2019

Water, heat, depth: On the poetics of the French summer novel

The article was written at 37°C. It brings together sixteen recent French-language novels to create a polyphonic topography of water—from the Parisian public swimming pool to private pools and North American housing complexes, to lakes and the coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. In concise scenes—the hesitation on the five-meter diving board, an old man's first immersion in the water after decades, sitting motionless at the edge of an unused pool, or surfacing exhausted after a long swim in the sea—water is experienced as an elemental bodily experience: cooling, supporting, resistant. The texts show how, in the moment of bathing, social orders shift and simultaneously become visible: bodies become legible, class differences, desires, and exclusions are laid bare, while the water momentarily creates an equality that immediately disintegrates on land. At the same time, water acts as both a repository and a trigger for memory: the smell of chlorine, salt on the skin, or the recurring blue of a pool evoke childhood, first love, or experiences of loss. The novels repeatedly return to adolescence, to the initiatory moments of a summer in which a plunge into the water determines belonging, or not jumping marks a lifeline. Other texts depict water as a site of existential boundary experiences—a space for coping with grief, illness, depression, or confronting death, where language fails and only the body can respond. Between the public swimming pool, which functions as a social microcosm, and the open sea, which embodies indifference and overwhelming power, a poetics of water unfolds that neither reduces the element to metaphor nor leaves it purely naturalistic: it is simultaneously concrete matter and a resonating chamber in which life is concentrated. Summer appears as an accelerated, heated form of time in which transitions take place in contact with the water – between childhood and adulthood, closeness and loss, control and loss of control – and in which the characters are simultaneously exposed and withdrawn from themselves for a moment.

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The mine as text, the city as body: Kiruna by Maylis de Kerangal

This essay develops a reading of Maylis de Kerangal's "Kiruna" (2019) that understands the book not only as a literary report on the northern Swedish mining town and its spectacular relocation, but also as a poetics-based reflection on the conditions of seeing and knowing. In the winter darkness, the narrator travels to Kiruna, encounters miners, engineers, and residents, traces the history of a town forced to relocate itself because the ever-expanding mine destabilizes the ground beneath its houses, listens to the tremors of the blasting, reconstructs the 1969 strike, and stumbles upon the repressed stories of the Sámi people. Yet the true object of her search remains hidden: the deepest reaches of the mine are invisible, so that understanding arises not from direct observation, but from traces, voices, and memories. Starting with the nighttime arrival and the perception of the mine as the hidden center of space, the essay reconstructs the text's argument in concentric movements: the inextricable entanglement of city and mine as "Siamese twins," the anthropomorphization of the underground into a living body, the superimposition of competing temporalities from Sámi history to the 1969 miners' strike, the gradual appropriation of subterranean space by women, and the development of a writing style that transforms the failure of direct perception into a method. In doing so, "Kiruna" is read in light of de Kerangal's later poetics in "La lentille et le roman" (2026): like a lens, the text focuses fragmentary perceptions, voices, and memories without completely dissolving the darkness of its subject. The article shows that the mine appears not only as an industrial object, but as a historical, political and epistemological structure, and that de Kerangal's writing, precisely in its insistence on vagueness and partial visibility, designs a poetics of indirect knowledge in which the invisible is not eliminated, but made legible in its hidden effectiveness.

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The eye at the gas pump: Alexandre Labruffe

This essay reads Alexandre Labruffe's "Chroniques d'une station-service" (éds. Verticales, 2019) as a radical recoding of the novel, moving towards a poetics of the ephemeral: at its center is a Parisian gas station, which functions not merely as a setting, but as a form of perception and writing. From the perspective of an unnamed gas station attendant, a network of micro-scenes, fragmentary observations, and loosely connected narrative threads unfolds—for example, when a drunken customer desperately calls out for the poets while his walk to the "limping flamingo" is distorted on the surveillance monitors; when, at night, the mooing of a cow from a cattle truck swells into an unexpectedly lyrical scene in the fog; or when the flickering neon sign "HORIZON" gradually loses its letters, causing the place itself to tip into oblivion. The study demonstrates how formal fragmentation, mediated perception (surveillance images, screens, codes), and the cyclical structure of time generate an aesthetics of transition in which consumption, desire, and apocalyptic imagination intertwine. Drawing on concepts of the "non-place," the gas station becomes legible as the paradoxical center of a globalized transit world, where subjectivity is constituted only as a fleeting registration of signs. At the same time, the essay explores the autopoetological dimension of the text: the loss of the author's own manuscript becomes the poetic matrix of a novel that stages itself as a fragment and a remnant. Thus, Labruffe's debut emerges as a melancholic-ironic reflection on the conditions of storytelling in late capitalism.

