Writing against the death of her lover: Céline Zufferey

No beginning, no solace

Céline Zufferey reveals this on the very first pages of the novel. Maxence (Paris: Gallimard, 2026), her method involves a series of scenes that systematically subvert expectations of a romance novel: Instead of a romantic encounter or an outburst of emotion, the text begins with the matter-of-fact question of whether Maxence wants to be buried or cremated—and the narrator's admission that she has forgotten his answer. This is followed, without transition or explanatory commentary, by a fragment about Maxence's nocturnal insomnia, during which the narrator observes him eating cheese through the glass door, then by a single three-line chapter in which she recounts that upon their first meeting she asked: "Is your name really Maxence?"—and nothing more. A few chapters later, there's a list of things that irritate her about him, from the dishes being put away incorrectly to the wet sound he makes when he rubs his eyes, followed by a chapter in which she secretly watches him work and tries to describe his face, sentence by sentence, physical feature by physical feature, until she stops. And then, abruptly, a chapter in the second person – “From where you read me, on the other side of the shore.” ¹ – which addresses the living Maxence with the anticipated dead one, as if the text had silently shifted its own temporal structure without announcing it: No transition, no warning, only the leap into a future that no one yet knows if it has already arrived.

How does one write against death? Not against one's own, but against the death of another, against the death of a loved one, which, with statistical certainty, will come sooner than one's own? And how can the aversion to forgetting be translated into a literary form that is neither sentimentally kitschy nor clinically recorded, but rather keeps the vivid presence of what is described palpable in every sentence? Céline Zufferey's third novel MaxencePublished by Gallimard in February 2026, the novel confronts this challenge with an energy that draws from the concrete reality of a love affair while simultaneously posing fundamental questions about literature and memory. The narrator, a thirty-year-old writer, has been with Maxence, a cultural journalist and music enthusiast from Lyon twenty years her senior, for eleven years. A twenty-three-year age difference—this is not primarily an erotic or social advantage, but a biological prognosis: he will most likely die before her. From this anticipatory grief arises the writing project that constitutes the novel.

The text can be read on at least four intertwined levels. As a love story, it develops a fragmentary portrait of the beloved—his body, his voice, his habits, his humor, his bookshelves. As an epistemological essay, it questions the possibilities and limitations of memory, language, and recording. As an autopoetological reflection, it explores the relationship between writing and life, between literary assimilation and personal fidelity. And as a text about the temporal structure of love and mortality, it engages with one of literature's core motifs: the attempt to stop time, to slow it down, to conquer transience through words. These four dimensions will be elaborated upon below. It will become clear that the novel achieves its subject matter precisely by constantly reflecting on its own inadequacy and elevating this inadequacy to a literary program.

The book opens with a surprisingly direct question: “Do you want to be buried or burned?” The narrator poses this question to Maxence but cannot recall his answer—a paradoxical opening that immediately introduces the central theme: the fragility of memory in the face of anticipated loss. From this question develops the writing project: the narrator wants to capture Maxence, “capture,” “dissect,” “perform his autopsy of his living self.” She wants to take notes, make lists, collect memories—everything to preempt the impending oblivion. Maxence’s reaction to the plan to write a book about him is brief and generous: “Take everything.”

The first half of the novel is a meandering exploration of Maxence as a person. The narrator describes his body with a medically tender precision: the wrinkles between his eyebrows, the curve of his neck, his lips, his hair, the sound of his voice in different situations. She describes his insomnias, which he experiences as blissful solitude, while her own are fraught with anxiety. She meticulously records what annoys him, what irritates her about him, what he teaches her. These passages blend the precise observation of the body with a phenomenology of shared life: the two duvets, the morning coffee, going to bed, the bookshelves with their 823 books and the countless objects that form a biographical topography.

The reflexive dimension intensifies in the middle of the novel. The narrator begins to question her own writing methods and their limitations. She wonders whether, through language, she is diminishing Maxence rather than preserving him, whether the book might be a tombeau, a literary tombstone, that encloses the living rather than preserves him. These sections alternate between intimate, everyday scenes—the marriage proposal on the Passerelle du Palais de Justice in Lyon during a rainstorm after the first lockdown, the story of the rare Beach Boys vinyl case she procures from Geneva—and metafictional reflections on the nature of remembering and writing. The narrator addresses Maxence increasingly directly, sometimes in the "you" mode from an anticipated future in which he is no longer present.

