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

This article is written in German. Automatic translations:

Content

Before the Flood
Between novel, epic, and poetry cycle
The dystopian developments
The vocal parts in relation to the prose
Writing as the last freedom

Before the Flood

Mathieu Belezi, Cantique du chaos, Paris: Laffont, 2025 (cited as CDC).

Mathieu Belezi's CDC (2025) depicts a world that has destroyed itself, yet insists on celebrating the post-apocalypse. The novel places itself in the tradition of great North and Latin American desperado literature—Kerouac, Bolaño, McCarthy, García Márquez—but goes beyond it by transforming this genealogy into a pronounced poetics of the end: Writing itself becomes the ultimate act, the only form of freedom in a world where all other freedoms have vanished. Among other questions, this raises the question of which genre elements Belezi chooses for this radical premise and how prose, poetry, and epic interpenetrate in this context.

CDC unfolds in the near future, a world left in ruins after a cosmic judgment—a 54-day biblical flood event. Four-fifths of the world's population perished in the floods; the survivors are held captive by totalitarian regimes that legitimize themselves through religious and political means: In France, a militia party called "Le Front" has seized power; in Italy, a Vatican theocracy reigns; and in America, the remnants of the population are frozen in a controlled stasis. Amidst this devastated world, the aging, disillusioned Frenchman Théo Gracques retreats to a Mediterranean island, hoping to disappear as a hermit—with a revolver, a hen, and the resolve to want nothing more to do with the world. On this island, he encounters the headstrong Chloé Dumont and her teenage children, Joan and Hugo. The encounter forces him back into life and ultimately to flee: together, all four cross Europe under the yoke of the militias, cross the Atlantic on a troop ship, travel through the devastated southern states of the USA in a red Toyota pickup truck, experience a catastrophic beauty of the American landscape, and finally reach Wyoming.

The novel interweaves two further timelines with this act of flight: In poetic bursts—as poems entered into Théo's travel journal, titled after places (California, Wyoming, Orénoque)—Théo's past life bursts forth. His first great love, Léonore, a tempestuous relationship full of passion and heartbreak, is evoked in lyrical flashbacks that rhythmically intersect the present of the road trip. Léonore is the woman with whom Théo first explored America; she became pregnant, gave birth to the child Basile, and lost him; their son drowned in Wyoming. The novel thus opens a dual structure of traumatic memory and the dynamics of present-day escape, both of which follow the structural principle of being on the move. Joan and Hugo die—initially, the reader is not informed of the precise circumstances; Chloé falls silent in a prolonged grief after the death of her children; she and Théo finally separate in Wyoming, where she remains.

In the second half of the novel, Théo, now truly alone and physically frail, travels on through Central and South America until he is stranded in a Venezuelan village on the Orinoco River. There he meets Miguelita, a young Costa Rican woman who is herself a restless soul. They become the novel's most peculiar pairing: not lovers, more like father and daughter, more like two outcasts from the world, living together in mutual tenderness and candid wit, while Théo slips ever deeper into death. He writes his last poem, "Orénoque," spreads his arms like a tree, and surrenders himself to the tropical earth. Miguelita ties his body to a raft and lets him drift down the river. The novel ends with her voice: weeping and alone, she learns his poem by heart.

A monumental, epic opening hymn, preceding all the narrative chapters, frames the novel as a mythical lament: In a lofty, lyrical tone, the world is conjured before the flood judgment—the skylines, the highways, social networks, weapons technology, greed—and then the judgment itself, the downfall and resurrection of terror. This hymn gives the novel its title and its fundamental tone: Chaos is sung about, lamented, praised, accepted as fact, and yet lyrically immortalized.

Between novel, epic, and poetry cycle

CDC already bears its hybrid nature in its title: A "cantique"—a hymn of praise—is not a form of prose, but a lyrical-liturgical one. The prose work also seeks to sing, to elevate a lament over chaos into song. Structurally, the text consists of three clearly distinguishable levels. The first is the mythic-epic framework: The novel's opening, a single long, anaphorically structured prose chant in unpunctuated lines, evokes the pre-catastrophic world and the judgment. This passage—which reads like a modern Book of Genesis—has the style and rhythm of an oral-epic text; the narrator addresses his audience directly with "Incline your ear / Listen / This is what is still being told." ¹, a formula reminiscent of the opening formulas of oral tradition, giving the text an archaic-communal dimension.

The second level is the actual prose novel, broken down into chapters named after topographical locations: "L'Île," followed by the major place names of the journey. These chapter titles formally anchor the road-trip principle in the paratext and place the novel close to the American road novel. The third level consists of the interspersed poems in Théo's travel journal—texts set in italics and typographically distinguished from the main text, titled after places: "California," "Wyoming," "Orénoque." These poems do not function as mere insertions, but as independent lyrical reflections and anticipations; they suspend the novel's temporal structure and transform the text into a cycle of poetry within the novel. Belezi thus pursues a similar principle to that of Roberto Bolaño in Wild detectives, where poetic fragments rhythmically interrupt the prose narrative and provide ideological commentary.

The novel as an apocalyptic road novel has its clearest precursor in Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), with which he shares the motif of streets deserted by civilization and the protective father-child relationship. But where McCarthy chooses radical prose poverty, Belezi responds with baroque abundance: His style is sumptuous, extravagant, with a lyricism that does not strive for brevity, but for song in excess.

The Desperado and his female companions

The novel's constellation of characters is organized concentrically around Théo, whose full name—Gracques—alludes to the Roman popular reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, lending the protagonist a latent political signature: a man who should have fought against injustice but failed. Théo is explicitly old, physically decayed, sexually impotent (as he himself reflects), and has a long history of violence and failed relationships. This hero of decline is constitutive of Belezi's construction of the desperado: not a heroic epic, but an elegy for one who has arrived too late and too weary to perform heroic deeds.

Chloé Dumont stands before him as an equal, energetically superior counterpart. While Théo runs his hermitage on the island, she comes to him with her children—not seeking help, but as an agent of the plot: she forces him out of his retreat and defines the direction of their escape. Belezi portrays Chloé as a woman in the tradition of strong female characters in Latin American literature: passionately autonomous, broken by the loss of her children, but unbreakable. Her silence after the deaths of Joan and Hugo is not a weakness, but a form of great dignity: she refuses the attempts at consolation from her social circle and withdraws from the patriarchal expectation of emotional communication.

Joan and Hugo, the teenage siblings, add an important function to the constellation: they are the only characters who still possess genuine curiosity about the world—especially Joan with her determination and Hugo with his willingness to admit fear. The motif of the forest spirits with red eyes, which Hugo and Joan discover on the island and show to Théo, is a key moment in the characters' relationship: in this shared walk through the nocturnal spruce forest, something like trust develops, and the nocturnal beings with the red eyes—rationally explained by Théo, but also experienced hallucinately—can be read as an allegory of a world that has transcended the explainable. The red eyes, which convey "an almost human empathy mixed with a kind of very profound sadness" ² These expressions represent the culpable complicity of the survivors: they are both perpetrators and victims of the impending extinction.

