Because it's serious: Omar Youssef Souleimane

This article is written in German. Automatic translations:

« Souris puisque c'est grave » : this chanson française résume ma situation. Rien n'est plus beau qu'être fluide face à la cruauté.
Omar Youssef Souleimane, L'Arabe qui souritFlammarion, 2025.

"Smile, for it is serious": This French song sums up my situation. Nothing is more beautiful than being fluid in the face of cruelty.

The poet, journalist, and writer Omar Youssef Souleimane, born in 1987 near Damascus, Syria, was raised in Saudi Arabia during his childhood and adolescence, a Salafist upbringing he later rejected. As a correspondent for the Syrian press from 2006 to 2010, he participated in the first demonstrations of the Arab Spring in Damascus in 2011, protesting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Persecuted by the intelligence services, he fled illegally via Jordan to France in 2012, where he received political asylum and currently resides. In France, he began writing in French, describing it as "refuge in the language of Éluard." He became a French citizen in 2022. His work encompasses novels, poems, and essays that explore themes such as exile, identity, Salafism, and the Arab Spring.

I am inscribed in arabic literature at the university, and I have announced everything in the world that I have read, and also in the Coran, and in a poetic poem available to me, plus the value of my eyes, as well as the propos of Mahomet. This poet is an example of my permis de ne pas emprunter le chemin de la radicalization, du Salafisme, comme mes parents. I'm helping you to replace the interlude with desire, violence with love. Abandonnant les injonctions du Prophète, j'ai choisi d'y substituer les rêves du poete.
Omar Youssef Souleimane, Une chambre en exilFlammarion, 2022.

I enrolled at university to study Arabic literature and announced to everyone that I no longer believed in their God, their Quran, and that a poem by Éluard held far more value in my eyes than all the pronouncements of Muhammad. This poet became the example that helped me avoid the path of radicalization, of Salafism, like my parents. He helped me replace prohibition with desire, violence with love. Abandoning the Prophet's commandments, I chose to replace them with the poet's dreams.

Omar Youssef Souleimane's work is a continuous exploration of his Syrian heritage, the traumatic experiences of war and exile, and his new identity in France. His perspectives on Syria and the Arab world are marked by an initial hope for freedom, which transforms into profound disillusionment with the failure of the revolution and the ongoing tyranny. At the same time, he develops a deep connection to France, its language, and its values, which shapes his view of the Middle East through a critical yet wistful lens.

Omar Youssef Souleimane, © Sébastien Leban, Flammarion.

In the autobiographical essay Being French In his 2023 book, Souleimane explores his journey to becoming a French citizen and his deep connection to France, describing his "struggle" (parcours du combattant) as a political refugee since 2012. The work is a love letter to France, its language, and its literature, particularly inspired by Paul Éluard. Souleimane also criticizes the "halal left" (gauche halal) and Islamist movements in France, which he observes in the banlieues. He advocates for a "liberal vision of immigration" (vision libérale de l'immigration) that promotes effort and integration to prevent immigrants from "living forever as strangers." ¹

Content

Le Petit Terroriste (2018)
Le Dernier Syrien (2020)
Une chambre en exil (2022)
L'Arabe qui sourit (2025)
Developing a French-Syrian perspective

Le Petit Terroriste (2018)

Le Petit Terroriste Omar Youssef Souleimane's autobiographical debut chronicles his childhood and adolescence in a Salafist family in Syria and Saudi Arabia. The book details the profound influence of a religious upbringing focused on glorifying figures like Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Souleimane recounts his inner struggle and gradual liberation from this ideology, fueled by the discovery of forbidden books and the philosophy of doubt, particularly through the works of Taha Hussein and Descartes. The text is a farewell to his childhood, to a Syria marked by tyranny, and to the Arabic language, in favor of a French literary voice. It is a book about geographical and spiritual journeys, from dogma to atheism and from one language to another. The work was published by Flammarion in 2018 and has also been adapted for the stage.

