Contamination after October 7: Amanda Sthers

Continuity of Jewish identities: from Les geses zu C

In the novel C (Grasset, 2025) Amanda Sthers paints a disturbing and highly topical panorama of French society in the shadow of October 7, 2023. The title itself forms an ambiguous riddle that runs through the entire text: It stands for Champignon (mushroom), for the traumatic event of the Hammas attacks, for the Bullshit (Stupidity) and ultimately, death. Sthers interweaves the personal with the political, with an eerie fungal infestation in a Parisian apartment becoming the material manifestation of deep-seated societal hatred. The narrative follows two central threads: the internal disintegration of the marriage between the Jewish editor Rebecca Vermusein and the architect Gilles Delorme, and the external decay of the French "vivre ensemble."

The literary and cinematic career of Amanda Sthers, born Amanda Esther Maruani on April 18, 1978, in Paris, represents one of the most multifaceted explorations of Jewish identity in contemporary France. As an author of novels, plays, and screenplays, and as a director, Sthers has created a body of work that consistently examines the tensions between her heritage, religious legacy, secular life, and the complex reality of the State of Israel. Her background is characterized by a hybrid genealogy that combines Sephardic-Tunisian roots with Breton influences, which in her texts often serves as a starting point for questions about the "dissonance" between inner self-image and external perception.

Amanda Sthers' Jewish background is intertwined with the history of the Sephardic Diaspora. Her father, Guy Maruani, is a renowned psychiatrist and author of Tunisian-Jewish origin. This paternal lineage carries with it a rich cultural tradition, often linked to the history of exile and migration from North Africa to France. Her birth name, Amanda Esther Maruani, already alludes to the biblical Queen Esther, a figure who represents the preservation of Jewish identity in the Diaspora—a theme that Sthers later both preserved and stylized for a universal audience through her pseudonym "Sthers."

Her mother, however, came from a Catholic Breton family, the Queffélec family. Sthers' cousins ​​include the renowned writer Yann Queffélec and the pianist Anne Queffélec. A crucial element of her religious identity, however, is that her mother converted to Judaism before marriage. This conversion forms a central biographical motif that Sthers reflects in her work, particularly in the character of Monica in her novel. Les Terres saintes (2010), who is also a convert trying to find her place within the Jewish tradition.

Sthers achieved his first major literary breakthrough in 2006 with the play Le Vieux Juif blondeThe work is a radical exploration of identity and plays with the physical reality of the author herself. In this piece, Sthers addresses the dissonance between outward appearance and inner experience. The protagonist, Sophie, a young woman from a middle-class Catholic family, suddenly claims that she is in fact Joseph Rosenblath, a 70-year-old Jewish man and survivor of the extermination camps. This psychological premise allows Sthers to explore the absurdity and profound nature of identity attributions.

Sthers intertwines personal pain with universal questions. She recounts encountering antisemitism as early as age ten: a classmate called her a "dirty Jew with a hooked nose," even though she was a "little blonde with a very small nose." This experience of "pure rage," existing independently of visual reality, is a recurring motif in her work. For Sthers, identity becomes a burden inherited, whether one wants it or not.

The connection between the theatrical monologue Le vieux juif blonde (2006) and the novel C (2025) primarily deals with a transgenerational Jewish trauma and the Shoah. In both works, the protagonists are obsessed with the memory of the extermination camps: While the young Sophie in the monologue believes she is actually the 77-year-old Joseph Rosenblath, a survivor of Auschwitz, Rebecca in C A “daughter of survivors” who, in her nightmares, sees mushrooms merging with trains that transport her parents to the death camp. Both characters perceive their Jewish identity as a kind of “disguise” or invisible skin that isolates them from their environment and places them in a state of permanent existential anxiety.

