the formal fragmentation—abrupt chapters, shifts in tone, a mixture of autofiction, essay, reportage, and poetry—appears not as an artistic deficiency, but as a fitting response to a reality torn apart by deindustrialization, uncertainty, and loss, in which cohesion itself has become a fiction. Particularly noteworthy is the thesis that the equivalence of different elements (everyday life and catastrophe, comedy and grief, bodily detail and social analysis) formulates an unspoken political stance that rejects hierarchies and places the marginal at the center. By consistently merging form and content—the fragmentation of life being reflected in the fragmentation of narrative—the argument gains its greatest persuasive power where it interprets the aesthetic clash of tones, physicality (blood, illness, sexuality), and Lorraine's space-creating function as interwoven planes; at the same time, it shows that writing itself, within the novel, functions as a means of survival and coping with grief, one that does not overcome fragmentation but rather makes it usable. Thus, in the review's interpretation, LOB appears less as a depiction of a social environment than as a radically contemporary search for forms in which fragmentation becomes a resistant way of life and the very essence of poetic unity.

➙ To the article

Delicate Destruction: Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's novel "Anéantir" (2022) unfolds the panorama of an exhausted present: at its center is Paul Raison, a high-ranking official in the circle of a French minister, whose everyday life is permeated by mysterious cyberattacks, political nervousness and creeping personal alienation. At the same time, his family environment falls apart – his father after a stroke, his siblings in their own dead ends – until the focus increasingly shifts to Paul's own illness. The diagnosis of an incurable cancer radically shifts the perspective: What initially begins as a political novel condenses into a narrative of dying, in which a fragile form of closeness surprisingly returns – especially in the cautious reconciliation with his wife Prudence. The novel traces this process in a slow, almost protocol-like temporality, keeping the destruction in narrative suspense: as something that is happening, but still seems to be held back by relationships, routines, and minimal glimmers of hope. – In contrast, the poetry collection “Combat toujours perdant” (2026) appears as a radical contraction of the same material. There is no plot, no character development, no mediation through social contexts: The texts consist of short, sharply cut observations that directly display physical and existential decay. Illness appears not as a process, but as a condition; the body not as a narrated fate, but as a defective system. The novel's themes – loneliness, sexuality, aging, proximity to death – also recur, but in a language that denies any illusion of continuity or meaning. Where the novel reconstructs relationships, the poetry collection knows only their absence or their echo; where the novel unfolds time, the poetry reduces it to abrupt points in the present. The review reads both books as complementary forms of a single project to depict the gradual destruction of the individual and society. The novel acts as a kind of "safe space": it distributes the unbearable across plot, characters, and time, thereby making it perceptible in the first place. The poetry collection, however, systematically removes these protective mechanisms and confronts the reader with a language that no longer tells the ending, but presupposes it. In contrast to the calculated provocations of earlier texts, which relied on scandal, exaggeration and polemical exaggeration, this late work operates with a demonstrative emptying: no longer does the breaking of taboos create friction, but rather the almost protocol-like sobriety of a writing that refuses any punchline. Whether this represents a step backward or a maturation depends on how one interprets this gesture: as a loss of aggression – or as a form of self-criticism that has recognized that provocation is futile in the face of the depicted exhaustion and must therefore be replaced by radical reduction. In this movement, both the individual and the social are erased: The subject shrinks to a functioning or failing body, while society appears only as a diffuse background structure, so that both levels become indistinguishable in the same process of annihilation. Thus, in the end, a peculiar beauty remains: in the subdued light of the hospital room, when Paul and Prudence lie wordlessly side by side, in the slow gesture with which she hands him the food, in the quiet continuation of everyday things – coffee steam in the morning, the rustling of bed linen – while the body inexorably disintegrates and these very inconspicuous scenes shine like last, fragile islands in the stream of annihilation.

➙ To the article

Vision at its limit: aesthetic overwhelm in the work of Nicolas de Crécy

Nicolas de Crécy's "Le syndrome de Kyoto" (Gallimard, 2026, cited as SDK) is an artist's novel that expands the pathology of an image-saturated consciousness into a cultural-diagnostic metaphor: At its center is Alexandre Vollin-Delbar, a painter whose hypertrophic art memory replaces any direct perception with art-historical overlays, thus making him both the ideal recipient and an incapable producer. The novel develops this constellation in a twofold movement of narrative representation (the stay in Kyoto as a failed attempt at healing) and reflexive self-reflection (the form of the text imitates the encyclopedic flood of images experienced by its protagonist), thereby making the individual illness legible as a symptom of an image-saturated present. The essay argues that Crécy's text should be understood less as a psychological case study than as a poetics of failure: the painter's "hypertrophy of art memory" acts as an intersection of perception theory, art criticism, and media analysis, revealing the paradox that the total availability of images leads not to increased creativity, but to its stagnation. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of Alexandre and the art historian Julie develops an alternative model of seeing—a distanced, historically reflective perception that does not overwhelm, but orders. The article explores how the novel systematically subverts classical forms (Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman), aligns its own narrative structure with the logic of hallucination, and simultaneously formulates a subtle satire on the art market, conceptual art, and digital visual culture. In the final image—the silent, free drawing after the silence of inner images—the review ultimately recognizes not a simple salvation, but a minimalist counter-poetics: art does not arise from the accumulation of references, but from the reduction to perception and gesture. Thus, in this reading, SDK appears as a commentary on the conditions of artistic creation in the age of total visibility that is as skeptical as it is precise.

➙ To the article

Negative Identity: Problematizing French-Jewish Literature in the Work of Bernard Vorms

Bernard Vorms' novel "Pas gentil" (cited as PG) unfolds, in essayistic form, the self-examination of an assimilated French-Jewish intellectual who, faced with age, origin, and societal ascription, is forced to grapple with an identity he can neither positively define nor completely shed. Starting with a banal everyday scene—a letter regarding funeral arrangements—a multifaceted text of reflection develops, intertwining autobiographical memories, family history, political analysis, and literary intertexts. The narrator traces the paths of Jewish existence between assimilation and exclusion, analyzes the persistence of antisemitic stereotypes, and formulates a central insight with the "axiom of absolute otherness": Jewishness is neither fully comprehensible to non-Jews nor to Jews themselves. The essay argues that the text unfolds its literary and theoretical radicalism precisely in this way: PG is not to be read as a contribution to an existing “French-Jewish literature,” but rather as a problematization of it. By consistently defining Vorm’s identity negatively—as something that reveals itself only in its indeterminacy—he develops a poetics of “negative identity” characterized by irony (for example, in the “shm” prefix), essayistic openness, and intertextual polyphony. The novel eschews classical plot and heroic narratives in favor of a thought process that culminates in a sober, unconciliatory, yet dignified conclusion: a self-reflective acceptance of one’s own belonging without illusions about its content. The interpretation simultaneously reads this approach as a plea for the essay as an adequate form of modern identity reflection—tentative, contradictory, and without claiming to definitive answers.

➙ To the article
Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to give you the best possible user experience. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognizing you when you return to our site, and helps our team understand which sections of the site are most interesting and useful to you.