All my research is not possible but: access to the sites interdits. La premiere fut le livre The pre-Islamic literature de Taha Hussein, écrit en 1927. L'auteur a étudié l'histoire à la Sorbonne où il a obtenu un doctorat en 1918. Dans cet ouvrage, Hussein part de l'idée que toute la poésie préislamique est apocryphe ; elle ne nous informe donc pas sur la vie religieuse et sociale de l'époque. Mon père considérait cet auteur comme un infidèle. This is a poem that dérangeait mon père, but the truth is that Hussein is the author of the authenticity of the Coran. The intelligence of the method of analyzing Arab history was used by Hussein and touched me. Elle is distinguished by the use of two cartésien, fruit de ses études en France.
Omar Youssef Souleimane, Le Petit TerroristeFlammarion, 2018.

All my research had only one goal: to gain access to forbidden websites. The first was the book published in 1927. On pre-Islamic literature by Taha Hussein. The author studied history at the Sorbonne, where he received his doctorate in 1918. In this work, Hussein argues that all pre-Islamic poetry is apocryphal and therefore offers no insight into the religious and social life of that era. My father considered this author an unbeliever. It wasn't the poetry itself that bothered him, but rather the fact that Hussein questioned the authenticity of the Quran. I was impressed by the intelligence of Hussein's method for analyzing Arab history. It was characterized by the use of Cartesian skepticism, which he had learned during his studies in France.

This passage is crucial for Souleimane's intellectual liberation. Taha Hussein's work on pre-Islamic poetry, which questioned the authenticity of the Quran, was a revelation for Souleimane. Hussein's acceptance of "Cartesian doubt," a result of his French education, demonstrates the influence of Western rationality on Souleimane's thinking and his break with his family's dogmatic Salafism. It marks the beginning of his journey to atheism and freedom of thought.

Le Dernier Syria (2020)

In March 2011, when Youssef took part in the first manifestation of Damas, the impression that the cri de liberté poussé against the regime of Al-Assad, après quarante ans de silence et de peur, était a miracle plus puissant que celui du prophète.
Omar Youssef Souleimane, Le Dernier SyriaFlammarion, 2020.

When Youssef participated in the first demonstration in Damascus in March 2011, he had the impression that the call for freedom against the Assad regime after forty years of silence and fear was a miracle more powerful than that of the Prophet.

This phrase captures the initial euphoria and optimism of the Syrian Arab Spring. The “cry of freedom” is described as a miracle that surpasses even prophetic miracles, highlighting its immense significance and the deep-rooted yearning for change after decades of oppression. It reveals the initial, innocent hope for a peaceful revolution, which, however, would soon descend into violence and disillusionment.

Omar Youssef Souleimane's first novel, Le Dernier Syria (German The last Syrian(Translated by Christiane Kayser, Lenos Babel, 2022), is set in March 2011 and depicts the early days of the Arab Spring in Syria. Told in seventy vignettes, the book follows a group of young Syrians—Youssef, Mohammad, Joséphine, and Khalil—who, on different levels, embark on their own revolution. The story delves into the hopes, dreams, and visions of a generation living in a time of seemingly possible possibilities, but ultimately caught in a tragedy that sweeps away their destiny and the entire country. The novel explores themes such as homosexuality and tradition, civilization and oppression, and intersecting and conflicting emotions and loyalties. It challenges stereotypes of "tame" Syrian fiction and was published by Flammarion in 2020.

Joséphine, a young woman with a troubling charm, joins her in a group of young people to share the stories, the dreams, the visions of the Avenir at any moment or in any ensemble possible. Se joue alors une partition amoureuse. Youssef and Mohammad. Youssef and Josephine. Khalil and Josephine. Homosexuality and tradition, civilization and oppression, sentiments and loyalties s'opposent et se croisent, just a drama that has its destinies et un pays all entier...
Omar Youssef Souleimane, Le Dernier SyriaFlammarion, 2020.

Joséphine, a young Alevi woman with captivating charm, gathers a group of young people in her home to share their hopes, dreams, and visions for the future in a time when everything seems possible. A love story unfolds. Youssef and Mohammad. Youssef and Joséphine. Khalil and Joséphine. Homosexuality and tradition, civilization and oppression, feelings and loyalties clash and intertwine until a tragedy turns the fate of the characters and an entire country upside down…

This excerpt illuminates the complex personal and societal conflicts that unfold in the context of the revolution. Josephine's encounters symbolize the youth's desire for exchange and change. The love affairs mentioned, and the tensions they address between homosexuality and tradition, civilization and oppression, feelings and loyalties, demonstrate how inextricably linked the private and sexual are with the political in Souleimane's novel. Leonie Rau of ArabLit emphasizes that the novel "reveals that the sexual is at the heart of the political and inseparable from it." ² This underlines the idea of a comprehensive revolution encompassing not only political but also social and personal freedoms, which is tragically destroyed by the reality of war.