A particularly disturbing link is the use of the antisemitic insult "Sale juif" or "Sale juive" (dirty Jew/Jewish woman) as an emotional or erotic climax. In the play, the conflict with the mother culminates in the exclamation: "I would have wanted you to die! [...] Dirty Jew!" ("J'aurais voulu que ce soit toi qui meure. J'aurai voulu que ce soit toi ! Sale juif.") In C This very insult is instrumentalized by Gilles in the bedroom as a sexual fetish, triggering a perverse, traumatized lust in Rebecca. In both texts, the insult functions as the ultimate verbal violence, aiming to erase the victim's identity or reduce them to their mere "Jewishness."

Furthermore, both works share motifs of physical alienation and symbolic clothing. Sophie/Joseph is depicted in Le vieux juif blonde humiliated by being forced to wear a pink nightgown with pig motifs while Rebecca in C She uses her "nuisette" (nightgown) as a means of wordless communication in a marriage that has grown cold. The most intense engagement with Israel is probably found in the novel. Les Terres saintes (2010). The book, which Sthers later adapted into a film, explores both return and exile. The protagonist, Harry Rosenmerck, a wealthy Jewish cardiologist from New York, leaves his career and family to raise pigs in Israel. His choice of Nazareth as his location is a deliberate provocation against both the Jewish Orthodox community and the Muslim and Christian populations.

In Amanda Sthers' works, the pig is a central symbol of transgression, identity rupture, and the boundary between the sacred and the profane. This is particularly evident in the novel Les Terres Saintes, in which Harry Rosenmerck runs a pig farm on stilts in Israel to technically circumvent the religious prohibition against pigs' hooves touching the holy ground. Here, the pig represents Harry's provocative departure from tradition and his attempt to redefine himself through a "mercantile, ultra-capitalist conviction." Rabbi Moshe Cattan provides a deeper theological interpretation: The pig is described in the Talmud as davar aher The pig is referred to as "something else" to avoid having to pronounce its name, and it symbolizes the animalistic nature that humans must shed to preserve their "humanity." At the same time, the novel addresses the pig as a political weapon: the idea of ​​treating buses with pig's blood to ritually defile assassins presents the pig as an instrument of deterrence in an irreconcilable conflict.

The role of the pig in the play is explored in a far more intimate and painful way. Le vieux juif blonde The pig is instrumentalized, serving as a tool of humiliation and forced assimilation. The protagonist, Sophie, who identifies as the elderly Jew Joseph Rosenblath, is forced by her mother to wear a pink nightgown with the motif of "The Three Little Pigs," which represents the "ultimate humiliation" for the character's Jewish identity. Here, the pig is used by the mother to violently shatter her daughter's Jewish delusion (or identity) by secretly mixing pork into her Chinese spring rolls. Sthers connects this domestic violence to the historical dimension of antisemitism by referencing in her texts how the pig was used to dehumanize Jews as early as the Middle Ages and later in Nazi propaganda. Thus, for Sthers, the pig becomes a cipher for the loss of belonging: it marks the point at which the character either betrays their identity by consuming the forbidden or is socially stigmatized through the external attribution of impurity.

The theme of transformation also runs through both. Les geses and CSophie transforms into an old man through suppressed tears, while in C The mushroom, a "monstrous symbol" of personal and societal decay, is manifested on the ceiling. The monologue was reissued at the same time. Le vieux juif blonde with the appearance of C In 2025, the author's intention to present these works as a coherent analysis of hatred and human "connerie" (stupidity) is underscored.

A pivotal moment in Amanda Sthers's life was November 13, 2015. She was at the Stade de France with her children when the terrorist attacks in Paris began. This event, in which she also lost friends, radicalized her sense of security in France. Sthers speaks of a climate of hatred that became increasingly palpable for Jews in France. No longer feeling safe in her homeland, she decided in 2017 to move to Los Angeles with her children.