The novel concludes with a long letter to the future Maxence, the dead Maxence, from across the river. The narrator lists what she could have done differently: spend more time with him, sleep less, leave more often. However, she avoids a purely accusatory tone and returns to defending the present. The everyday life she and Maxence lead is not a failure, but rather a miracle in itself: "ce n'est pas banal, c'est inestimable." The book does not end with resignation, but with a call to the reader—and to herself—to recognize the extraordinary in the everyday.

Neither autopsy nor portrait

Maxence It is difficult to classify. Gallimard lists the book as a "novel," but the text only loosely corresponds to the conventional understanding of a novel. There is no continuous plot, no teleologically oriented narrative, no conflict in the dramatic sense. Instead, the novel consists of 62 chapters without titles, which, in their brevity and autonomy, resemble short prose pieces: portraits, reflections, lists, scenes, meditations. Each chapter is a fragment, a mosaic tile that can stand on its own, but only unfolds its full meaning in conjunction with the others.

The heterogeneity of the chapters becomes immediately apparent when leafing through the text. One chapter, barely ten lines long, records Maxence's reaction to the announcement of the writing project: "When I told him I wanted to write a book about him, a book about him before his death, he replied: 'Take everything.'" ² That's it – scene, dialogue, end. The following chapter is a meticulous physical description, beginning with the observation of eyebrow wrinkles and working its way through hair color, beard growth, neck, and lips, until it culminates in a fragmented list of individual features – "His upper lip is very thin," "He has a mole on the right," "The light from his screen reflects off his glasses; I can't see his eyes." ³ —, which does not give a coherent impression and ends with the laconic self-criticism: “That’s not enough, no pictures included.” ⁴ A few chapters later, an inventory of the objects on the bookshelf follows – a Moroccan lamp, a four-leaf clover, a miniature taxi, a pavé from a Berlin street, photos of his childhood in which he is blond – which extends over two pages and ends without comment, followed by a single sentence: “I stop him and stand between him and the garbage container.” ⁵ There is no bridge, no transition between the inventory and the narrated scene, only the white space on the side.

This heterogeneity results from a decision about the nature of the subject matter. The novel shifts between genres as if between levels of magnification: sometimes the camera is very close—the bone beneath the skin of his neck, the sound of him rubbing his eyes—while at other times it pulls back to the entire history of their relationship or to philosophical reflections on memory and language. A chapter about the couple's sleep—the two blankets, his feet protruding from the mattress, the rhythm of their breathing—transitions directly into a dense meditation on listening to his heartbeat, culminating in medically precise statements: "Five minutes without air, and the heart stops. Six minutes, and the brain suffers irreversible damage." ⁶ The intimate tips into the clinical, the clinical into the existential. And then follows a short chapter in which she asks him about wars and he answers: Secessionist, Kuwait, Indochina, Omaha Beach, IRA. The transition is abrupt, almost comical—a history lesson after cardiac arrest—and yet coherent in the logic of the overall portrait: this too, his quality as a living encyclopedia, belongs to him, is part of the same man she is trying to save.

The fragment is the only adequate form for the novel's purpose: a person, a life, a love affair cannot be reduced to a closed narrative system. Stendhal already knew that love exists in indirect expression, in digression, in subordinate clauses; Zufferey goes further and opts for a structure that explicitly rejects completeness. The fragment, in its tradition from Novalis through Schlegel to Barthes' Fragments of a love affairThis is not an expression of incompleteness, but of epistemological humility: the beloved person eludes total comprehension. "It will be neither an autopsy nor a comprehensive portrait—if I fail, all the better." ⁷ Failure is not a flaw, but a program.