Une chambre en exil (2022)

"Une chambre en exil" (A Room in Exile) is a highly autobiographical novel that chronicles Souleimane's first months as a political refugee in Bobigny, a suburb of Paris. The narrator, who describes himself as an "apostate" and atheist since breaking with his father's Salafist religion, navigates the Kafkaesque French bureaucracy to sort out his paperwork and integrate. The book addresses the difficulties of exile, the loneliness and precarious living conditions, but also the discovery of the French language and literature as a refuge. It offers a realistic perspective on the challenges of integration and the presence of radical Islam in the banlieues, which can lead to alienation from the values of the Republic. The novel was published by Flammarion in 2022 and was nominated for the Prix de la littérature arabe.

Temporarily installed in Bobigny, so that the fire can be restored. Dans ce monde où se croisent d'éternels exilés, la complexité de leur rapport à la France seurte au poids d'un islam radical. Attiré par sa voisine, Violette, young female libre et volunteer qui le trouble, il se met à fréquenter un lieu dirigé par un imam politisé et doit affronter, en tant qu'Arabe, l'intensité de la banlieue et la nostalgie d'un pays natal qui n'existe plus.
Omar Youssef Souleimane, Une chambre en exilFlammarion, 2022.

Temporarily settled in Bobigny, what he sees and hears rekindles fragments of memories of what he left behind. In this world where perpetual exiles meet, the complexity of their relationship with France clashes with the weight of radical Islam. Drawn to his neighbor Violette, a young, free, and strong-willed woman who bewilders him, he begins frequenting a place run by a politicized imam and, as an Arab, must grapple with the intensity of suburbia and the longing for a homeland that no longer exists.

The quote describes the narrator's paradoxical experience in exile. Although he has fled Syria and radical Islamism, he finds himself confronted with similar phenomena in Bobigny: the presence of a politicized Islam and the challenge of integration in the face of the complexities of French society. The longing for home is contrasted with the harsh reality of a country that no longer exists, and the difficulties of finding a new home become palpable.

L'Arabe qui sourit (2025)

My identity is bien au-delà, it is suitable for my various apartments.
Omar Youssef Souleimane, L'Arabe qui souritFlammarion, 2025.

My identity goes far beyond that; it consists of my various affiliations.

L'Arabe qui sourit Omar Youssef Souleimane's latest novel can be read as a "novel of return." The protagonist, a Syrian-born perfumer in La Rochelle, returns to the Middle East after the death of an old revolutionary comrade named Naji to repatriate his body to Syria. The novel is a blend of adventure story and a "moving meditation on the turmoil of exile." It explores the search for identity and the choice between freedom in a democracy and solidarity in a more traditional society. A central element is the investigation into the illegal Captagon trade, in which the Assad regime is implicated. The novel is both a "sensual adventure story" and an "emotional meditation on the turmoil of exile." ³ It was released in March 2025 and won the Prix du Quai d'Orsay.

Depuis le début de l'histoire, nous n'avons connu que l'occupation, the civil war or the dictatorship. Nous sommes dependents of the others. Actuellement, nous sommes colonisés par les Russes, les Iraniens, et demain ? Est-ce qu'un jour on se débarrassera de la soumission ?
Omar Youssef Souleimane, L'Arabe qui souritFlammarion, 2025.

Since the beginning of our history, we have only experienced occupation, civil war, or dictatorship. We are dependent on others. Currently, we are colonized by the Russians and Iranians, and tomorrow? Will we ever be able to free ourselves from subjugation?

This pessimistic yet realistic view of Syrian history encapsulates Souleimane's enduring passion and disillusionment. He emphasizes the cyclical nature of conflict and foreign rule in Syria. Despite the grim present, in which Syria is "colonized" by external powers such as Russia and Iran, the question of a possible liberation expresses a persistent, albeit fragile, hope for a better future. This reveals his view of Syria as a country imprisoned, but one whose spirit of resistance, symbolized by its smile, lives on.