In Amanda Sthers' work, the novel forms Les geses (Stock, 2025) an essential biographical and historical foundation for C (Grasset, 2025), by uncovering the roots of a Jewish-Oriental identity that is later shaken by the trauma of October 7th. While C describes antisemitism as a present-day, almost biological horror, and addresses it Les geses Jewishness is initially portrayed as part of a lost cosmopolitan symbiosis in 1950s Egypt. Through the figure of Rachel, the Jewish friend of Hippolytus' mother, a Judaism is depicted that was deeply rooted in Arab culture and whose rites – such as the festival – Pourim del Cairo – Arabic and Hebrew verses were mixed. However, this phase of coexistence ends abruptly with the Suez Crisis and the systematic expulsion of the Jews, which introduces the motif of exile that connects both novels.

In the novel Les geses Gestures function as a form of bodily memory, picking up where language, archives, and conscious self-interpretation fail. They are the fundamental carriers of an "archaeology of the intimate": involuntary movements, tics, and rituals preserve experiences, affects, and losses without explaining or rationalizing them. For Marc, his father's gestures become legible traces of a life in exile, an existence between belonging and exclusion. Identity here appears not as a narratable biography, but as sedimented bodily practice—as something one does before one knows who one is.

In this sense, gestures in the novel are primarily organized transgenerationally. They are not consciously passed on, but rather inherited physically: the hand in front of the face, the swatting away of flies, the restless knocking—all these movements are reactions to threat, uncertainty, and the pressure to conform. Jewish identity does not appear as a dogmatic declaration, but as an implicit bodily knowledge intertwined with other layers of origin. The Sephardic Jewish rituals transmitted by Rachel, in particular—kissing bread, pouring water behind travelers, culinary practices—mark a Jewish continuity preserved not through institutions or texts, but through everyday, seemingly superstitious actions. Jewishness appears here as a lived practice in exile: fragile, hybrid, yet astonishingly persistent.

At the same time, gestures in the novel express trauma and survival intelligence. Many of them arise from fear, flight, or the compulsion to conform, yet they become stable markers of identity. This is precisely where their significance for Jewish identity lies: they preserve history without monumentalizing it. In Marc's dance practice, this principle takes on an aesthetic and philosophical dimension. Life itself becomes legible as a choreography in which injuries, ruptures, and losses are not erased but translated into movement. Les geses This approach develops an understanding of Jewish identity as embodied memory: not completed, not pure, but ongoing – from body to body, from gesture to gesture.

A key link between the novels is the portrayal of Jewishness as an object of projection and desire. In Les geses The young Hippolyta experiences Jewish culture as maternal security through Rachel, who shapes him with ritual gestures and foods like "oeufs hamine" (Hamine eggs). At the same time, the figure of his stepfather Basile already hints at an exoticist gaze: he desires Hippolyta's mother Florentine precisely because of her Arab heritage and combines this with a drive for humiliation. This toxic dynamic unfolds in C Its radical continuation occurs when Gilles insults his wife Rebecca in the bedroom with anti-Semitic slurs in order to draw sexual power from the "defilement" of his Jewish counterpart.

In Les geses Israel is portrayed as a place of personal reconciliation and identity blending, which stands in stark contrast to the highly politicized perception in C Hippolyte lives there for years with Farida, an archaeologist with Jewish-Muslim roots, and starts a family. Here, Jewishness appears as a complex, lived reality beyond labels, in which Hippolyte, as a Muslim, values ​​his Jewish neighbors and his children, Sarah and Ayoub, grow up amidst this diversity. While Israel in Les geses For Hippolyta, it is a place where he is "at peace with himself," as it will be in C to the center of a global moral crisis, in which Rebecca, among others, must fight for her belonging to Western feminism.

Finally, it prepares Les geses the groundwork for the Ashkenazi traumatization that occurs in C culminates in the story. Through the character of Hilda, Hippolyte's partner from a family of Holocaust survivors, the gravity of European antisemitism is introduced into the narrative. This encounter confronts the reader with a Jewishness marked by the suffering of the Shoah – a motif that Rebecca explores in C as the “daughter of survivors” has been completely absorbed. Thus, the transition from the “archaeology of intimacy” to Les geses on the “biology of hate” in C Understandably, the traumas stored in the gestures of our ancestors break to the surface after October 7th like the poisonous spores of the fungus "C".