Miguelita, who appears in the second half of the novel, a young Costa Rican woman at the ends of the earth—on the Orinoco River, in the Venezuelan jungle—meets the elderly Théo without any reverence, with wit, ferocity, and physical presence. The relationship that develops transcends all novelistic categories: no love, no pity, no hierarchy between old and young, European and woman from the Global South. When Miguelita's body is commented on in the street café and she is asked whether she is Théo's daughter or his whore, Miguelita reacts with a verbal and physical outburst that becomes one of the key moments of female subversion in the novel: she confronts the man, exposes her own sexuality as a weapon, and reverses the gaze. This performance makes it clear that Belezi creates in Miguelita the liberated voice that reflects Théo's exhaustion without being infected by it. Belezi gives her a language that is vulgar, direct, and powerful—no filter, no euphemism. This linguistic energy of femininity in the novel finds its culmination in the final scene: Miguelita mourns, yes, but she does not do so quietly and brokenly, but publicly, in the church square, before an audience of monkeys and birds that she has consciously chosen.

Belezi creates a gender dynamic that subverts the traditional structures of the adventure novel. While the classic road trip novel (Kerouac, McCarthy) portrays women as passersby or points of respite, Chloé and Miguelita are the true protagonists. Chloé initiates the escape, makes decisions, and sets the course. Miguelita survives after Théo's death: it is the female subject who carries the narrative forward, who passes it on.

However, the portrayal of physicality is complex and not without tension. The poems about Léonore reveal a male gaze on the female body, oscillating between desire and control: “Devour her cries, her laughter, the animalistic surges of her loins.” ³. This perspective is authorized by the lyrical self-reflection on failure – Théo knows that he has lost Léonore, and the poem is not triumph but sorrow – but remains recognizably male-coded in its aestheticization of the female body as an object of desire.

The split voice

The novel employs a multi-layered narrative perspective. The main narrative thread—the chapters set in the present—is told from the first-person perspective of Théo: sober, ironic, and characterized by ruthless self-observation. Théo narrates in the past tense, occasionally interrupted by second-person singular interjections in which he addresses himself: "you tell yourself this even though, deep down, you have just as little desire to accompany these two children as you do to hang yourself." ⁴This self-address creates a doubling of the subject: Théo observes himself functioning, commenting on his own survival with that distance which is the trademark of the desperado hero.

Contrasting with this are passages from Chloé's perspective, narrated in the third person singular and in the present tense—a striking shift in tense that casts Chloé's experience in a more enduring, less detached light of presence. Chloé's chapters are formally denser and more dialogically vibrant than Théo's; they recount life in Saint-Gabriel under military occupation, the everyday forms of terror, the searches, the militias. The difference in narrative stance thus reflects a difference in existential condition: Théo observes, Chloé acts.

The poems, finally, are written in the first person, but in a lyrical present tense that merges memory and present – Léonore's body on the California beach, the speeding Plymouth on the highway, are simultaneously past and present. This timelessness of the poetry stands in stark contrast to the time-bound nature of the apocalyptic present.

Directness, silence, lyrical detours

The novel explores radically different forms of communication. The simplest and most frequent is the concise dialogue in indirect speech, seamlessly integrated into the narrative flow through the absence of quotation marks: The narrator's act of recording—thoughts, dialogues, perceptions in one and the same hypotactic cascade—creates a text that recognizes no hierarchy between inner monologue and external speech. This is a formal decision: In a world that no longer grants privacy, where militias are ubiquitous and trust is scarce, the distinction between what is thought and what is said no longer holds any security.

Alongside this, silence is presented as a form of communication, and it is given profound thematic weight. Chloé's silence after her child's death is the most extreme example, but Théo's own hermitage on the island is also a retreat from the communicative world. In contrast, the language of the body—gestures, embraces, the precise description of postures—is highly active in the novel: Miguelita communicates more with her shoulders, her laughter, her way of moving, than with words.

The lyrical poems are the most exclusive form of communication: only Théo can produce them, and initially he addresses them to no one. Only at the end of the novel does he give the manuscript of the "Orénoque" poem to Miguelita, and this act of giving is the true communicative conclusion: a dying man gives another person his last word, and this person—not as a lover, not as a daughter, but as a free witness—learns it by heart. The poem becomes a memory, and the novel's ending transforms writing into oral tradition.

Plot structure and narrative threads: Triple temporality

Belezi constructs the novel using three interwoven but distinctly different narrative strands. The first strand is the apocalyptic present: Théo's escape from the island with Chloé, Joan, and Hugo; the journey through Europe, the Atlantic crossing, the American road trip, the stay in Wyoming, and finally the onward journey to Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. This strand follows the classic developmental pattern of the road trip novel: movement in space replaces psychological development, the journey itself is the plot.

The second thread is the memory of Léonore, preserved solely in the poems. This thread runs in the past and forms, as it were, the emotional foundation of the entire novel: Théo is not only fleeing the regimes, he is also fleeing the past, which constantly catches up with him through the poems. Léonore, the unborn and then born and then lost child, the first trip to America in the Plymouth – all of this is the lost paradise that defines the desperado: he is a desperado because he knows what he has lost.

The third thread is death: From the second half of the novel onward, physical decline becomes apparent, the novel begins to move toward its end, and the Orinoco finale is its culmination. This thread is not framed chronologically, but rather through symptoms and signs: Théo falls, his legs give way, he lies more than he walks. Death as a slow disempowerment of the body coupled with an intensification of poetic expression is a central poetic motif of the novel.

Synchronization of Apocalypse and Memory

The novel's temporal structure is fundamentally non-linear. The apocalyptic opening canto begins with a primordial lament that recounts the collapse of the world from the distance of an indeterminate afterlife – "There was a time when everything had started to go wrong." ⁵This narrative external perspective on the catastrophe lends the text a mythological temporality from the very beginning: the downfall is complete, what is being narrated is legend.

Within the novel's narrative, this mythological temporality is disrupted by Théo's subjective experience of time, structured by his body and his journey. The poems, as a third temporal plane, function as loops of memory, activating the past in the present. The interplay between the temporal structure of the poems and that of the prose is particularly striking: while the prose progresses linearly, the poems linger, return, and vary the same scenes—Léonore on the beach, the breakneck drive through Texas—thus creating the impression of a time that never calms down but repeatedly reopens the same wounds. The place-based poems and the prose narrative exist in a fundamental temporal opposition: while Théo travels through Wyoming with Chloé, Joan, and Hugo in the prose, he writes the Wyoming poem about his first visit to Wyoming with Léonore. The two time levels are positioned in the same place – this doubles the space: Wyoming is simultaneously the place of present loss (Joan and Hugo will die here) and the place of past loss (Basile and Léonore).

Cartography of the Apocalypse

The novel's spatial structure follows a concentric principle of expansion: from the island as the smallest, protected space of retreat, through continental Europe of terror, the Atlantic as a transit space, America as a doubly coded space of the past and devastation, to the Orinoco jungle as the ultimate, irretrievable space. This geographical progression simultaneously constitutes a symbolic regression: the further Théo travels from Europe, the less political and the more natural and cosmic the spaces become. The Venezuelan jungle at the end of the novel is the antithesis of the Mediterranean island at the beginning: no more peace, no enclosure, no control—only the overwhelming abundance of life that Théo will absorb.