Developing a French-Syrian perspective

Omar Youssef Souleimane's work is a direct reflection of his personal development and the tragic history of Syria. Le Petit Terroriste This is the origin of his literary journey and marks his break with the past. It reveals his Salafist adolescence in Saudi Arabia and his rejection of religion. Here begins his exploration of "resistance through joy" and intellectual doubt as liberation. Writing in French is already an act of political and personal exile. One critic emphasizes that the book is "a testimony without evasion." ⁴ – Souleimane returns in the novel Le Dernier Syria The novel returns to the beginning of the Syrian revolution, a time of hope and potential that he himself witnessed. It captures the tragedy of a generation whose aspirations for democracy were shattered by both the regime and the Islamists. Here, his view of Syria deepens as a country torn apart by violence and external influences, and he reveals the connection between personal freedom (especially sexuality) and political liberation. ⁵ Libération describes it as "a youth in spring". ⁶ - Une chambre en exil It is a direct confrontation with his experience of exile in France. It describes the difficulties of integration, the struggles with French bureaucracy, and the resurgence of Islamist tendencies in his new homeland. His view of France is affectionate yet critical; he sees the beauty of the language and culture, but also the "other France" he discovered in Bobigny. ⁷ L'Obs notes that the book "largely describes his own journey through exile". ⁸ – The essay Being French It is an explicit reflection on his French identity. He celebrates France as the "home of freedom" and defends secular values. Critics emphasize that he is delivering a "declaration of love for this country that has taken him in." ⁹

L'Arabe qui sourit This marks a new phase – that of the (partially) possible physical reunion with Syria after the collapse of the Assad regime. His view of Syria is now even more complex: he feels joy at returning, but also sorrow at the destruction and the continued oppression by new actors such as Islamist militias. The novel is a "moving meditation on the turmoil of exile." ¹⁰ He describes the deep estrangement from his family in Syria, who are now ideologically far removed from him.

In recent years, Omar Youssef Souleimane has made his voice heard as a journalist and intellectual in The Express and other media outlets on current political issues in the Middle East and France. His perspective is characterized by a clear stance against dictatorships, Islamism, and anti-Semitism, while simultaneously defending the values of freedom and secularism, for example regarding Syria and the region: Souleimane sees the parallels between Russia's actions in Ukraine and Syria and describes Putin as "an accomplice in the tragedy for the Syrian people." ¹¹ He argues that a federal state modeled on Switzerland is the only solution to prevent Syria from collapsing and to integrate the Kurds. ¹² He also criticizes the ongoing fragmentation of Syria caused by foreign influences and Islamist militias. ¹³ Souleimane believes that the Arab League needs to find a "new enemy" to control its peoples, which exacerbates the political problems in the region. ¹⁴ He warns against the illusion of Saudi Arabia's liberation, as the country remains an authoritarian regime despite superficial modernization under Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). ¹⁵

Souleimane expresses his frustration with the debates surrounding immigration in France and advocates for a "liberal vision" that promotes integration through effort and shared values instead of identity-based division. ¹⁶ He sees himself as a "Frenchman without papers" even before he received citizenship. ¹⁷ The naturalized Syrian-born writer criticizes identitarian movements, which he sees as harmful to the republic, and defends secularism against Islamist discourses, also in the context of the abaya debate. ¹⁸ He expresses concern about the "Islamist propaganda" being spread in some French bookstores. ¹⁹

Regarding antisemitism and the Middle East conflict, Souleimane exposes antisemitic statements in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and criticizes the “double standards” of the extreme left. ²⁰ He recounts his childhood in Syria and Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism was deeply rooted and Jews were portrayed as enemies. ²¹ He goes on to explain the difficulty for Arabs in denouncing anti-Semitism in the Middle East. ²² The author critically examines the narrative of Rima Hassan as an “exile” and her positions on the Middle East conflict. ²³ He ultimately calls for the creation of a Palestinian state as a response to extremism. ²⁴

Omar Youssef Souleimane's literary work is an existential, courageous exploration of the Syrian tragedy, the challenges of exile, and the complexities of identity in the 21st century. From his liberation from Salafism in Le Petit Terroriste about the shattered hopes of the Syrian revolution in Le Dernier Syria, the difficult integration into Une chambre en exil, culminating in the painful return to the now foreign country and the intellectual self-discovery in L'Arabe qui sourit He offers a ruthless yet poetic perspective. As a "Frenchman by will, by impregnation and by choice," he is a champion of freedom and rationality, tirelessly calling for the questioning of dogmas and the defense of the values of democracy and secularism, be it in Syria or in France.