The lists that recur in the novel—things on the bookshelf, habits that annoy him, films he loves, material remnants of the relationship—are another genre that Zufferey employs productively. The list initially appears as a neutral inventory, an encyclopedic catalog. But in its accumulation, more emerges than the sum of its parts: a portrait, a biography, a declaration of love. The catalog of the bookshelf—"An intricately crafted Moroccan lamp with orange walls," "A round clock that runs fast," "The painting that a somewhat disoriented artist gave her upon his departure from Perpignan" ⁸ – is the representation of a world.

The cast of characters is radically reduced. There are two main characters: the unnamed narrator and Maxence. All other characters—parents, friends, the deceased dog, colleagues—appear only as mentions or peripheral figures. This decision sharpens the focus and lends the text an almost claustrophobic intensity: there is only this relationship, this couple, this man.

The fact that the narrator remains nameless, while the novel bears the partner's name, is a deliberate asymmetry. She is constituted by her gaze, by her writing, by her relationship with him—not by a name of her own. This is a precarious position, one that the text itself questions. The narrator writes that she longs for a writer's identity that is more independent, with her own literary references, her own readings, her own cultural genealogy. She systematically resists Maxence's book recommendations in order to develop her own literary identity: "No to Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion, and the Beat Generation. No to Philip Roth, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Thomas Pynchon. I am fulfilling a generational obligation." ⁹ This resistance is a feminist gesture of the text: it rejects the model of intellectual dependence, which is canonical especially in couples with a large age difference.

The age difference and its consequences are a recurring theme. The narrator is 31, Maxence 54—meaning she will likely live alone for decades after his death. This asymmetry is neither dramatized nor romanticized, but rather soberly stated and explored. It is interesting how the gender dynamic is modulated by this constellation: Maxence appears as a calmer, more composed, and culturally sophisticated character, while the narrator is more tense, controlling, and anxious. He teaches her freedom and serenity; she provides him with structure and a sense of presence. This complementarity defies common gender stereotypes because the need for control lies with her, not him.

The exploration of the institution of marriage is revealing in this context. The narrator initially resists marriage out of a fundamental aversion to the institution's patriarchal tradition: "Marriage also meant wrapping oneself in a garment burdened by an unequal tradition." ¹⁰ The couple finally finds a compromise: a secular ceremony on a Rhône riverboat between two bridges, without a registry office, with her own Vietnamese silk dress and edelweiss in her hair. "Even more than the man I said 'yes' to, he is the man I can say 'no' to, and that's more important to me." ¹¹ Saying no is an expression of freedom and belonging.

Poetics of Anticipatory Mourning

The narrative perspective is initially clear: a first-person narrator in the present, writing about Maxence. But this clarity is deceptive. As the novel progresses, the form of address proliferates in surprising ways. For most of the text, the narrator writes about Maxence in the third person—he is the object of her gaze, of description. But then, in certain emotionally charged moments, the narrator switches to the direct "you": she addresses Maxence, who is reading the book, or the future Maxence, who is dead and reading from the other side of the riverbank. "From where you read me, on the other side of the bank, where nothing can be changed anymore, everything will seem possible." ¹²

This shift in addressee is a complex technical achievement of the novel. The narrator writes in a double temporality: she writes in the present to a living Maxence, who might read the book, and simultaneously to an anticipated dead Maxence. The text is thus both a love letter and a premonition, both a chronicle and an epitaph. The uncertainty of the addressee—who is actually reading this?—is structurally productive: it makes the reader a witness to this doubling.

The communication between the characters within the narrative space itself is intensively examined. Maxence is frequently quoted in direct speech: brief interjections, endearments, imparting of knowledge, jokes. These direct speeches serve a special function: they are the most immediate attempt to preserve the voice that, in the fourth chapter, is explicitly stated to be the first to be overcome by oblivion. "The voice disappears first." ¹³ The list of pet names and phrases – “My heart”, “My angel”, “I will eat you up”, “Oouuhh, you, you, you”, “Everything will be alright” ¹⁴ – functions as an acoustic recording, as a transcription of a voice that defies description, but is kept alive through embodiment in its own unique turns.

Even arguments are analyzed as a form of communication. The narrator precisely describes the dynamics of their conflicts: he talks more, she is silent more, and the longer her silence lasts, the more he talks. "Your silence is deafening." ¹⁵ She throws the hot water bottle, the water spills over his vinyl records, and the gesture of reconciliation is to silently dry the covers together. Communication in this crisis takes place through physical co-action – the body intervenes where language fails.