Central to the spatial concept is the contrast between mobile and fixed space. The novel glorifies the vehicle—the Plymouth in Théo's memory, the red Toyota pickup in the present—as the only remaining space of freedom. The moment all four are sitting in the pickup, driving through the deserted highways of America, there is no terror, no regimes, no hunger. The vehicle is the last enclave of the private. Kerouac developed this logic in On the Road The foundations were laid; Belezi takes them and radicalizes them: For him, the road is not a departure into an open America, but an escape from a dead Europe.

Themes, semantic fields and metaphors

The dominant semantic field of the novel is that of endings and exhaustion: “bout du rouleau,” “au bout de mes jambes,” “vieillard” are formulas that Théo repeatedly applies to himself, constituting the body as the clock of the end. Paradoxically, this field of endings contrasts with the semantic field of abundance and plenty: the tropical landscapes of the Orinoco, the excessive animal descriptions in the final chapter, the overwhelming experience of nature and light. This tension between exhaustion and excess is the emotional heart of the novel.

Water is the central reservoir of metaphors: the Flood as punishment, the Mediterranean as the dividing line between the island and the world, the Atlantic as a space of crossing, the Orinoco as the final body of water. Water kills (the Flood's punishment, Basile's death in the trough) and sustains (Théo's body on the raft, Miguelita's last glance). This dual nature makes water the fundamental figure for the novel's narrative: it is both destruction and transition.

The semantic field of the tree and rootedness is decidedly emphasized in the final poem "Orénoque": "Sap rushes into the branches of my fingers, I am also a tree / Or if I am not a tree, I am becoming one" ⁶Théo's transformation into a tree is the novel's symbolic culmination: the restless nomad becomes a plant that puts down roots. This metamorphosis is not a defeat, but a reconciliation with mortality.

The metaphor of the song itself—the "Cantique" of the title—permeates the text as a self-observation of its own form. Théo sings on the banks of the Orinoco before his senses and the animals, Miguelita learns his poem by heart: the song outlives the singer. This constellation—death and transmission—corresponds to the principle of the epic as collective memory.

The dystopian developments

The World Before the Flood: A Critique of Civilization as an Inventory

Belezi begins his novel not with the catastrophe, but with its causes. The long opening canto is a meticulous inventory of the pre-catastrophic world: fleets of drones that "plow up the skies and sow terror." ⁷Corporate capital erecting ninety-nine-story skyscrapers, chemical fires poisoning forests, masses of concrete poured over dying cities, artificial intelligences that are faster than human intelligence ever was. This world is not described abstractly, but in concrete terms and quantities: immeasurable parking lots, deadly highways, palaces for billionaires with fake princes and evil fairies.

The linguistic stance towards this pre-world is unambiguous: it is a prophetic indictment, structured as a litany of loathing. The frequent anaphora – “And other people burned down… And other people poured out… And still other people invented…” ⁸ – create the rhythm of a punishment poem. The apostrophes “O misguided peoples / O obscene peoples / O blind peoples / O guilty peoples” ⁹ They strike the tone of the Old Testament: Jeremiah laments, Isaiah condemns. This is therefore not sober social criticism, but rather lament and accusation, moral outrage in religious form. The perspective is not sentimental: the skyscrapers, with their precisely ninety-nine stories, are ridiculously exaggerated; "palaces for billionaires, populated by false princes and evil fairies." ¹⁰ It is clearly ironic, almost caricatured. The complaint thus carries an ironic underpinning from the outset: the evil of the old world was simultaneously evil and stupid, monstrous and ridiculous.

The Flood as a punishment: Apocalypse with ambivalent interpretations

The punishment itself – forty-five days of catastrophic deluge – is treated with a curious ambivalence in the opening canto. Formally, it is portrayed as divine retribution: "By the will of a relentless and vengeful hand." ¹¹ The floods pour forth. The clouds take on animal forms – elephant trunks, galloping hooves sealing off gaps in the light – and destroy with a physical fury that corresponds to the judgment of the Old Testament: not a blind natural event, but a targeted visitation.

Yet the flood destroys precisely those objects listed in the first part as symbols of civilizational hubris: the skyscrapers, the highways, the airport cathedrals, the billionaires' palaces. This is a precise poetic justice—each verse of destruction mirrors a verse of accusation. This structure allows a difficult-to-interpret joy in the aftermath to shine through: the world being described deserves its destruction. But at the same time, the words of the "poor women and poor men who spread out their arms in crucifixion" resonate with a sense of profound elation. ¹² Like true victims, not like perpetrators. Belezi holds both together: just punishment and human compassion for the dead. The linguistic stance here is split – lament and apocalyptic satisfaction in one.

Théo, the protagonist, has his own unique solution to this ambivalence: he simply isn't interested. Regarding the religious question of guilt – "Do we deserve such a punishment?" ¹³, which he is asked dozens of times by American survivors – he reacts with a shrug: “I shrugged, got back into the pickup truck, annoyed by constantly being confronted with such questions, me, for whom the embarrassments, falls and other downfalls of a world for which I no longer had any empathy – but really none at all – were completely irrelevant” ¹⁴This indifference is Théo's fundamental philosophical attitude towards the apocalypse, and it permeates the entire novel.

Totalitarian France

In the novel's present tense, France is ruled by a regime under "Générale-Présidente Julie Faten Lelamer"—a name that uses absurd bureaucratic language to designate power. The description of this regime is characterized by an ostentatiously sober, bureaucratic precision, which in itself constitutes a literary stance. What Chloé recounts from Saint-Gabriel—in the first-person perspective of present-day experience—is a sequence of everyday moments under the terror: the glance at the newspaper portrait's phantom image, which resembles her; the consideration of which cashier might have seen her; the explanation that every departure requires the approval of an "Agence des entrées et des sorties" (Entry and Exit Agency).

This agency—the immigration and exit office—is the novel's sharpest linguistic commentary on totalitarianism. It isn't called "secret police" or "Stasi," nor does it bear any historically charged name; it's simply called what it functions as: a bureaucracy of mobility. The linguistic approach here is dry objectivity as a means of exposure—the bureaucratization of totalitarianism laid bare through its own sober naming.

The concrete images of the terror, however, are depicted in real time, without distancing commentary: A military transport vehicle crashes into the window of a bistro. Militiamen storm inside with submachine guns strapped to their hips. Shots ring out. People flee without looking back. The militia leader, annoyed by the café owner's shouting, strikes him in the forehead with the butt of his rifle. The transport vehicle drives off – "amid laughter and the satisfied stamping of boots." ¹⁵Chloé's comment afterwards: no moral explanation, no expression of outrage. Just a matter-of-fact sentence to Robert: "The raids are happening daily now." ¹⁶.