Reference / Citation suggestion

Nonnenmacher, Kai. "Because it's serious: Omar Youssef Souleimane." Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature. 2025. Accessed on May 19, 2026 at 09:58. https://rentree.de/2025/06/14/denn-es-ist-ernst-omar-youssef-souleimane/.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Kai Nonnenmacher

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg | Contact

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Notes

Omar Youssef Souleimane: “I don’t have a chance, I don’t have a catastrophe for France”, The Express, January 20, 2024.>>>
Leonie Rau, 'The Last Syrian': A Novel That 'Reveals That the Sexual Is At the Heart Of, and Inseparable From, the Political', ArabLit, 2. February 2023.>>>
Thomas Mahler, L'Express, 'Un sourire contre les dictatures', 10 April 2025, pg. 78.>>>
"Je rêvais d'être terroriste", Free Charente, July 20, 2018.>>>
Leonie Rau, 'The Last Syrian': A Novel That 'Reveals That the Sexual Is At the Heart Of, and Inseparable From, the Political', ArabLit, 2. February 2023.>>>
Jean-Pascal Guiot, “Le Dernier Syria”, a young person in print, Libération, 22. February 2020.>>>
'Un Syrien dans le 9-3', L'Orient-Le Jour, 3. March 2022.>>>
'Prix Jean-Daniel 2022: les 10 livres sélectionnés', Nouvel Observateur, 30. March 2022.>>>
Nadjet Cherigui, 'Omar Youssef Souleimane, fier d'être français', Le Figaro, September 30, 2023.>>>
Thomas Mahler, 'Un sourire contre les dictatures', The Express, April 10, 2025, 78.>>>
Christophe Colinet, “La Russie mène en Ukraine la même guerre qu'en Syria”, Press Center, 11. March 2022.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, 'Pourquoi la Syrie didit s'inspirer de la Suisse pour ne pas imploser', The Express, 12. March 2025.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “La Syrie encore une fois déchirée par des influences étrangères,” The Express, December 4, 2024.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Le rêve d'Erdogan de reconstituer le calipat n'a pas de limite,” The Express, October 26, 2020.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Croire que l'Arabie saoudite puisse devenir plus libre est une chimère,” The Express, May 20, 2024.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Je ne suis ni une chance, ni une catastrophe pour la France,” The Express, January 20, 2024.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane: “Je suis un Français sans papiers”, The ExpressDecember 14, 2020.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Au-delà de l'abaya, combattons l'esprit identitaire,” The Express, September 1, 2023.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Des librairies parisiennes accusées de propager une idéologie Islamiste”, The Express, 9. March 2024.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Elias d'Imzalène: ce qui a vraiment été dit en arabe le jour où il a dérapé”, The Express, 28. September 2024.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Chaque matin, on répétait 'mort à Israël', sans savoir où c'était,” The Express, October 20, 2023.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Antisémitisme: Je suis le traître Syria récupéré par Israël,” The Express, December 17, 2023.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, "Pourquoi Rima Hassan n'a rien d'une 'exilée'", The Express, June 10, 2024.>>>
Omar Youssef Souleimane, “Pourquoi il est crucial de construire un Etat Palestinien”, The Express, June 2, 2025.>>>

