1999

With "Le Chasseur" (Éditions Michalon, 1999), Éric Vuillard presents his debut novel—a slim, formally rigorous text that unfolds, in 48 short chapters, the experience of being hunted as an existential, all-encompassing condition. In the form of a radically subjective first-person monologue, the novel explores the fundamental situation of a hunt that has been opened "once and for all," in which there are no longer any closed seasons, no safe havens, and no legally secured boundaries. The narrator, shifting between animal and human, imagines himself as the last of a species, as the object of obsessive pursuit, and simultaneously as the sole target of a hunter whose threat is as destructive as it is meaning-giving. Plot in the classical sense hardly exists; instead, a series of flashes of thought, hypotheses, and self-interpretations unfolds, making hunting legible as a metaphor for fear, the yearning for recognition, power, and mortality. The review highlights that this debut novel already foreshadows the obsessions that Vuillard's later historical narratives—such as "Conquistadors," "Congo," and "L'ordre du jour"—politically concretize: an interest in asymmetrical power relations, the staging of violence, and the complicity of the threatened. While his later texts focus on real historical figures and archival material, "Le Chasseur" appears as a poetics laboratory in which persecution is still allegorically condensed. The review's argument follows a clear progression: from formal analysis (fragmentation, monologue structure, ambivalence between reality and delusion) through the psychological interpretation of the hunter-prey bond to the political and metaphysical reading of the hunt as a state of exception. Thus, the novel can be understood not only as an existentialist parable, but as the germ cell of a complete work that later reveals the "backstage" of history, but here examines the threat as a structure of consciousness itself.