The camp's construction on the island—observed by Théo through binoculars, like a naturalist cataloging a new animal species in his surroundings—is described in the same matter-of-fact tone: watchtowers at least ten meters high, double rows of barbed wire, military tents set up four to four, water taps and latrines in the middle. "A kind of no-man's-land. / A kind of concentration camp of sad memory." ¹⁷The parenthesis "de triste mémoire" – "of sad memory" – is the only evaluative insertion in the description; the rest is a record of measurements. What follows is torture: screams from tortured bodies rising into the blue sky, scaring away the birds. The description of the torture methods is brief and almost technical, and the most cynical moment of the entire novel lies in the matter-of-fact description of the exhausted torturers who must relax after their work is done – "giggling, because one had to giggle to relax after sweating blood and water over a body that had been subjected to every conceivable manipulation." ¹⁸This attitude is ice-cold irony, which formulates the banality of evil from the perspective of the perpetrators and is therefore all the more devastating.

The Vatican theocracy of Italy: Religious terror as spectacle

In Italy, Vatican-affiliated militias rule together with priests who preach at every intersection and square—eyes burning, fists raised—proclaiming the Flood as God's just punishment. Belezi recounts these sermons in indirect speech, in a pastoral tone derived from the priests' own words, which is doubly revealing. God is referred to as "our God of all," who created his paradise—"a magnificent, colossal, immeasurable work in time and space." ¹⁹ – and to which people, in their hubris and depravity, were no longer worthy.

The theological message is: You deserved the flood; but you are the chosen ones who survived it; therefore, submit to our laws, God's laws, which we interpret for you. This circular logic—punishment as election, survival as an obligation to the authorities—is a condensed representation of religious totalitarianism. Belezi's attitude toward it is not outright outrage, but a detached, almost ethnographic rendering, which, through its neutrality, is even more disturbing than an explicit accusation: Théo and Chloé sometimes literally fall to their knees so as not to draw attention to themselves. They are not praying—they are feigning submission for their survival. This is the physical practice of dissent in a totalitarian regime.

Post-apocalyptic America: silence, emptiness, driving through cemeteries

The America the group encounters after crossing the Atlantic is a different kind of dystopia than the European one: not active oppression, but a quiet, slow decline after a bloodletting. New York has lost half its skyscrapers; the neon signs are dark; the streets, formerly chaotic and noisy, are now "as clean as new coins, polished, cleaned, shining." ²⁰. This unnatural cleanliness is Belezi's image for the survival totalitarianism of order: The order that remains after the catastrophe is the order of death, not of life.

The waitress in the diner bursts into tears when Théo asks why there are so few people on the street: “We were 340 million, and now we barely exceed 30 million.” ²¹The numbers alone – brutally precise – bear the full weight of the demographic catastrophe. The waitress isn't crying for sentimental reasons; the flood left no dead, only absent ones.

On their way out of New York, Théo, Chloé, Joan, and Hugo drive through miles of cemeteries with headstones all bearing the same year of death. Joan comments: "That's too sad." ²²And this terse sentence from the fourteen-year-old is the emotional low point of the American descriptions. Théo simply drives on. The journey through American cities reveals further images of decay: deserted parking lots with cars that will never be moved again; shopping malls, yawningly empty and rusting away; tractors rotting in fields without farmers. Théo “closes her eyes to what she doesn’t want to see”—an explicit formulation of the mechanism of dissociation as a survival strategy.

Panama and Central America: The Apocalypse as the End State

In Panama, Théo roams the ruins of the city, seeing "corpses of dogs, cats and people, which the sun had finished cleansing." ²³ – and meets alcoholics “in the final stages of thirst” in the only remaining active harbor bistro ²⁴, who still oppose a "wake coma close to insanity" ²⁵ To assert themselves without fighting. The pirates on the sea routes, the artillery crates in Alfonso's boat hatches – the militarization of everyday life has become so commonplace that Alfonso explains it with a shrug: "These are shitty times we live in, don't you think?" ²⁶Théo does not answer.

The oceans themselves are dystopian: Pollution has killed so many species that new, nameless vertebrates have emerged, for which humanity, in its "continuous regression," has yet to invent names. This casual remark—almost casually inserted into a description of fish baskets—is one of the novel's ecologically far-reaching points.

Lost nature as counterpoint and paradoxical redemption

Belezi contrasts all these dystopias with a central counter-image: nature, which survived the apocalypse and is slowly reclaiming the spaces that humanity has vacated. The forests of America are "on probation." ²⁷, but the birds in them are “drunk with light” ²⁸Since the civilian planes have stopped flying, the eye can once again wander unhindered to the sky. Théo, on the rusty boat between Panama and Colombia, puts it explicitly: "It is the places without memory that still have meaning: the sky, the sea, a few nameless islands, a few hectares of still virgin forests." ²⁹The disappearance of humanity as a prerequisite for the return of meaning: that is the philosophical flip side of dystopia.

This attitude is expressed darkly and honestly in the novel: no optimism about the rebirth of civilization, no solace in community, no belief in progress – but rather the realization that the world is more beautiful, more meaningful, more peaceful without humans. Théo doesn't turn this conviction into a political program; he simply notes it down, as an observation, from the deck of a rusty boat.

The vocal parts in relation to the prose

The lyrical as a structural backbone

Mathieu Belezi's novel already bears the lyrical quality in its title: a "Cantique" is not a novel, not a narrative, not an essay—it is a hymn, a liturgical gesture of language. Alongside the actual prose narrative, the novel contains three formally distinct lyrical registers: the grand, epic-lamenting opening hymn, which serves as a mythopoetic overture to each chapter; a series of nine italicized poems of places, embedded within the prose as Théo's travel diary entries, condensing the characters' recollections of their first trip to America with Léonore; and finally, the concluding poem "Orénoque," which occupies a special position in several respects. These three levels together form the lyrical framework of the novel, without which the prose cannot fully unfold its meaning.

The opening chant: Mythopoetic foundation

The opening chant has no prose form. It is broken into lines, without punctuation except for occasional exclamation marks and question marks, without capital letters at the beginning of lines, without quotation marks, without any narrative framing. The opening formula directly evokes the logic of the oral epic genre: The singer steps before his audience, demands attention, and announces a pre-existing, transmitted story. The verb "raconter" in the present tense places the world to be narrated in a dual temporality: The story is complete, but its narration is still ongoing. The chaos of the world has become legend, but the singing continues.

Behind this opening lies a precise genealogical decision: Belezi places his novel in the lineage of the great Old Testament lament and ancient epic poetry. The anaphoric structure mentioned above – “And other people… / And still other people…” ³⁰ – is the structure of the Psalms, the Lamentations, and the major scenes of the Book of Genesis. The exclamation pattern “O lost nations / O obscene nations / O blind nations / O guilty nations” ³¹ is the direct adoption of the prophetic invocation formula.

The dominant stylistic principle of the opening chant is accumulation. Belezi heaps upon the signs of a lost world in long cascades of verse: fleets of drones, chemical fires, masses of concrete, ninety-nine-story skyscrapers, immeasurable parking lots, deadly ribbons of highways, cathedrals of train stations and airports, palaces for billionaires, invasive applications, artificial intelligence. This enumeration serves a precise rhetorical purpose: each link in the chain names an object of capitalist civilization and, through the mere listing of it, ridicules and condemns it. The structure of repetition is intensified by the particles and conjunctions: each new paragraph begins with "et" (and), a word that signals both the equality of the links and their incessant continuation.