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Éric Vuillard's "La bataille d'Occident" (2012) and "L'ordre du jour" (2017) are two war narratives that tell the First and Second World Wars not as national histories, but as products of mutually intertwined Franco-German mythologies: The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 forms the structural horizon of both texts, from which the complementary self-images of both nations – the German mythology of rationality and the unstoppable military apparatus, and the French "élan" myth of the glorious offensive – emerge as traumatic reflections of each other. The essay argues that Vuillard's literary method essentially consists of a twofold deconstruction: firstly, he demonstrates that the supposed German efficiency is a bluff—the Wehrmacht's tanks are stuck in traffic on the road to Linz, Schlieffen moves paper figures across a yellowed map—and secondly, that French revanchism collapses in Joffre's culinary Alsatian fantasies, while soldiers in red uniform trousers march into machine-gun fire. The unifying explanatory model is neither national character nor political irrationalism, but rather capitalist interest and class logic: the twenty-four industrialists who financed Hitler in 1933 appear in Vuillard's work as the civilian continuation of the same accounting rationality that led Schlieffen to devise his plan of annihilation as a profit gamble. As a genre of Récit – a hybrid form between essay, historiography and novel – Vuillard practices an autopoetologically reflected poetics of the counter-archive, which sets the repressed names of the victims, the collapsed myths of the perpetrators and the continuing amnesia of corporations against the domestication of history into the folkloristic "déesse raisonnable" of a stagnant historical politics.
Society in a mode of fragmentation – literature as a response to the crisis of representation: Robert Lukenda
Robert Lukenda's study, "Representing Society in the Age of Singularities: Narrative Responses to France's Contemporary Crisis of Representation," is a comprehensive analysis of how contemporary French literature responds to the experience that "society" as a coherent whole has become increasingly elusive. Starting with scenes such as Annie Ernaux's ethnographic view of the supermarket or Éric Vuillard's reconstruction of nameless revolutionary actors, Lukenda demonstrates that literature intervenes precisely where political and media discourses distort or fail to capture social reality. In a first, broad theoretical section, he unfolds France's historical and contemporary crisis of representation—from the tension between the republican claim to unity and social inequality to the fragmentation into "France périphérique" and metropolises—before analyzing literary responses in the second part: autosociobiographical self-examinations (Ernaux, Eribon), documentary reconstructions (Vuillard), collective narrative projects ("Raconter la vie"), and serial formats. The review argues that Lukenda convincingly defines literature as a medium of "mediation" that makes social relations visible where classical forms of representation fail; at the same time, it critically emphasizes that this literature often privileges the perspective of the "invisible," while elites, political institutions, and inherent aesthetic logics remain underexposed. These works create an image of a France that only inadequately describes itself—and of a literature that makes this gap visible without being able to fully close it.
A thriller as a Corneille tragedy: Patrick Besson
Patrick Besson's crime novel "Presque tout Corneille" (Stock, 2025, cited as PTC) functions like a Corneille tragedy disguised as a holiday comedy: Georges Charpy, a fired Parisian journalist, encounters his former boss at the Hotel Aiglon in Corsica and begins to humiliate him at every conceivable game—swimming, tennis, chess, table tennis—driven by his Corsican wife, Colomba, who, like Mérimée's eponymous heroine, pushes the man toward a vendetta without ever explicitly stating it, a power structure that the essay identifies as the true center of the plot. Meanwhile, Lisa, the hotel director's daughter, reads Corneille's complete works chronologically by the pool—one tragedy per day—and her quotations comment on the events like a classical chorus: "Qui vit haï de tous ne saurait longtemps vivre" (from Cinna). "Qui se laisse outrager mérite qu'on l'outrage" (from Heraclius). Sentences that circle Corneille's central theme, namely the question of whether man can ever reconcile what he wants with what he is allowed to do, and which in the novel serve to make the act of murder appear morally predetermined, not as an exception, but as a consequence. The boss is found beheaded, later a second character as well; Georges confesses to both murders—the first out of honor, the second out of jealousy—and the essay reads this double murder as evidence that Besson is not introducing Corneille into the thriller genre, but rather showing that the thriller possesses the same moral architecture as classical theater: guilt arises where the will to gain satisfaction is stronger than reason, which urges moderation, and Lisa, who at the end cuts Corneille off—"Oui: trop de sang." —thus performing the gesture that marks the core of the novel: literature can comment on violence, but it cannot stop it.
Beauty, corruption, and literary genealogy: Capote's guilt, Aragon's farewell, Simon Liberati, and Taïné's death