Sthers uses in C Her characters serve to depict the fragmentation of French society. Gilles is the "Goy," who feels like a minority in his Jewish community and searches for a "home," which he finds in the chauvinistic world of Capucine and Jean-Claude. Capucine Le Malin acts as a "muse" of the far right; she is the embodiment of an elegant but hateful nationalism that propagates the "Grand Remplacement" as a certainty. After Macron dissolves the National Assembly and the subsequent elections, the opposing sides become more radicalized. Gilles secretly votes for the National Rally to punish Rebecca and her world.

The portrayal of French politics is merciless. Sthers criticizes both President Macron's uncompromising stance and the "écoeurante" campaign of the rebellious (LFI), whom she accuses of having rehabilitated antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. The novel depicts a country on the brink, where the "vivre ensemble" is nothing more than an empty shell:

Affective transference and moral climate

the novel C The narrative is not linear, but follows an associative dramaturgy that focuses less on plot chains than on the transfer of emotions. The narrative time is the present after October 7th, but this present is constantly perforated by memories, discourses, media echoes, and inner monologues. The narrative voice is omniscient, but strongly tied to Rebecca: she acts as a sensory organ through which political, social, and intimate upheavals are perceived.

The text jumps between different milieus – apartment, restaurant, publishing house, hospital, intellectual salons – but these changes of location serve less to develop the plot than to map a moral climate. The novel unfolds like a fungal mycelium: invisible threads running beneath the surface connect seemingly separate scenes. What appears above ground as a conversation, a sex scene, or a media report is, in fact, already interconnected underground.

The very first chapter bears the programmatic title "Spore." The narrative begins with a diffuse infestation: This dust metaphor is doubly coded: On the one hand, it refers to decay, death, and the memory of the Shoah; on the other, to an invisible spread, to something that cannot be located and yet contaminates everything. Antisemitism, fear, and political brutalization do not appear as a sudden explosion, but rather as a slow pervasiveness.

The novel therefore employs no classical intensification; instead, it uses a condensation technique. Scenes often stand side by side without any apparent connection; their relationship only becomes clear in retrospect. This structure denies catharsis and forces readers to make the connections themselves – a method that corresponds to the novel's theme: In a world where discourses are fragmented, there is no longer any innocent overview.

The metaphor of fungi: mycelium, spore, infestation

The mushroom metaphor is a central symbolic vehicle of the novel. Mushrooms are neither plant nor animal; they defy stable categories—just as the antisemitism addressed in the text does not appear openly, but rather hybrid, coded, and camouflaged. Spores are invisible, ubiquitous, and passive-aggressive: they do not attack head-on, they colonize. Accordingly, hatred does not appear as an eruptive event, but rather as a creeping process of permeation.

The novel opens programmatically with the chapter "Spore". It is already clear here that it is not about a linear plot, but about germination: about something that takes root, sediments, and then erupts to become visible.

The spore appears here as a fusion of biology and the Bible. The text intertwines scientific explanation (“disseminated spores”) with the Jewish-biblical precept of mortality. Rebecca interprets the spores genealogically. They represent the parents' return to the intimate sphere, the bedroom, the marital bed. Jewishness does not appear as a religious practice, but rather as a physically inherited memory: dust, ash, residue. The spore is thus the antithesis of the metaphor of “pure origin.” It is impurity, contamination, remnant. Already at this point, the novel reveals what it will later unfold politically: Jewishness is narrated not as identity, but as an indelible trace—something that is read from the outside as dirt, but internally as grief.

The fungus initially appears as a mundane white dust in the couple's bedroom. For Rebecca, a fille de rescapés (Daughter of survivors), this dust immediately triggers a transgenerational trauma. Her existential interpretation encapsulates individual grief and collective memory: “This dust I hunt is their body.” The Shoah does not appear here as a closed historical block; it is shown as an ongoing metabolic process that accumulates in bodies, homes, and relationships. The biblical resonance (“Dust you are…”, Genesis 3:19) radicalizes this reading by making transience a present experience. At the same time, the fungi are not monsters, but rather the result of an environment—dampness, darkness, neglect. Similarly, antisemitism is not marked as an exception, but as a consequence of a discursive climate that enables it.