Maxence It has no plot in the traditional sense. There are no conflicts that escalate and resolve, no turning points that reorient the story. Instead, the text is organized as a concentric circular movement: all the threads—body, memory, writing, death, everyday life, love—circle around the same center without reaching or exhausting it.

Several loosely connected narrative threads can be distinguished. The first is chronological and tells the story of the relationship: the first meeting via webcam, the long-distance relationship between Lyon and Geneva, the gradual growing together, the marriage proposal and the initial refusal, followed by acceptance, and the secular celebration. The second thread is synchronous: it documents the couple's current daily life, the episodes of insomnia, the coffee rituals, sleeping together, the dancing scene in the living room, the arguments. The third thread is anticipatory and future-oriented: the tense considerations regarding the ambulance's arrival time, the question of cremation or burial, and the visionary passages from an imagined grief.

These three strands are not arranged linearly, but rather intertwine. A chapter about a present-day scene can abruptly transition into a flashback, which in turn leads to a glimpse into the future. The novel's temporal structure is thus fundamentally rhapsodic, shaped by the rhythm of memory and association, not by causal causality.

The spatial structure is strikingly limited. The focal point is their shared apartment in Lyon, more precisely: the kitchen, the bedroom, the office, the living room. These spaces are described with an intensity that transforms the ordinary interior into a sacred topography. The bookshelf is not merely furniture, but a repository of biography and memory. The kitchen is simultaneously a space for ritual and love. The living room becomes a stage for scenes of insomnia and episodes of dance. Lyon as a city appears only occasionally—the Saône, the footbridge, the street on the wedding night—but when it does, it is always as an emotionally charged setting.

The blurring of the boundaries between inside and outside is topographically significant. When Maxence observes the illuminated windows of those opposite him at night—his fellow insomniacs whom he knows without knowing them—a space of silent community without contact emerges: “These few illuminated living rooms and kitchens underscore our absence—we, the majority, lost in sleep—a few glimmers of light emphasizing the space of those who are awake.” ¹⁶ The nighttime space becomes a resonating chamber of loneliness and connection.

The novel's temporal structure is characterized by a fundamental tension: between the moment and eternity, between the fleeting now and the anticipatory gaze from the other side. This tension is the text's central theme. The narrator is incapable of living fully in the moment—she observes herself living, simultaneously taking notes, is "en appareil enregistreur." Writing and experiencing are mutually exclusive: "To live or to write." ¹⁷ But this contradiction is not a problem that can be solved; it is the condition of literature. Time in the novel is not linear, but cyclical and associative: the present opens up to the past and the future, and all three temporal planes exist simultaneously in the text.

The Full and the Empty

The dominant semantic field of the novel is that of physicality and the senses. The body is the primary material of memory: his hands, his back, his neck, his voice, his heartbeat in the night. The narrator hears his heartbeat with a mixture of fascination and terror, because hearing the beating heart is the anticipation of cardiac arrest: "Fullness announces emptiness; that which is there cries out for what could no longer be." ¹⁸ The physical presence of the body is thus always already haunted by its absence.

A second semantic field is that of recording and the archive. The novel is full of metaphors for preservation: capsules, urns, photo albums, sound recordings, handwritten lists, material objects as carriers of memory. The apartment itself is an archive. The demand for a total archive—the narrator desires X-rays, fingerprints, plaster casts—makes the absurdity of the project visible and simultaneously names its necessity.

Water and river are structurally significant metaphors. The "other side of the riverbank" is the metaphor for death that runs through the novel – and which the narrator herself ultimately exposes as a euphemism: "But now you're writing 'on the other side of the bank.' You've created your own fiction. It's not that simple." ¹⁹ The wedding scene on the footbridge over the river, the Saône, the Rhône ship as the place of celebration – water is the medium between this world and the next, between present and loss.

The morsure – the bite – is one of the text's most powerful metaphors. In one sequence, the narrator describes how the couple bites each other, almost to the point of injury: "The bite leaves an imprint on the skin, a mark to show that one was there, up until then, a memory." ²⁰ The bite as a physical inscription, as the physical equivalent of the writing project: leaving a trace that proves one was there.