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Two perspectives on David Hockney: Catherine Cusset and Fabrice Gaignault

Both books revolve around David Hockney, yet approach him from opposite angles: Catherine Cusset's "Vie de David Hockney" (Gallimard, 2018), a biographical novel, tells the painter's life from within—from his Bradford childhood, where rusty metal turns a brilliant red under his father's brush and "the world changes color," to his late mastery—carried by free indirect discourse that allows the narrator to disappear behind the character and makes Hockney's desires, defiance, and joie de vivre the true substance; Fabrice Gaignault's "Patrick Procktor, le secret de David Hockney" (Séguier, 2022), on the other hand, approaches him from the periphery, as an essayistic investigation into the forgotten friend, rival, and "twin" Patrick Procktor, who was once ahead and ultimately died penniless and forgotten, while Hockney rose to become the world's most expensive living painter. This interpretation contrasts the two books – through narrative perspective, character construction, the relationship between success and failure, the portrayal of creation and homosexuality, ekphrasis, and ultimately the fact that both discuss the same key works, "A Bigger Splash" and "Portrait of an Artist." These identical images reveal how two irreconcilable truths emerge: that of life, experienced from within, and that of posthumous fame, measured from without. The scope of this comparison is outlined by the question of why, of two closely related talents, one ascends to the heights of auction success while the other sinks into anonymity – and what it reveals about writing itself when an apology for joy and an elegy for forgetting both contemplate the same painter.

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Reactionary masculinity as empty provocation: Côme Martin-Karl

Côme Martin-Karl's novel "La réaction" (2019) leads its readers into the bizarre world of French reactionaries, online trolls, Catholic integralists, and monarchist splinter groups, whose political radicalism increasingly veers into the comical. At its center is Matthieu Richard, a young man adrift, who is drawn into this milieu less out of conviction than out of a lust for provocation and being an outsider. This essay demonstrates how the novel, with satirical sharpness, exposes the rituals, linguistic forms, and self-images of a scene that constantly speaks of greatness, tradition, and decline, yet is characterized by internal contradictions and political emptiness. The central argument is that Martin-Karl is not primarily caricaturing right-wing ideologies, but rather a form of male self-presentation in which political positions become mere props for a pose. Based on the narrative style, the relationships between the characters, and the tense interplay between political radicalism and homosexual desire, the interpretation reveals how the novel exposes the supposed harshness of its protagonists as an expression of a deep need for recognition and distinctiveness. Thus, "La réaction" ultimately appears less as a political novel than as a brilliant satire on masculinity, the lust for distinction, and the transformation of politics into a game of self-presentation.

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Huysmans as a seismograph of modernity: Agnès Michaux

Agnès Michaux's novel trilogy "La fabrication des chiens" (The Making of Dogs) and her later biography of Joris-Karl Huysmans together form an extraordinary double project: a literary reconstruction of the fin de siècle and, at the same time, a fresh perspective on Huysmans as a seismograph of modernity. The first volume of the trilogy (1889) follows the young provincial journalist Louis Daumale through the Paris of the Exposition Universelle, the Eiffel Tower's opening, and the enthusiasm for progress, while beneath the glittering surface, nationalism, eugenics, social anxiety, and cultural exhaustion are already becoming visible. At the heart of the story is Daumale's encounter with Huysmans, who appears not as a museum-like icon of decadence, but as a radically honest diagnostician of his time: "unjust, sometimes only, but with complete sincerity." Michaux's argument is that decadence should be read not as a pose, but as a precise diagnosis of civilization. Des Esseintes from "À rebours" is not understood as an aesthetic ideal, but rather as a symptom of a society whose sensory overload and artificiality deform humanity. This idea is reflected in the titular motif of the "fabrication" of dogs: optimization, breeding, and social conditioning become a metaphor for a modernity that standardizes all living things. In her biography, Michaux further radicalizes this approach by reading Huysmans not intrinsically, but physically and socially—as a shivering, nervous civil servant whose art arises from physical hypersensitivity, urban weariness, and uncompromising truthfulness. Thus, the result is not a nostalgic image of the Belle Époque, but an analysis of modernity itself: for Michaux, 1889 appears as that historical tipping point at which progress and decay, rationalization and spiritual yearning, surface and inner turmoil become inextricably intertwined.