The mycelium represents what Hannah Arendt would call the "pre-political": attitudes, words, ironic half-sentences, academic relativizations. By the time the fruiting body appears—slogans, arson attacks, violence—it is far too late. The novel insists that the real drama lies not in open hatred, but rather in its normalization. In this sense, Rebecca refers to the fungus only as "the C“, so as not to give it any mythical power by speaking its name; Sthers describes it as “autre monde dans notre monde”, growing in secret, under floorboards and behind walls – just like the anti-Semitism that resurfaced in France after October 7th.

The “archaeology of hatred” receives its most concise interpretation from Rabbi Samuel Benchimol, who reads the fungus as a physical reaction to the hatred of the environment: anti-Semites are “root” and “fertilizer,” they transform Jews and their hatred into fungi—a metaphor of parasitism that encapsulates disgust, dehumanization, and projection. Sthers elaborates on this figure by referring to parasitic fungi such as Ophiocordyceps, which take over the nervous system of their hosts and control their behavior from within. This biology mirrors Gilles' psychological development: his growing resentment towards his wife's Jewish world, his professional bitterness in his cousin David Mimoun's office, and the seduction of far-right rhetoric act like spores that occupy his identity until he himself becomes the "host" of hatred.

As the fungus becomes visible, the image shifts from dust to form. The text conspicuously insists on beauty – a sense of beauty that is unsettling.

This passage is crucial because it demonstrates the aesthetic mechanism of ideology. The mushroom is beautiful. and Monstrous – like antisemitic fantasies, like radical discourses, like erotic fantasies of violence. The text makes it clear: what is dangerous is not the ugly, but rather the attractive. The mushroom is not an external threat; it is an ornament, a "nénuphar," almost impressionistic. The novel suggests here that ideologies – whether political, sexual, or antisemitic – do not primarily operate through arguments, but through form, seduction, and aesthetics. The mushroom is an aestheticized catastrophe.

The breaking of October 7th

The portrayal of Jewishness in the novel is inextricably linked to the trauma of October 7th. Rebecca experiences this day as the end of an era of relative security. Sthers vividly depicts the loneliness of the Jews, who find themselves confronted with the indifference or even jubilation of the world.

At the beginning of the novel, Rebecca is in a simple pizzeria in Paris. The colors of the Italian flag remind her of the Palestinian flag, immediately triggering a chain of traumatic reflections on the events of October 7th. This excerpt describes the radical shattering of the Jewish sense of security. Sthers here sharply emphasizes the bitter realization that the universal compassion that seems self-evident in the face of other atrocities (such as those committed by Boko Haram) is replaced in the case of Israel by a relativization ("Oui mais"). The author addresses the loneliness of a community that must acknowledge that antisemitism has once again become socially acceptable, not only in extremist fringe groups but also in the mainstream of Western intellectual circles (universities, politics).

In its portrayal of October 7th, the novel adopts a radical position of non-relativization. The description of the massacres is explicit, almost documentary: “Une sauvagerie sans précédent. […] filmant des viols, des sévices sexualuels, des meurtres ignobles.” This starkness is a deliberate strategy. Sthers rejects any aesthetic sublimation. The text insists that there are events that cannot be resolved through discourse. The truly scandalous aspect, however, is not just the violence, but rather the world's reaction: the immediate “oui mais,” the contextualization as a moral evasion.

Israel is not idealized in the novel, but rather presented as a singular touchstone of Western morality. The text reveals how quickly universalist principles are abandoned as soon as Jews are the victims. The novel diagnoses a selective empathy that is not based on suffering, but on political expediency.

Israel is simultaneously remembered as a project: “In its origin, however, Sionism was a struggle against colonialism.” This remembrance is not a justification, but rather an indication of historical oversimplification. The novel shows how Israel is pushed out of the moral sphere—not despite, but because of its existence. Antisemitism is not merely individual; it is institutional: media, universities, and politics appear as amplifiers. The novel insists that the scandal lies not in the hatred itself, but in its social acceptance.