The middle section of the opening chant shifts from enumeration to visual representation, adopting an emphatically animistic metaphorical language. The clouds are animals that "raise their trunks like pachyderms." ³², “hurling lightning bolts while writhing” ³³, “swell with inconsolable anger” ³⁴, “leading a hellish gallop from everywhere” ³⁵This consistent animal metaphor gives destruction a body, a will, and a rage.

The opening hymn ends with three dots and three spaces – an ellipsis that gives no answer to the final question: “O guilty nations / Into what darkness have you sunk?” ³⁶The question remains open; the narrator withdraws; silence descends. He offers no answer, he merely frames the scene. What follows—the adventures of Théo, Chloé, the children, and Miguelita—is an attempt to continue living in this silence after the question.

The Place Poems: A Cycle of Poetry Within the Novel

Interspersed throughout the novel are poems, each named after an American location: California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and others, written along the journey across the USA. In addition, there is the concluding poem, Orénoque, which stands geographically and symbolically outside the American sequence. These place-themed poems are typographically uniform: they appear in italics, are divided into stanzas, rhythmically punctuated by blank lines, and their titles are set in capital letters. Formally, the poems are consistently written in the first person singular, but within a present-tense temporality that overlays past and present: the poem is the place where time is suspended, where the lost soul is simultaneously present and absent.

Structurally, all the poems are characterized by a consistent dialogic quality: Léonore's voice appears in a typographically marked format—a long dash that, in the printed form of the novel, acts like an indentation. This marking has no equivalent in the prose; it is a purely lyrical convention and creates the impression of a voice speaking from another level of the page—from below, from the past, from within the poem itself.

The first poem about a place, "California," is the most sensual and physical of the cycle. It describes a scene on a California beach: Léonore and Théo chase each other, fall into the sand, make love. The poem follows a wave-like motion, chanted through the thrice-repeated onomatopoeia of ocean waves: "CHOOU — CHOOOU — CHEUEUCH." This sound painting is the rhythmic foundation of the poem, its beat, its breath. Interspersed with the love scene, like a foreign element, is a thrice-repeated verse: "She's pregnant / One should forget it, at least on this California beach / But I can't / She's pregnant, pregnant, pregnant." ³⁷The poem's ending coincides with the decisive break: Léonore refuses to have an abortion. The poem's final word – “Non.” – is a single syllable that encapsulates the entire text with its concluding grammar.

The poem "Oregon" introduces a new voice that recurs throughout the following poems: that of the mother. She appears as a cautionary, accusing voice that inserts itself into the poem—always in the form of a long dash. These insertions are not remembered dialogues with a real person; they are the voice of the superego, the voice of societal and familial norms that haunt Théo. The poem takes place during a car ride through Oregon, while Théo drinks and Léonore cries. From within the peaceful village idyll, Théo observes: "Because they had faith in the future / And I don't." ³⁸His alienation is not a consequence of the apocalypse; it is his fundamental condition.

The poem "Idaho" is the darkest of the cycle and contains the most direct exploration of Théo's suicidal desire, during an ascent of Pic Borah. The poem ends with a philosophically dense verse: "I shall see if the weight of Léonore's eyes, mouth, and heart in this world here / Weighs a little more / Than my desire to plunge into the emptiness of the sky." ³⁹The metaphor of the scales – life against death, Léonore against the abyss – is not poetic ornament in this context, but the most precise possible description of the situation: Théo has a decision to make, and her criteria are physical (eyes, mouth, heart), not abstract.

The poem "Wyoming" is extensive and spans a wide timeframe. It covers the entire arc from Léonore's pregnancy through Basile's birth to his death and their separation. The central scene—Basile's death—is brutally concise in its formal economy: "Until the day / Until the day the child named Basile dies / Falls and dies / Tippes into the garden wash tub and dies / Hits his skull on the cement and dies / Dies instantly without us being able to do anything." ⁴⁰The fourfold repetition of “meurt” – each time in a new syntactic construction, each time further specifying the step – creates an effect that goes far beyond the narrative: The “meurt” becomes the refrain of a death song.

Dramatically, the Wyoming scene in the novel's present tense corresponds to a parallel scene: Chloé, whose children Joan and Hugo are now also dead, remains in Wyoming, while Théo flees. The novel thus doubles the biographical pattern: Théo leaves Wyoming twice, leaves behind dead bodies twice, abandons a woman twice. In this sense, the poem "Wyoming" is less a memory than fate.

“Orénoque” as a poetic testament and metamorphosis

The poem "Orénoque" differs from the American place poems in several ways. First, it is the only poem that is anchored in the novel's present tense in the place of its creation—Théo writes it on the banks of the Orinoco as he dies, and it is this manuscript that Miguelita learns by heart after his death. Second, it is the only poem that is explicitly addressed by name to both living and dead people—to Clara, Basile, Lucie, Chloé, Joan, and Hugo. The apostrophes to the dead—"wherever you are / On earth as in heaven / Bless my old body of the weary old man"— ⁴¹ – gives the poem the form of a liturgical prayer. Thirdly: It no longer contains Léonore's voice or the mother's voice – the dialogic instances of the earlier poems are silent. Théo now speaks alone.

The Orénoque poem unfolds a sequence of metaphors of transformation. The first transformation is the transition into the tree: “Sap breaks into the branches of my fingers, I too am a tree / Or if I am not a tree, I am becoming one / My feet are in the earth, in the mud of carrion and slime.” ⁴²The transformation into a tree is the overcoming of mobility: Théo's entire life was movement; now he puts down roots – but in the sense of physical decay, not bourgeois sedentary life.

Particularly bold is the extension of this metaphor of transformation into the body's orifices: "In my mouth and my ears buds burst open / As a hundred others burst open / In the pupils of my eyes, in the hole of my ass / And in my balls, freed from human bondage" ⁴³This passage links death with blossoming, decay with new beginnings, and it does so without aesthetic inhibition by simultaneously evoking the sublime and the obscene.

The second great transformation leads from tree to bird: “And then I spread the wings of my arms wide, and I am a bird / Guacamayo bird in the three colors of life / White for love and red for despair / Black for sorrow” ⁴⁴The guacamayo—a South American macaw—is the bird of the Orinoco biotope; its three colors become the emblem of Théo's life journey. And the bodily gesture—the spreading of his arms into wings—is the last physical action Miguelita observes in Théo before he collapses. The poem anticipates the actual act.

The final prayer of the Orénoque poem is theologically unusual: “O God, who are in heaven like a bird on its branch / I beg you, if your ears are habitually deaf / at least do not laugh at my expense” ⁴⁵Théo does not pray for salvation, not for forgiveness, not for mercy—he prays not to be mocked. This God, “like a bird on a branch,” is both familiar and utterly indifferent. In this paradoxical image of God, the religious thought of the entire novel is condensed: neither faith nor atheism, but a bitter, laconic familiarity with the silence of heaven.

