2018

The world as surface, the surface as world: trompe l'œil and ekphrasis in the work of Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal's novel "Un monde à portée de main" (2018) follows Paula Karst, a young Parisian woman who learns the art of trompe l'oeil at a Brussels institute and later works as a decorative painter in film studios, church restorations, and villas, until she finally contributes to a monumental reproduction of the Lascaux cave paintings. This essay reads the novel as the literary counterpart to its own theme: just as Paula's painting aims to obliterate itself in favor of a deceptively realistic surface, Kerangal's prose also proceeds ekphrastically and illusionistically—conjuring colors, materials, and visual spaces so sensuously that the reader forgets the words behind the world. The perfect trompe l'oeil requires not only the moment of deception but also that of disillusionment—only when the eye recognizes the illusion as art does the work unfold its true beauty. From there, the interpretation expands the question to the relationship between original and copy, which is radically subverted in the novel, from the Brussels training to the Egyptian funerary statue in the Turin museum: The copy is not a lie, but a creation of reality – and Paula's work on Lascaux ultimately poses the oldest question in art history anew: What is an original if the cave paintings of prehistory themselves wanted nothing more than to make the world so real that one could touch it?

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From the film "Leurs enfants après eux"

The dignity of perseverance: literary rehabilitation of the France périphérique in the work of Nicolas Mathieu

In “Leurs enfants après eux” (Actes Sud, 2018), Nicolas Mathieu tells the story of a generation growing up over four summers in the dying industrial region of Lorraine: In the fictional town of Heillange, Anthony, Hacine, and Stéphanie drift between gravel pits, disused blast furnaces, and familial fault lines through a youth whose promises – advancement, freedom, self-definition – prove to be structurally blocked, so that even their most intense experiences of love, violence, or friendship remain constantly bound to the gravity of a space that no longer produces a future; the novel condenses this experience into a choral panorama in which individual biographies appear less as autonomous life stories than as variations on a collective fate of invisibility. In contrast, “Connemara” (Actes Sud, 2022) shifts the perspective to the present and to a different phase of life: Using Hélène, the seemingly successful social climber, and Christophe, who remained in his original social milieu, Mathieu tells the story of the illusion of social mobility itself – Hélène’s return from the Parisian elite to the provinces reveals her upward mobility as a story of alienation, while Christophe embodies the flip side, a life of continuity without departure, so that their fleeting reunion makes visible the impossibility of a coherent identity between origin and self-conception; the titular place of longing remains pure projection, a name for a life not lived. The essay reads both novels as a diptych that elevates the geographical space of périphérique France from mere backdrop to epistemic center: space appears here as an instrument of knowledge in which the contradictions of French meritocracy materialize, and the characters act as bearers of social positions whose scope for action is predetermined by origin, class, and symbolic orders. Mathieu's poetics are described as a tension between social-realist precision and literary economy—as a writing of ellipsis that, through choral structure, free indirect style, and the imbuing of landscape, body, and everyday details, generates a universal resonance without ever tipping into abstraction; at the same time, this writing insists that the implicit social critique lies not in explicit theses, but in the narrative form itself, in convergence without catharsis, in the "malgré tout" of precarious happiness, or in the "cœur en miettes" of an unfulfilled existence. This creates the image of a work that neither morally privileges ascent nor stagnation, but understands both as variants of the same double bind – and herein lies the political power of its literature.

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Three intermedial Orpheus variations: Palermo, Berlin and Trump's USA in the work of Sébastien Berlendis