In the novel, antisemitism is portrayed not merely as a political movement, but rather as a sensory experience. Rebecca compares it to the scent of violets—a perfume to which the receptors become so quickly accustomed that one no longer perceives the stench, while at the same time it remains deadly. This “everyday” antisemitism is evident in the conversations of neighbors who rant about “Français de souche” (a derogatory term for French people), or in the horrifying depiction of the Courbevoie rape case, in which a twelve-year-old girl was violated because of her Jewishness.

In Brussels, Rebecca requires emergency surgery. The attending physician makes an openly antisemitic remark, prompting Rebecca to reflect on society's gradual desensitization to hatred. The "violet metaphor" is one of the most powerful in the book. It describes this desensitization to evil: just as the nose quickly becomes desensitized to the scent of violets, society's moral sensibilities dull towards antisemitic attacks. Sthers criticizes a form of antisemitism so deeply ingrained in everyday life that it is shamelessly expressed even in medical emergencies.

Regarding Israel policy, Sthers addresses the intellectual misguidedness of Western elites. A key moment is the confrontation between Rebecca and the American author Judith Servant over the concept of "pinkwashing." Servant accuses Israel of using LGBTQ rights merely to distract from the occupation. Rebecca, however, sees this as a dangerous reversal of perpetrator and victim roles and a betrayal of universal values. The "Mushroom Stage" at the Nova Festival becomes, for Rebecca, a traumatic link between the mushroom in her bedroom and the real horror in Israel.

The perversion of identity

Rebecca is not a religious figure. Her Jewishness is neither ritualistic nor dogmatic, but existential. It is shaped by fear, inheritance, and silence. The novel does not frame Jewishness as belonging, but rather as a body of memory. This becomes particularly clear in the question of non-motherhood: "She would tremble at the thought of having a Jewish child." The decision against children is not an individual neurosis; it is presented as an ethical consequence of history. Rebecca refuses to pass on a legacy that she perceives as life-threatening. The novel portrays this decision as tragic rationality. Gilles, the non-Jew, cannot share this fear; here we have an asymmetrical relationship: love without shared threat.

Jewishness is always exposed in the novel, even where it is concealed. It is marked, instrumentalized, and addressed from the outside. The scene with Judith Servant is particularly striking, in which Rebecca is paradoxically 'de-Jewified': she is expected to think universally, to judge objectively, while her counterpart morally elevates himself. "Et moi, je ne peux pas être juive quand ça t'arrange." This sentence is key. It names the imposition of having to shed or adopt Jewishness situationally—depending on political expediency.

The relationship between Gilles and Rebecca is characterized by a profound sexual alienation, which only experiences a perverse revival through the intrusion of antisemitism into the bedroom. Gilles, who redefines himself through his affair with the far-right Capucine Le Malin, begins to racially humiliate Rebecca during intercourse. The truly disturbing aspect of this is Rebecca's consent.

This scene beneath the crucifix in Greek exile symbolizes the total destruction of the couple's moral integrity. For Gilles, the insult is an act of liberation from the "guardianship" of Jewish intellectualism, which Rebecca represents. For Rebecca, it is the masochistic affirmation of her identity as a persecuted person—a pleasure in defilement ("jouissance de la souillure"). Sexuality here becomes a battleground on which the political tensions of France are played out.

Intertextuality and the role of feminism

The novel is rich in intertextual references. Hannah Arendt's opening motto describes the creeping erosion of judgment in a society exposed to constant lies. Arendt argues that the goal of total disinformation is not necessarily to make people believe the lie to be true, but rather to make them lose faith in the existence of truth itself. A people in this state is incapable of forming its own opinions, having been deprived of a reliable factual basis. This state of intellectual paralysis and disorientation forms the breeding ground in the novel for "connerie" (stupidity), which is portrayed as the most powerful destructive force in human history.