Maxence is a self-reflexive text. The narrator is a writer, and the novel is the book she is writing, or at least the book that introduces the book she is writing. This mise en abyme is not merely a formal game, but thematically central. The writing project is introduced with a medical metaphor: “I will catch him and dissect him. Perform an autopsy on him while he is still alive.” ²¹ This metaphor of autopsy—literally “to see with one’s own eyes”—is ambiguous. It promises knowledge through total access and simultaneously reveals its own violence: whoever performs an autopsy dissects a living being into its component parts. And the narrator’s gaze is indeed analytical, almost forensic: she observes Maxence, working at his desk, as if he were a stranger on the train. She is ashamed of this gaze and cannot let it go.

The question of whether the book liberates or restricts Maxence runs through the entire middle section. "I'm afraid that if I say who he is, it will prevent him from continuing to be that person." ²² The book as a tomb, a literary memorial that doesn't postpone death but anticipates it—this fear is the ethical dimension of the writing project. That Maxence has agreed to the granting of power to his wife—"Prends tout"—makes him a willing participant, a "victime consentante." But his consent doesn't alleviate the narrator's sense of deception.

The reflection on the relationship between writing and life resonates. The narrator articulates an irresolvable dilemma: "When I write, I lack something; when I don't write, I lose something." ²³ Writing about life costs the life one seeks to describe; not writing costs the memory one seeks to preserve. This aporia is not a rhetorical device, but an existential experience that the novel exposes with great honesty.

Fragments of a language

Maxence It is a richly literary text, with references organically woven in: as conversations, as readings, as a cultural biography of Maxence. The literary intertext is multifaceted. The lists of Maxence's favorite books include names like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Raymond Chandler, Enrique Vila-Matas, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud—a gallery of American realism and the postmodern novel that spans a cultural horizon. La maison des feuilles (Mark Z. Danielewski) appears as the narrator's favorite novel – a text that itself deals with architecture, fear, and the impossibility of description.

Maxence can be seen as a productive response to Barthes' Fragments of a love affair Reading—not as an appropriation, but as a reversal and transformation of the theoretical project. In 1977, Barthes developed a phenomenology of the loving subject, whose discourse unfolds in alphabetically ordered figures—"Absence," "Attente," "Adorable," "Corps." The crucial structural feature in Barthes's work is that the beloved object remains silent: "He grants reading a space to speak: the space of a person who speaks within themselves, lovingly, toward the other (the beloved object) who does not speak." ²⁴ The lover remains a projection screen, an idol, an image—he has no voice, no body, no habits. Barthes's characters are therefore radically subject-centered: it is always the loving self that speaks, struggles, suffers, waits, fantasizes. In Zufferey's work, however, the lover is not silent. Maxence talks, explains the history of punk, recommends books, says "mon cœur," dances in the living room. The narrator is not working on a topography of her own desire, but on a portrait of a real, reluctantly tangible human being. What is, for Barthes, a "horizontal discourse" without transcendence and without narrative—characters that do not integrate, that do not become part of the story—is, for Zufferey, also a fragmentary discourse, but one that remains fragmentary for different reasons: not because love inherently defies narrative, but because the person of the lover defies totalization.

The deepest kinship between the two texts lies in the shared aporia of naming. Barthes observes that the loving subject, in attempting to name the beloved, always produces only an empty word—"Adorable!"—because the other's totality defies any inventory: "Tout ne pourrait s'inventorier sans se diminuer." Zufferey makes precisely this problem the guiding principle of her novel. She attempts the inventory—the lists, the descriptions of bodies, the transcriptions of voices—and, as she herself admits, she systematically fails. ("Ce n'est pas suffisant, aucune image avec ça.") Where Barthes establishes this theoretically, Zufferey makes it a narrated experience. And where Barthes describes the absence of the beloved as the very condition of loving discourse—"The absence of the other presses me underwater"—Zufferey's novel is based on the fact that the other's totality is submerged. ²⁵ Zufferey's narrator anticipates this absence despite the man's full presence. The Barthesian concept of absence is thus employed in Maxence To a prolepsis: The absence has not yet occurred, but it has already inscribed itself in the present and gives writing – as with Barthes, loving discourse – its energy and its pain.