This review reads Sébastien Berlendis's new novel, "24 fois l'Amérique" (Actes Sud, 2026, cited in FA), in conjunction with two earlier books ("Revenir à Palerme," 2018, and "Seize lacs et une seule mer," 2021), as part of a cohesive poetic constellation. All three texts explore a common narrative motif: a first-person narrator follows the trail of a missing woman, traversing landscapes steeped in history, memory, and melancholy. While the first novel unfolds an almost claustrophobic search for the lost lover, Délia, in a decaying Palermo, staging photography as a medium of remembrance, the second relocates this search to the summer lakes of Berlin, where Super 8 films of a mysterious woman become the starting point for a leisurely reconstruction of the past. FA now expands this movement into a road movie through the American Rust Belt: The narrator travels from New York to Lake Michigan to find Marianne, who has been present for years only through drawn postcards. The novel unfolds a visually structured journey through motels, industrial wastelands, and lake landscapes, in which photographic equipment, overexposed images, and cinematic shots become central metaphors for the unreliability of memory. Marianne appears less as a real figure than as a "presence through absence," whose trace the narrator follows in a landscape of fragmented memories. – The article argues that these three novels can be read as an intermedial variation on the Orpheus myth. Berlendis's narrator constantly moves in a paradoxical motion between memory and the present: Like Orpheus, he tries to retrieve a lost Eurydice, but the search does not lead to the recovery of his beloved, but rather to an aesthetic transformation of the loss. The analysis reveals that this poetics is strongly influenced by visual media. Photography, film, and Polaroid images not only structure the characters' perceptions but also the formal organization of the texts—particularly in the most recent novel, whose twenty-four episodes resemble cinematic shots from a melancholic road movie. Simultaneously, the article interprets this latest novel as an indirect political novel about contemporary America: The journey through the Rust Belt leads through deindustrialized cities, religiously charged landscapes, and migrant-dominated urban spaces, resulting in a multifaceted portrait of a socially fractured country. The interpretation argues that Berlendis does not formulate this political dimension programmatically but rather allows it to emerge from a poetics of observation in which personal memory, media perception, and historical landscapes are intertwined.

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Rimbaud Fictions: Guillaume Meurice

In Guillaume Meurice's Rimbaud-inspired novel "Cosme" (2018), the protagonist is the son of Spanish immigrants, born and raised in Biarritz. His life is a turbulent journey, taking him from juvenile delinquency in the Parisian suburbs to military service where he deciphers secret messages, and endless hours spent in chess clubs. Cosme is a free spirit, a poet, and potentially a "seer" ("Voyant"), who values ​​friendship and lives an existence oscillating between shared passions, profound solitude, vertigo, and a "long unleashing of the senses." A central theme in Cosme's life is his persistent and almost obsessive search for the hidden meaning of Arthur Rimbaud's enigmatic poem "Voyelles," which he considers the "holy grail of French poetry." He is unwavering in his determination to uncover secrets, even if it means taking unconventional paths and confronting social violence, homelessness, or the disregard for authority. Ultimately, Cosme is a self-taught alchemist of words who wants to unlock the best-kept secret of French literature.

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Gardens of Transformation: Marivaux and Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

This article connects Pierre de Marivaux's "Le Triomphe de l'amour" (1732) with two contemporary works by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam: the theatrical adaptation "À l'abordage!" (2021) and the novel "Arcadie" (2018). A common core is a fundamental dramaturgical constellation: a young character infiltrates a secluded world—be it Hermocrate's philosophical enclave, Kinbote's cult-like community, or Arcady's utopian commune. In all cases, the established order is challenged by love, desire, and transformation. The mode varies, however: Marivaux's comedy stages a strategic masquerade to restore order; Bayamack-Tam transforms this model into a queer farce in "À l'abordage!" and into a melancholic quest for self-discovery in "Arcadie." The mask becomes identity, the theatrical performance an existential transformation. The article demonstrates how Bayamack-Tam not only updates Marivaux but also radically recodes her work: instead of a binary world of reason and emotion, she creates fluid identities whose desires are not normatively tamed but politically liberated. While Marivaux stages love as a means of restoration, in "À l'abordage!" it becomes pleasurable destabilization, and in "Arcadie" it becomes the touchstone of utopian promises of salvation. Farah is no longer merely the subject of disguise but of transformation itself. The essay reads Bayamack-Tam's works as a homage to Marivaux through subversive continuation—a queer humanism that does not drop masks to reveal truth but to assert identity as an open process of becoming.

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The Virgin in the Living Here and Now: Kamel Daoud's Double Novel

“The relationship to women reflects the relationship to fantasy, to desire, to the body, to life.” Kamel Daoud’s novel “Houris” (2024) can be read as a counter-narrative to his museum dialogue “Le peintre dévorant la femme” (2018): While here a fictional body-hating jihadist is confronted with the erotic Western paintings of Pablo Picasso, in “Houris” Daoud has a pregnant survivor of the Algerian civil war reflect on the silence of women, as a story of individual and collective resurrection.

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Alternative alphabet: William Marx

William Marx's 2018 work, Un Savoir Gai, is not merely a personal reflection on the homosexual experience; it presents a theoretical framework that fundamentally questions how knowledge is generated and how perceptions of the world are shaped. Based on the specific 'gay' existential perspective, Marx develops a 'gay knowledge' that challenges established heteronormative narratives and societal…

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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