The final lines of the poem return to the theme of "presque liberté": "It is my last joy / My only escape / ... Understand me / My near-freedom / Before I disappear forever" ⁴⁶. This formula of “almost freedom” names the structural principle of the novel’s program as a whole: freedom is never fully achievable in this world – it is always threatened, restricted, temporary – but as “almost freedom” it is real and precious.

The relationship between the lyrical passages and the prose

The poems also serve a rhythmic and breath-related function within the novel as a whole. Belezi's prose—particularly in the passages depicting European terror, the journey across America, the shootouts, and the escape scenes—is often characterized by high intensity and speed: short sentences, abrupt shifts in action, elliptical dialogues. Into this context of pace, the poems, like arias in contrast to the recitative, act as a braking maneuver: they slow down the reading, compel a different kind of attention, demand a focus on the individual line, the individual image. This rhythmic function is precisely calculated compositionally: the California poem appears shortly before the group arrives in New York; the Idaho poem appears immediately before Joan's physical catastrophe. The poems are not pauses, but rather bursts of energy—they prepare the reader's emotional frequency for what is to come.

The poems can also do things that prose, structurally, cannot. They can hold the paradoxical simultaneously: Léonore is pregnant and desirable, the mother is right and wrong, Basile's death is both fact and wound. Prose must sequence; the poem can blend. They can introduce the inner voice—the mother, the guilt, the suicidal urge—without framing. And they can describe the body differently: In prose, Théo's body is an instrument of the plot; in the poems, it is the object of lyricism—from the eroticism of the California poem to the plant-like dissolution of the Orénoque poem.

The relationship between poetry and prose finds its ultimate meaning in the passing-off scene at the end of the novel. Miguelita finds the unfinished manuscript of the Orénoque poem, learns it by heart, and recites it that evening in the churchyard—for monkeys, birds, and herself. The poetic interludes, which throughout the novel appeared as isolated lyrical islands, are transformed in this final scene into an oral tradition: the written word becomes the sung, the private becomes public, the European becomes tropical. Thus, CDC is not a novel that describes a song—it is a novel that recounts the survival of the sung.

Writing as the last freedom

Baroque writing against silence

Belezi's style is a deliberate provocation against the prevailing trend of a literature of reduction. Where contemporary literature often resorts to minimalism, Belezi opts for overwhelming effect: long, anaphoric sentences, accumulating noun phrases, interjections, and exclamations. The novel's opening is paradigmatic of this: the repeated constructions "Et d'autres hommes…", "Et d'autres hommes encore…" ⁴⁷ They evoke the language of the Old Testament, the Psalms and the Lamentations, and give chaos the form of litany. In writing against annihilation, form is not ornamentation, but resistance.

Writing itself is explicitly thematized in the novel: Théo's travel journal, in which he records his poems, is his only controlled sign of life. While everything around him collapses—relationships, body, world—this diary-like writing remains his vital sign. On Wyoming nights, when Chloé lies in bed unable to sleep, Théo goes to the barn, lights a candle, and writes. Writing as a nighttime activity, as an individual refuge from collective catastrophe: this constellation carries an explicitly autopoetological dimension.

CDC is, in a very fundamental sense, a novel about writing and its conditions. The question that drives it is not only: How does one survive in the apocalypse? but: Why write when no one reads anymore? Théo himself poses this question when he reflects on the fact that no one publishes poems anymore because no one reads them—and yet he continues to write. The answer the novel offers is not a functional one: Writing is useless, saves nothing, changes nothing about the political situation. But it grants the writer a form of freedom that no regime can take away. This freedom is "almost freedom." ⁴⁸, which the final poem speaks of: a freedom that knows it is temporary, but is precious precisely for that reason.

In this context, the passing of the poem to Miguelita at the end takes on the significance of a literary testament: the author entrusts his work to the future, which is accidental and unforeseen—a young woman from Costa Rica on the Orinoco—and this future accepts it, not as an obligation, but as an act of love. Belezi thus creates a poetics of continuity that does not depend on institutions, publishers, or readership, but on the fundamental human willingness to carry on the voices of the dead.

The three mottos open the novel's intertextual network: Henry Miller, William T. Vollmann, Arthur Rimbaud. Miller represents the tradition of Bohemian literature, which celebrates outsider status as an aesthetic program. Vollmann's quote – "I remain eternally motionless in my boiling blood, nowhere at home and always lost" ⁴⁹ – defines existential homelessness as the fundamental condition. Rimbaud's verse – “My day is done; I leave Europe” ⁵⁰ – presents the escape from Europe as a romantic and literary program.

Within the novel, further intertexts become explicit: Victor Hugo's poem "Le Crapaud" is recited by Théo on the Orinoco and thus serves as both a childhood memory and an emblem of the inconspicuous, the despised, who nevertheless gazes in wonder at the heavens. Billy Paul's song "Me and Mrs. Jones" plays in one of the Plymouth memories, condensing the road trip myth into a pop song icon. Moreover, the entire concept of the apocalyptic road trip can be read as a dialogue with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is simultaneously confirmed and surpassed: Belezi rejects McCarthy's linguistic poverty in favor of his own baroque abundance, but retains the structural principle of the father-child escape.

The reference to Roberto Bolaño is perhaps the most profound: Like Bolaño's Juan García Madero in Wild detectives Théo is a poet who travels in a world that no longer needs poetry, and yet—or perhaps precisely because of this—continues to write. The intermedial dimension is evident in the significance of music as a form of communication: rock, soul, folk songs along the Orinoco. The novel sketches an intermedial landscape in which writing is part of a broader canon of human expression.

To frame the text

The novel's beginning and end form a dramatic structural frame. The beginning is collective, apocalyptic, choral: An unnamed narrator addresses an unknown audience and unfolds the catastrophe in lyrical lines of verse without punctuation. The "yes" is absent; the voice is that of a community that has experienced judgment. The language is grand, with a biblical resonance; the temporal structure is that of a legend. The world is global; the perspective is that of heaven.

The novel's ending, however, is radically intimate, personal, and on a very small scale. Miguelita's voice – "I, Miguelita, the Costa Rican women" ⁵¹ – brings back the first-person pronoun, but now it is a different first person: no longer Théo's, but that of a woman who is crying. The language is that of direct address: "Now that you are dead, Théo, who will be kind to me?" ⁵² —a sentence that, in its desolation and hopelessness, carries the entire emotional weight of the novel. The monkeys, the birds, and the Giboyada turn away and return to their “immense realm of darkness”—and yet the novel does not end with darkness, but with Miguelita’s tears streaming down her cheeks and the poem she is already reading and will soon know by heart.

This movement from the collective to the individual, from the epic to the lyrical, from the beginning of the end of the world to the end of a single life is the core movement of the novel: The chaos of the beginning does not lead to silence, but to song.