Intermedial references are particularly rich in the field of music. Maxence is a music journalist, and his passion for music structures his approach to the world. The film music of Blade Runner, Nick Cave, Tindersticks, David Bowie (Rock'n'Roll Suicide, Loving the Alien), the garage punk genealogy, the mythical Beach Boys suitcase containing the studio recordings of the never-finished album Smile These references are not decorative, but constitutive of the portrait. Music is to Maxence what writing is to the narrator: the medium of expression, the medium of memory.

Cinema is also present. Here's a list of Maxence's favorite films – Blade Runner, Manhattan, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now, ShiningAll of David Lynch's works are a kind of map of the soul. The narrator writes: "There are things about him that I only understand through the films he watched over and over again." ²⁶ Cinema as a key to the individual – this is a theory of identity as cultural elective affinity. Wim Wenders' perfect days It is explicitly mentioned and linked to Maxence: a film about the quiet happiness of the present moment, about the man who finds a kind of perfection in small repetitions. The resonance with the novel's theme is obvious – the simple, the everyday as the precious.

Inventory, epitaph, tomb

Maxence This is a book about the untranslatability of a living person into language – and about the inevitability of attempting to do so. Céline Zufferey has written a novel that uses its own inadequacy as a method: because no portrait is complete, because every description misses the mark, failure becomes the structural principle and the gap the place where life continues to breathe.

The novel opens with the question of cremation or burial: a seemingly ruthless confrontation with mortality. The narrator doesn't remember the answer, and this gap in memory is programmatic: the book begins with the failure of memory and the intention to counteract this failure. The tone is dry, almost laconic: "Do you want to be buried or cremated? I can never remember his answer." ²⁷ The scene with the dead dog, the urn on the bookshelf, the chopped-down oak tree – a forest of memento mori already on the first pages. And then the formulation of the program: "I will catch him and dissect him." ²⁸ Writing as a form of self-control, as a response to powerlessness.

The novel's ending returns to this initial question, but with a transformed answer. In a long letter to the deceased Maxence, the narrator lists all the things she could have done differently. The rhetoric of "J'auras pu"—I could have—is the rhetoric of anticipated grief. And then comes the turning point, the central counter-argument: "Because I'm doing well here, because he's doing well where we are." ²⁹ The life they lead is not a failure. It is the life they choose.

Between beginning and end, a shift occurs from the defensive gesture of clinging to the affirmative gesture of gratitude. The book begins with the desire to preempt oblivion and ends with the admission that life, in its ordinariness, is itself the treasure, requiring no record to be valuable—yet needing record to become visible. This dialectic of necessity and impossibility is the novel's structural unity.

The novel's formal choices—the fragment, the list, the shifting addresses, the rejection of chronological coherence—are necessary responses to the thematic dilemma: How does one capture the living without killing it? By showing the act of capturing itself as a movement, as a continuous approach that knows it will never arrive.

Writing about a loved one is not a preparation for their death, but an intensification of the present. The anticipatory grief that motivates the project transforms in the act of writing into a heightened awareness of the now. The book, intended to delay death, teaches us to love life. The novel develops an aesthetic of death that distances itself from all conventional forms of depicting death: no dying, no mourning, no elegy in the classical sense. Death is in Maxence Structurally absent and yet omnipresent – ​​it appears not as an event, but as a horizon that colors the present from within. What Zufferey does could be called a poetics of prolepsis: death is anticipated, foreshadowed, drawn into the present until it becomes the invisible companion of every everyday moment. The heartbeat that the narrator hears at night on Maxence's breast and cannot bear is this poetics in its purest form – the living appears at the same moment as the future mortal: “Le plein préfigure le vide, ce qui est là hurle ce qui pourrait ne plus l'être.” ³⁰ Death here is not an absence that is coming, but a presence that is already there, inscribed in the body of the beloved, in the heart rhythm, in the age difference of twenty-three years, which runs like a silent prognosis through the entire text.