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Between art installation and non-dystopia: Théo Casciani's radical diagnosis of the present.

In his novels "Rétine" (2019) and "Insula" (2026, both published by POL), Théo Casciani presents two interrelated experiments exploring the digital present. While "Rétine" dissects the disintegration of a long-distance relationship in a world of art installations, Skype windows, and globally circulating images, "Insula" intensifies this aesthetic of distance into an existential dystopia: an illegal VR pill, political radicalization, and the father's death from cancer intertwine to form a narrative of untouchability, grief, and algorithmic coldness. Both novels revolve around the question of how perception, the body, and intimacy are transformed under the conditions of permanent mediatization. – This dual interpretation reads these texts as a development from an aesthetic "poetics of the surface" to a morally charged non-dystopia. She argues along central categories – gaze, space, time, intertextuality, masculinity – and shows how Casciani elevates the motif of the eye to a poetics matrix: from the retina as a repository of visual stimuli to the insula as a neuronal metaphor for isolation. Both novels culminate in the "Scream" – a moment in which the body interrupts the dominance of images and asserts itself against the smooth simulation of the world.

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Sunken worlds, open wounds: Geology and trauma in the work of Elisabeth Filhol

Élisabeth Filhol's novel "Doggerland" (2019, English translation 2020) intertwines the present of a storm raging over the North Sea with the deep past of a submerged landscape that once connected Great Britain to the European continent. At its heart are geologist Margaret and engineer Marc, who reunite twenty years after their separation—embedded in a narrative that intertwines personal biographies with geological, climatic, and mythological timescales. While Margaret scientifically reconstructs prehistoric Doggerland, Marc works on the industrial exploitation of the very geological strata she is researching. The novel unfolds amidst storm warnings, fossilized forests, tectonic visions, and the epilogue of a Stone Age catastrophe, transforming the North Sea into a space where past, present, and future are inextricably intertwined. This review analyzes "Doggerland" as a poetic-scientific reflection on the agency of nature and the vulnerability of human life plans. It shows how Filhol uses geological processes—isostasis, glacial dynamics, tectonic rifts—not merely as a backdrop, but as structuring metaphors for psychological trauma, memory, and recurrence. The essay explores how mythological semanticizations (the storm as a goddess, the ice as a breathing organism) merge with precise scientific language. The review argues that "Doggerland" undermines the illusion of human control in the Anthropocene: nature appears not as a resource or backdrop, but as an independent, cyclically active force that shapes individual and collective history—and can return from the depths at any time.

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Lise Meitner's victory against Otto Hahn: Cyril Gely

Cyril Gely's novel "Le Prix" (2019) stages an intense psychological clash between Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner on the day of Hahn's Nobel Prize award in 1946. In the confines of a Stockholm hotel suite, a moral and intellectual duel unfolds, exploring the unequal power dynamics, gender dynamics in science, and the ethical failings of National Socialism. Gely's dramatic prose transforms historical facts into a huis clos, in which Lise Meitner reclaims her suppressed scientific achievements and Hahn is forced to confront his moral guilt. In the end, Hahn receives the Nobel Prize—but true recognition belongs to Meitner, whose quiet justice rewrites history as an indelible echo.