Simon Liberati's "New York City Inferno" (Stock, 2026) concludes a trilogy of novels that began with "Les Démons" (2020) in late 1960s Paris and leads via 1970s Rome ("La Hyène du Capitole", 2024) to 1974-75 Manhattan – a New York at the turning point between pop and punk, between the last glamour of post-war culture and the first dark premonition of an epidemic that has not yet been named. At the center are the Russian-born siblings Tcherepakine: Taïné, androgynous, drug-addicted, proto-punk avant la lettre, who dies on the schooner Elseneur in Palma de Mallorca, and Alexis, the vagabond would-be writer who ultimately takes Capote's money and begins writing the book that is already the first volume of the trilogy—a Möbius strip in which genesis and work are inextricably intertwined. The essay interprets the trilogy as a circular structure: The book that Alexis announces at the end of the third volume bears the same title as "Les Démons," and this circularity is a poetics statement—literature does not arise from emptiness, but from survival, from the material of the dead. Truman Capote, who appears in the novel as a living corpse and gives the student the apostolic mission, is the key figure: Liberati accomplishes what Capote could not with "Answered Prayers" because the social victory had made writing impossible – he writes the American Proust as a French one, with the same social chronicle, the same betrayal, the same conviction that gossip is a literary form, but with the affective charge that Capote's clinical irony lacks. In this constellation, Louis Aragon's brief, hallucinatorily beautiful appearance also gains its full weight: The old communist, who looks through a fogged windowpane at a Balthus tableau and hums Nerval verses, is not only an intertextual gesture, but the witness of the end – the last representative of a European literature of engagement, who bids farewell to Bérénice (the name of the main character in Aragon's "Aurélien"), who, unlike in Aragon's work, is not a historical martyr in Liberati's version, but a purely aesthetic vision of youth, which the old man sees through glass and cannot touch before he disappears down the sandy path, taking an era with him.
The Unreachable City: Sanctity, History, and Violence in the French Jerusalem Novel
What place does Jerusalem occupy in contemporary French literature—and what does this place reveal about literature itself? This essay examines eleven novels and short stories, ranging from André Schwarz-Bart to Nathan Devers, from Valérie Zenatti to Justine Augier, from Élie Wiesel to Mathias Énard, and demonstrates that Jerusalem is never merely a backdrop in these works, but rather a structuring principle: a city that disorients the characters, brings repressed memories back to the surface, imposes affiliations, and shatters established forms. Three functional types emerge from the comparison—Jerusalem as an eschatological space, as a political focal point, and as an existential mirror—which are distributed and overlap throughout the texts without ever converging. A specifically French perspective proves constitutive: Republican secularism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the experience of the Shoah as part of its own history—all of this colors the perception of a city equally sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and whose threefold sanctity has for centuries produced wars as well as longings. Arab and Muslim authors such as Karim Kattan, Amin Maalouf, and Adania Shibli add their own distinctive emphasis, describing Jerusalem not as the destination of a long-held yearning, but as the starting point of forced exile—and using French as a strategically chosen medium to inscribe Palestinian concepts and experiences into a Western discourse that otherwise does not recognize them. What unites the works examined, beyond all differences, is the awareness that Jerusalem eludes the sovereign narrative gaze: None of these texts triumphs over its subject; all bear the marks of the place where they have failed.
War as a legacy: On the systematics of transgenerational imprinting in the work of Julia Weidmann
This review presents Julia Weidmann's study "Continuum of Wars: Intergenerational Narratives of the World Wars in Contemporary French Literature" (Winter, 2025) as a fundamental, comparative investigation of a central phenomenon in contemporary French literature: the intergenerational narration of the World Wars. The starting point is the observation that subsequent generations—from the "wound" generation to the "inheritance" generation—reconstruct familial wartime experiences in literary form, mediating between archival research and imagination. To this end, Weidmann develops an original model of a "war continuum" that replaces traditional numerical generational categories with a metaphorical, trauma-oriented scale, and operationalizes this concept in a four-stage analytical method, which she applies to a broad corpus of authors (including Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Ivan Jablonka, and Anne Berest). The review particularly praises the methodological clarity, the nuanced close readings, and the identification of recurring narrative structures across generations, but also highlights limited weaknesses, such as a certain schematization in the comparative analysis and the relatively marginal treatment of aesthetic details. Overall, the study appears as a substantial contribution to literary memory studies, providing a viable set of tools for analyzing transgenerational memory and simultaneously opening up new perspectives for the exploration of future narrative forms.

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