The spectrum of linguistic attitudes towards dystopia

The dystopian developments in CDC are discussed from a rich spectrum of perspectives, which can be roughly divided into five registers:

Prophetic lament dominates the opening hymn: the tone is Old Testament, the apostrophes are direct, the condemnation is formal. This stance takes sides, but without political specificity – it is moral and religious, not programmatic.

Bureaucratic objectivity, serving as a form of exposure, characterizes the descriptions of the Lelamer regime and the construction of the camps on the island: the starkness of the language makes the cruelty more unbearable because it frames the monstrous as normal. This tone owes its literary significance to the writing tradition of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil": evil is not dramatic, but administrative.

A chilling irony emerges in the passages where the narrator adopts the perspective of the perpetrators or the indifferent: the militiamen's smugly stamping boots; the religious circular logic of the Vatican priests; Théo's refusal to answer questions about guilt. Irony, then, as a method of distancing.

Indifference as a philosophical stance is Théo's personal contribution: he refuses to be outraged by the collapse of the world. This indifference is not stupidity or coldness—it is the result of long, exhausted reflection. In the novel, it functions as the most critical of all stances because it poses the question of whether outrage in the face of the irreversible is even a meaningful practice anymore.

Ultimately, the most unsettling stance is a paradoxical affirmation of the end: when Théo says that the sky is more beautiful without airplanes, when he states that places without human memory are the only ones that still make sense, this is not a celebration of the apocalypse—but neither is it a lament. It is a sober acknowledgment of the situation that transcends lament and criticism, reaching a kind of laconic reconciliation with disappearance.

Conclusion

CDC is a novel that dares to sing a song amidst the ruins of humanity—and finds its own justification in this. Belezi writes against the twofold temptation that always haunts apocalyptic literature: the temptation of the heroic struggle for survival and the temptation of elegiac silence. His desperado, Théo Gracques, is neither hero nor martyr, but an old man who writes because he cannot do otherwise. In this obsession—both comic and tragic—lies the novel's deepest humanistic gesture: writing is not socially useful, not politically effective, not lovingly communicative; it is solely the form in which an awareness of its own finitude confronts and asserts itself.

Formally, Belezi achieves this program through a hybrid genre structure that combines epic, road-trip novel, and poetry cycle, and through a style whose baroque abundance represents the literary counterpart of the character: Just as Théo doesn't stop traveling the world even though his body begins to fail him, so language doesn't cease to proliferate even though the world it describes is dying. The voices of the novel—Théo's sober gaze, Chloé's silence, Miguelita's rage and grief, the poems as crystallized memory—together constitute a polyphony that accepts catastrophe as a constitutive condition of writing without allowing itself to be defined by it.

In the end, Miguelita sings the poem of the dead Théo in the church square on the Orinoco, surrounded by monkeys and birds: a ridiculous performance, but also a sublime one. The Cantique is not a triumphant hymn; it is the song that remains after everything else has fallen silent.

Reference / Citation suggestion

Nonnenmacher, Kai. "Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the Works of Mathieu Belezi." Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature. 2026. Accessed on May 17, 2026 at 12:48. https://rentree.de/2026/04/22/gesang-im-chaos-apokalypse-nomadentum-und-wider-bei-mathieu-belezi/.

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

“Tendez l'oreille / Écoutez / Voici ce qu'on raconte encore”>>>
“Une compassion presque humane mélangée à une sorte de très grande tristesse”>>>
“Dévore ses cris, ses rires, les ruades animales de ses reins”>>>
“Tu te dis ça alors qu'au fond de toi tu n'as pas plus envie d'accompagner ces deux gamins que d'aller te pendre”>>>
“Il fut un temps où all avait fini par aller de travers”>>>
“The sève point aux branches de mes doigts, je suis arbre moi aussi / Ou si je ne suis pas arbre, je suis en train de le devenir”>>>
“labouraient le ciel et semaient la terreur”>>>
"Et d'autres hommes incendiaient... Et d'autres hommes déversaient... Et d'autres hommes encore inventaient...">>>
“Ô nations égarées / Ô nations obscènes / Ô nations aveugles / Ô nations coupables”>>>
“Palaces for billionaire people of faux princes and fairy carabosses”>>>
“Par la volonté d'une main irreductible et vengeresse”>>>
“Pauvres women and pauvres hommes qui ouvraient des bras de crucifiés”>>>
“Avons-nous mérité pareil châtiment?”>>>
“je haussais les épaules, remontais dans le pick-up, agacé qu'on me pose sans cesse ce genre de questions, à moi qui n'en avais rien à foutre des gamelles, culbutes et other dégringolades d'un monde pour lequel je n'avais plus d'empathie, mais alors plus d'empathie du tout">>>
“Dan’s éclats de rire et le trépignement satisfait des bottes”>>>
“Les rafles sont devenues quotidiennes”>>>
“Sorte de no man's land. / Sorte de stalag concentrationnaire de triste mémoire”>>>
“en ricanant, parce qu'il fallait bien ricaner pour se détendre, après avoir sué sang et eau sur un corps offert à toutes les manipulations imaginables”>>>
“A work grandiose, colossal, immensurable in the times and space”>>>
“also propres que des sous neufs, polies, astiquées, rutilantes”>>>
“Nous étions three cents quarante millions, and c'est tout juste si nous dépassons à présent les trente millions”>>>
“C'est trop triste”>>>
“des cadavres de chiens, de chats et d'humains que le soleil finissait de nettoyer”>>>
“at the end of the stadium of the Soif”>>>
“Coma éveillé proche de la Folie”>>>
“C'est une foutue époque qu'on est en train de vivre, tu trouves pas?”>>>
“en sursis”>>>
“ivres de lumière”>>>
“ce sont les lieux sans mémoire qui ont encore un sens, le ciel, la mer, quelques îles sans nom, quelques hectares de forêts encorevierges”>>>
“Et d'autres hommes… / Et d'autres hommes encore…”>>>
“Ô nations égarées / Ô nations obscènes / Ô nations aveugles / Ô nations coupables”>>>
“dresser of trompes de pachyderme”>>>
“se tordre en lançant des éclairs”>>>
“gonfler d'une insolable colère”>>>
“mener de toutes parts des galops d'enfer”>>>
“Ô nations coupables / Dans quelles ténèbres avez-vous sombré?”>>>
“Elle est enceinte / Il faudrait l'oublier, au moins sur cette plage de California / Mais je ne puis / Elle est enceinte, enceinte, enceinte”>>>
“Parce qu'ils avaient confiance en l'avenir / Et que ce n'est pas mon cas”>>>
“Je verrai si le poids des yeux, de la bouche et du cœur de Léonore en ce bas monde / Pèse un peu plus / Que mon envie de me jeter dans le vide du ciel.”>>>
“Jusqu'au jour / Jusqu'au jour où l'enfant nommé Basile meurt / Tombe et meurt / Bascule dans le lavoir du jardin et meurt / S'ouvre le crâne au contact du ciment et meurt / Meurt aussitôt sans que nous puissions rien faire”>>>
“Où que vous soyez / Sur la terre comme au ciel / Bénissez mon vieux corps de vieil homme fourbu”>>>
“De la sève point aux branches de mes doigts, je suis arbre moi aussi / Ou si je ne suis pas arbre, je suis en train de le devenir / J'ai les pieds dans la terre, dans la boue de charogne et de glaires”>>>
“Dans ma bouche et mes oreilles éclatent des bourgeons / Tout comme il en éclate d'autres centaines / Dans les pupilles de mes yeux, dans le trou de mon cul / Et dans mes couilles délivrées des servitudes humaines”>>>
“Et puis j'ouvre grand les ailes de mes bras, et je suis oiseau / Oiseau guacamayo aux trois couleurs de la vie / Couleur blanche pour l'amour et rouge pour le désespoir / Couleur noire pour le deuil”>>>
“Ô Dieu qui êtes aux cieux comme un oiseau sur sa branche / Je vous en prie, si par habitude votre oreille est sourde / Au moins ne riez pas vous aussi à mes dépens”>>>
“C'est ma joie dernière / Mon unique échappatoire / … Comprenez-moi / Ma presque liberté / Avant de disparaître à tout jamais”>>>
“And other people…”, “And still other people…”>>>
“almost liberté”>>>
“The rest of my life is immobile in my song with the bouillonne, but my part is empty and it always lasts”>>>
“Ma journée est faite; je quitte l'Europe”>>>
“moi Miguelita la Costa Ricaine”>>>
“À présent que tu es mort, Théo, qui me voudra du bien?”>>>