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Reconciliation is in the midst of conflict: Christine de Maizières

Christine de Maizières' "Trois jours à Berlin" (Wespieser, 2019; I was somewhat incredulous to find no German translation) transforms November 9, 1989, into a poetic mosaic of voices, memories, and perspectives. A French woman, Anna, travels to the divided city to find the man she once met—Micha, the son of an East German official. Interwoven with Stasi files, inner monologues, and the otherworldly perspective of the angel Cassiel, the novel unfolds a polyphonic narrative of history as a 'folding': Berlin becomes a vibrant metaphor for Europe, a "plain immense" filled with ruins, languages, and longings. The fall of the Wall appears not as a heroic moment, but as a delicate instant of permeability, in which silence, misunderstanding, and poetry subvert the power of ideologies. “Trois jours à Berlin” can be interpreted as a poetic reflection on a French perspective of Germany—as a work that makes the division not only political but also existentially tangible. De Maizières’s shifting narrative forms, her interplay between lyrical introspection and bureaucratic coldness, allow the event itself to speak: reconciliation as an aesthetic movement, not as a historical conclusion. In the tension between Anna and Micha, between the angel Cassiel and the people, we find the image of a Europe searching for its “missing part”—a lost tenderness that rediscovers itself in the moment of opening.

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Rimbaud Fictions: Jean-Michel Lecocq

"Le squelette de Rimbaud" by Jean-Michel Lecocq is a crime novel revolving around the mysterious discovery of Arthur Rimbaud's grave, delving into the legends and legacy of the poet. The novel is set in Charleville-Mézières, Rimbaud's hometown, which is mired in a period of cultural inertia and economic austerity. This lethargy is abruptly interrupted when Georges Hermelin, the deputy mayor responsible for cultural affairs, proposes a daring and provocative idea: expanding the Rimbaud Museum with a special exhibition, the centerpiece of which would be Rimbaud's femur. The shock, however, is immense when, upon opening the coffin, it is discovered that the skeleton inside has both legs intact and therefore cannot belong to Rimbaud.

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Changing lives: Claudine Galea

Claudine Galea's novel "Les choses comme elles sont" (Éd. Verticales, 2019) takes the childhood and adolescence of an unnamed protagonist in Marseille and its surrounding area during the 1960s and 70s as the starting point for an exploration of childhood, family dynamics, and the impact of historical events on individual development. At its core, it is the story of the "Petite," who evolves from a curious child to a rebellious teenager and finally to a young woman on the cusp of all possibilities. The novel portrays an existential family history of great hardship, marked by "black holes" that are unspeakable yet indelible. Simultaneously, the reader breathes in the linguistic density of the eras lived through in Marseille and the bitter aftereffects of history stretching from one shore to the other of the Mediterranean. Galea's fresco combines a lyrical writing style with the distance required to examine the darker corners of France's national narrative.

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Poetics of Childhood: Mathieu Palain, Sale gosse (2019)

Mathieu Palain's "Sale gosse" (2019) primarily tells two stories: that of Marc and that of Wilfried, the "sale gosse"—the "dirty brat" who repeatedly falls through the cracks of the system. Marc, himself marked by a difficult background, tries in his work to save a generation that barely believes in salvation. Wilfried, confronted early on with violence, drugs, and instability, seeks solace in football, a prospect that repeatedly eludes him. Palain's "Sale gosse" portrays childhood in precarious social circumstances as a microcosm of societal structures and individual destinies, offering a portrait of vulnerability, the search for recognition, and the speechlessness on the margins of society. The novel not only recounts the failure of individual biographies but also—subtly and without false pathos—develops its own poetics of childhood.

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L'art ne valait rien sans doute mais rien ne valait l'art

Picasso ouvrait mes yeux et les yeux de ceux qui, par crainte d'affronter la jouissance de voir, cette concupiscentia oculorum tant redoutée d'Augustin, se débinaient et regardaient ailleurs, et des aveugles en grand nombre que les images laides qui envahissaient l'espace avaient dégoûtés ou endurcis (images laides d'autant plus proliferantes que les hommes avaient de moins en moins leur mot à dire, pris qu'ils étaient dans une Folie d'informations en continu pour rien).

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