In the novel, this thesis is particularly evident in the character of Gilles, who becomes estranged from his wife Rebecca's left-liberal worldview and susceptible to far-right narratives such as the "Great Replacement." Gilles no longer believes the intellectual discourses of those around him and instead escapes into a world where political realities like the atrocities of October 7th are dismissed as mere "narratives" or strategic fabrications. Rebecca also experiences this loss of truth when formerly friendly feminists deny violence against Jewish women or when Judith Servant delegitimizes Israeli democracy through the term "pinkwashing." The result is total social isolation, in which Rebecca feels as if she is screaming against a wall of silence and denied facts.

The allusion to Sartre's "Les Mouches" (The Flies) underscores the existential burden of guilt and nature's hostility towards humankind. The concluding quote from Romain Gary about "connerie" (stupidity) gives the novel its final, bitter note: stupidity is the strongest force because it is immune to reason.

Sthers' critique of contemporary feminism is particularly sharp. Rebecca despairs at the silence of feminist organizations regarding the rapes of October 7th. For Rebecca, the fact that Judith Servant, an icon of Wokism, accuses Israel of "pinkwashing" while simultaneously ignoring the oppression of women and homosexuals in Islamist regimes exposes the hypocrisy of an identity politics that labels Jews as "dominant whites" and thus excludes them from the safe space of solidarity.

Rebecca, the editor, argues with her star author, Judith Servant. Judith wants to add a chapter on "pinkwashing" shortly before the publication of her novel, accusing Israel of using LGBTQ rights merely for image purposes. The dialogue highlights the rift within the Western left. While Judith represents the postcolonial view that Israel is an "oppressor" instrumentalizing liberal values, Rebecca points to the existential threat facing Israel. Sthers demonstrates how academic terms like "pinkwashing" can be used to delegitimize the only democracy in the Middle East, while obscuring the far more brutal reality in neighboring countries.

C This is one of the few contemporary novels that doesn't offer a blanket critique of identity politics, but rather exposes its inner logic. The novel shows how victim status is hierarchized. Suffering isn't acknowledged, it's categorized. Those who don't fit the mold are excluded. The rapes of October 7th are the touchstone: they are real, documented, brutal—and yet discursively invisible. The novel doesn't present a conspiracy theory; it diagnoses a moral economy in which Jewish women aren't considered legitimate victims because they belong to the wrong collective. Rebecca doesn't ask polemical questions; she despairs. Her questions remain unanswered. Feminism doesn't appear as a flawed project, but rather as one that has become hollow when it abandons universalist principles.

The antisemitism in the novel is rarely crude. It appears as irony, as intellectual discourse, as supposed courage. Judith Servant is not a caricature, but rather a precise character: she represents an antisemitism that presents itself as dissent. Her "courage" consists of speaking out against "her own people"—a classic figure of self-legitimization. Rebecca confronts her with an asymmetrical risk economy: those who demonize Israel risk little; those who criticize Islamism risk much. Here, the novel intertwines antisemitism with cowardice—not as a moral weakness, but as a structural constellation of Western public discourse.

The characters are not psychologically complex; they are based on their positions. They represent discursive situations, not developmental arcs. Rebecca is the only character who truly suffers—not because she is morally superior, but because she cannot escape.

Gilles is not an antagonist; he is more of a borderline case: liberal, well-meaning, politically ambiguous. His stance is typical of the novel: he is not a perpetrator, he is a non-victim. His decision to discard the green card letter is emblematic. Mobility is an option for him, an illusion for Rebecca. He is "at home," she never quite is.

Judith Servant is the most precisely drawn character in the novel. She embodies a left-liberal orthodoxy that feigns dissent but reproduces power. Her Jewishness "par procuration" (her rabbi grandfather) serves as a shield. She is not a fanatic, but a manager of moral complexity. Her final scene—cigarette, slow dressing, door slamming—is deliberately cinematic in its exaggeration: she is a villain, but a contemporary one, without a hood, without a slogan.