Odysseus in Paris: An epic without a center, with James Joyce
The volume "Ulysse à Paris" (Seuil, 2024) continues the Homeric-Joycean tradition by radically pluralizing the epic structure of the wandering journey and relocating it to the socially, politically, and historically charged terrain of northern Paris. Published in collaboration with the journal Cockpit, this collective novel is not merely a loose anthology, but an aesthetically and theoretically coherent project that programmatically stages literary polyphony as a counter-model to epic unity. Instead of a sovereign hero, a network of heterogeneous voices unfolds, whose characters—from migrant subjects to feminist reformulations of mythical roles to flâneurs sensitized to the politics of memory—experience the odyssey as an event of displacement, precarity, and fragmented identity. The review explores how each contribution transforms specific Homeric episodes and Joycean techniques: be it through the emptying of the heroic (de Quatrebarbes), the ironic treatment of genealogical authority (Fiat), the politicization of mythical violence in the context of Holocaust remembrance (Comment), or the radical subjectivization of marginalized perspectives (Schavelzon, Noël). Tiphaine Samoyault emphasizes memory as a mode of a never-completed homecoming. Gabriela Vazquez condenses migration into an epistemic perspective that consistently conceives of the center from the periphery. The analysis traces the dense intertextual entanglement and reads formal techniques (polyphony, stream of consciousness, catalog technique) as carriers of historical and ideological meanings. It becomes clear that the central driving force of the volume is the deconstruction of homecoming: Ithaca no longer appears as an attainable place, but as an empty signature, replaced by provisional, often precarious forms of arrival that neither stabilize identity nor reconcile history. The review itself thus follows a twofold movement – it reconstructs the genealogical depth of the project and at the same time insists on its diagnostic sharpness regarding the times – making "Ulysse à Paris" visible as an epic that constantly questions its own possibility.
Diaspora as a movement: Manuel Carcassonne
Manuel Carcassonne's "Le Retournement" (Grasset, 2022) begins with an unassuming sentence – "Souvent, Nour et moi, nous nous disputions" – and unfolds from this the story of a man who only late in life, between Parisian publishing offices and a hospital bed in the Hôpital Cochin, between reading Flavius Josephus and the streets of devastated Beirut, comes to the realization that "Jewish heritage" is not a neutral finding, but an existential ascription. Triggered by his encounter with Nour, the Lebanese Christian writer from Achrafieh, whose persistent confusion of "israélite" and "israélien" exemplifies the problem of identity, and by a personal crisis, the narrator embarks on an associative journey through the history of the "Pope's Jews," through family archives, philosophical readings, and contemporary politics. The review interprets this deliberately hybrid book, which oscillates between love story, essay, and historical archaeology, as a literary form of "retournement": not as a return to an origin, but as a movement of displacement and superimposition, in which identity emerges precisely where it defies definitive definition. From the recurring conflict at the beginning to the exhausted gesture of sleep at the end—Nour, walking through the rubble of Mar Mikhael after the explosion of August 4, 2020, and the narrator kissing her without having found any answers—the text, the review argues, demonstrates that Jewishness in late modernity refers neither to faith nor land nor language, but to a specific experience of time, memory, and otherness: a continuous movement that unfolds in the act of writing itself.
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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.
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.
Francesco Petrarch and his followers: Étienne Anheim
Étienne Anheim's "Pétrarque: portrait de famille" (Minuit, 2026) reconstructs Francesco Petrarch's literary project as the result of dense familial entanglements and understands his work as a discursive "family portrait" in which genealogical construction, social embeddedness, and poetic self-stylization are inextricably intertwined. Based on a combination of textual analysis and archival research, Anheim demonstrates how Petrarch mythologizes his origins along a patrilineal notary genealogy, while simultaneously systematically marginalizing or silencing key figures—especially his mother, daughter, and the mothers of his children. The constellations of father (as a professional model to be overcome), brother (as a spiritual alter ego), Laura (as a real void, imaginary lover, and symbolic cipher of poetry), as well as children and friends, unfold as structuring relationships within which Petrarch shapes his authorial identity. Writing thus always appears as an addressed, fragmentary practice within an extended "familia" composed of relatives, correspondents, and literary successors. Anheim does not resolve the tensions between archivally reconstructible social history and literary self-presentation, but rather understands them as a productive site where Petrarch invents his own genealogy and simultaneously establishes the model of modern authorship—a model based on selective memory, symbolic reshaping, and the transformation of familial bonds into literary transmission.
Exchange and misunderstanding: Jacques Decour, Philisterburg
Jacques Decour's "Philisterburg" (1932, Éds. Allia, 2023) is paradigmatic as a text of a poetics of the "in-between": a hybrid work between diary, essay, travelogue, and political diagnosis, which, from the perspective of a young French student of German studies, explores Germany in the late Weimar Republic while simultaneously reflecting on the epistemic conditions of this observation. At its core is not a one-sided portrayal of the foreign, but rather the productive tension between proximity and distance, between participation and critical self-examination, which manifests itself both formally—in the interweaving of narrative and essayistic passages—and in terms of content. Decour's text unfolds a dense panorama of social, political, and cultural forces in which characters appear less as individuals than as bearers of structural positions within the Franco-German relationship. Particular attention is paid to the role of language and translation as sites of both misunderstanding and insight, the analysis of stereotypes and enemy images, and the comparison of different educational systems as expressions of divergent worldviews. Against the backdrop of the escalating political situation around 1930, the portrayal gains a prophetic sharpness without ever lapsing into deterministic certainty. The review highlights how Decour understands the "in-between" not as a harmonious synthesis, but as a conflict-ridden, knowledge-generating space in which cultural difference becomes visible and conceivable – and how precisely this literary stance lends the text its enduring relevance and intellectual urgency.

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