At the same time, the novel develops a second, opposing movement: an aesthetics of resistance against death, through the banal. Anticipatory grief, in the act of writing, transforms into something else—into a heightened awareness of the inconspicuous, the repeatable, which is precisely for that reason precious. The coffee ritual, the two bedspreads, the bite on the shoulder, the worn chalk drawing in the frame—all these are small monuments against forgetting, creating not grief, but presence. The aesthetics of death in this novel is thus paradoxical: it works with the means of death—cataloging, inventory, epitaph, tomb—to intensify life. The book is a tomb that is simultaneously a declaration of love, an archive that is also a dance. Death gives the present its sharpness, and the present deprives death of its terror—not through denial, but through the simple, repeated assertion: "This is not commonplace, this is of inestimable value." ³¹

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

Notes

1. “De là où tu me lis, de l'autre côté de la rive”>>>
2. “Quand je lui ai dit que je voulais écrire un livre sur lui, un livre sur lui en avant de sa mort, il a répondu prends tout. ">>>
3. “Sa lèvre supérieure est très fine”, “Il a un grain de beauté à droite”, “La lumière de son écran se reflète dans ses verres, je ne vois pas ses yeux”>>>
4. “Ce n'est pas suffisant, aucune image avec ça.”>>>
5. “Je le freine, m'interpose between lui et la benne.”>>>
6. "Cinq minutes without air and the cœur s'arrête. Six minutes and the cerveau subit des damages irreversibles.">>>
7. “Ce ne sera ni une autopsie ni un portrait total, j'échoue, tant mieux.”>>>
8. “A marocaine lamp ouvragée aux parois oranges”, “Une horloge ronde en avance”, “La painting qu'un artiste un peu perdu lui a donnée à son départ de Perpignan”>>>
9. "Non à Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion et la Beat Generation. Non à Philip Roth, Enrique Vila-Matas et Thomas Pynchon. Je me fais un devoir de génération.">>>
10. “Le Mariage c'était also enfiler un costume alourdi par une tradition inégalitaire.”>>>
11. “Plus que l'homme à qui j'ai dit oui, il est l'homme à qui je peux dire non, et pour moi ça compte davantage.”>>>
12. “De là où tu me lis, de l'autre côté de la rive, là où on ne peut plus rien changer, all paraîtra possible.”>>>
13. “La voix disparaît la première.”>>>
14. “Mon cœur”, “Mon ange”, “Je vais te bouffer”, “Oouuhh toi toi toi”, “Tout va bien aller”>>>
15. « il est assourdissant ton silence »>>>
16. “Ces rares salons et cuisines éclairés soulignent notre absence à nous, majorityité égarée dans le sommeil, quelques lueurs qui renforcent l'espace de ceux qui veillent.”>>>
17. "To live or to write.">>>
18. “Le plein préfigure le vide, ce qui est là hurle ce qui pourrait ne plus l'être.”>>>
19. "Mais maintenant tu écris 'de l'autre côté de la rive'. Tu t'es créé ton propre artifice. Ce n'est pas si facile.">>>
20. “La morsure laisse sur la peau une empreinte, une marque, pour dire qu'on a été là, jusque-là, une mémoire.”>>>
21. "Je vais le capturer, le disséquer. Faire son autopsie de son vivant.">>>
22. “J'ai peur que dire qui il est l'empêche d'être encore.”>>>
23. “Je manque en écrivant, je perds quand je n'écris pas.”>>>
24. “The donne à lire une place de parole: la place de quelqu'un qui ne parle pas.”>>>
25. “L'absence de l'autre me tient la tête sous l'eau”>>>
26. “Il ya des choses de lui que je ne comprends qu'à travers les films qu'il a vus et revus”.>>>
27. "Tu veux être enterré ou incinéré ? Je ne ne me souviens jamais de sa réponse.">>>
28. “Je vais le capturer, le disséquer.”>>>
29. “Parce que je suis bien là où je suis, parce qu'il est bien là où on est.”>>>
30. « Le plein prefigure le vide, ce qui est là hurle ce qui pourrait ne plus l'être. »>>>
31. “ce n'est pas banal, c'est inestimable.”>>>