Supporting characters like Capucine or the publishing milieu reinforce this diagnosis: antisemitism often appears linked to class contempt, resentment, and cultural distinction. The novel insists that hatred does not primarily arise from ignorance, but rather from symbolic competition.

The Triumph of the Angel of Death

The novel's ending is characterized by a cruel logic. Gilles, who initially feared the fungus in his bedroom, eventually begins to admire it and consider it part of himself. When he learns that this fungus – the "Ange destructeur" (Amanita bisporigeraKnowing that the mushroom is fatal if consumed within two hours, he resolves to destroy his wife. The act itself is described as almost ritualistic. Gilles mixes the mushroom into Rebecca's omelet while simultaneously toasting the triumph of "sensible" French culture. As Rebecca dies a painful death in the bathroom—a moment when Gilles perceives her gurgling screams as the "background noise" of his own liberation—he calmly leaves the house to enjoy himself with Jean-Claude.

The final act is the complete annihilation of Rebecca's existence and will. Gilles denies her the burial in Israel she had wished for. He has her buried in the French soil she had so recently feared. The takeover of the architectural firm under the name "Delorme-Mimoun" is the final act of appropriation: he uses his cousin's Jewish name merely as a brand, while driving David himself to flee to Miami.

The ending is a triumph of "Connerie" and moral indifference. Gilles feels "at home" in France, having eliminated the Jewish woman—and with her, his guilty conscience and professional mediocrity. The fungus has vanished because it has served its purpose: it has compelled its host (Gilles) to remove the obstacle. Sthers concludes with profound pessimism. The "C" has won. Whether as a fungus, as October 7th, or as the boundless stupidity of humankind, it has sown the seeds for a future in which hatred remains the only reliable constant. Gilles discards the Green Card Rebecca had won and chooses to embrace decaying France.

On the day of the Goncourt Prize ceremony, November 4, Judith Servant declines the prize (which she was certain to win) because she no longer shares her former beliefs. Kamel Daoud wins instead. At the same time, Gilles learns that Lamblet has awarded the bunker project to another firm because David Mimoun's name is "too Jewish" for an audit. Filled with hatred for his wife's world, Gilles decides to end it. He plucks the fresh mushroom from the ceiling, grinds it into a powder, and mixes it into Rebecca's omelet.

Thus, the novel does not end with a resolution; it ends with a continuation in the mode of threat. There is no catharsis, no reconciliation, no moment of learning for society. Instead: attacks, conversations, weariness. The ending refuses solace. This is not aesthetic cruelty, but rather an ethical decision. The novel says: Whoever expects an end here has not understood that this is a state of being.

In the novel C The motif of spores and fungi does not function as a mere fantastical element; it appears as a central conceptual figure that unites biology, politics, sexuality, antisemitism, and ideology in a single, branching image. The fungus is never a metaphor. for something individualIt is a structuring logic of the novel itself: it grows invisibly, parasitically, affectively; it nests, altering perception and behavior long before it becomes visible. The spore is that which one doesn't take seriously—until it's too late.

The mushroom metaphor returns implicitly: the mycelium remains. Perhaps there will be fruiting bodies again. Perhaps not. But it does not disappear. The novel ends with no voice claiming the ultimate truth. Its courage lies not in pathos, but in the refusal to pacify complexity. C is a novel that doesn't try to convince, but simply endures.

Crucially, the fungus cannot be "defeated." It always returns. The novel refuses any purification. This can be read as a polemical barb against naive identity politics: spores cannot be wiped away. Antisemitism cannot be "cancelled." Nevertheless, it can be recognized before it bears fruit. The fungus is the novel's repressed knowledge: that enlightenment comes too late when the spores are already circulating in the mycelium. That the personal is political, not metaphorically, but rather biologically. And that hatred doesn't begin with a loud cry, but as fine dust on the bedroom floor. The fungus is the novel's true "C": contamination, couple, corps, croyance. What grows doesn't grow because it is evil—it grows because the conditions for the spores' spread were perfect.

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