2020

Where the trauma begins: Camille de Toledo

Camille de Toledo's "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (Verdier, 2020) develops a multifaceted literary investigation from a shocking moment—the discovery of her brother's hanged body in Paris in 2005—intertwining mourning, family chronicle, essay, and poetic evocation. The novel follows its narrator, Thésée, over the course of years in a dual movement: into the present of a traumatized body and simultaneously backward into the genealogical depths of a family marked by loss, silence, and concealed Jewish heritage. Starting with three boxes containing photographs, letters, and the manuscript of her great-great-grandfather, a "poem-inquiry" unfolds, revealing how historical violence, suicides, and repressed memory are inscribed not only narratively but also physically in the bodies of descendants. The review interprets this formally hybrid work as a performative poetics of the transgenerational: the non-linear temporal structure, the synchronicities of the dates, the shifting pronouns, and the incorporation of documentary voices realize precisely the entanglement of past and present that the text asserts. At its core lies the reinterpretation of the Theseus myth: the labyrinth is no longer an external place, but rather the interior of the family history, the "Ariadne's thread" a fragile web of archival material that only emerges in the act of writing. By returning at the end—in a radical inversion of chronology—to the great-great-grandfather's suicide in 1939, the novel marks the origin of the wound and reveals that knowledge is only possible through return: through arriving at the place from which everything originated. The essay emphasizes that Toledo thus provides neither a psychological nor a sociological explanation of suicide, but rather establishes a literary form of knowledge that gives voice to the memory sedimented in matter. Literature appears here as a place of “revival” – not as a resolution of trauma, but as a reconnection with the dead, as a careful mending of a broken thread that makes a “vie nouvelle” conceivable in the first place.

➙ To the article

Negative Identity: Problematizing French-Jewish Literature in the Work of Bernard Vorms

Bernard Vorms' novel "Pas gentil" (cited as PG) unfolds, in essayistic form, the self-examination of an assimilated French-Jewish intellectual who, faced with age, origin, and societal ascription, is forced to grapple with an identity he can neither positively define nor completely shed. Starting with a banal everyday scene—a letter regarding funeral arrangements—a multifaceted text of reflection develops, intertwining autobiographical memories, family history, political analysis, and literary intertexts. The narrator traces the paths of Jewish existence between assimilation and exclusion, analyzes the persistence of antisemitic stereotypes, and formulates a central insight with the "axiom of absolute otherness": Jewishness is neither fully comprehensible to non-Jews nor to Jews themselves. The essay argues that the text unfolds its literary and theoretical radicalism precisely in this way: PG is not to be read as a contribution to an existing “French-Jewish literature,” but rather as a problematization of it. By consistently defining Vorm’s identity negatively—as something that reveals itself only in its indeterminacy—he develops a poetics of “negative identity” characterized by irony (for example, in the “shm” prefix), essayistic openness, and intertextual polyphony. The novel eschews classical plot and heroic narratives in favor of a thought process that culminates in a sober, unconciliatory, yet dignified conclusion: a self-reflective acceptance of one’s own belonging without illusions about its content. The interpretation simultaneously reads this approach as a plea for the essay as an adequate form of modern identity reflection—tentative, contradictory, and without claiming to definitive answers.

➙ To the article

Textual Mobility: Tiphaine Samoyault and her plea for an agonistic philology

The double review of Tiphaine Samoyault's books "Toutes sortes de Misérables" (2026, cited as TSM) and "Traduction et violence" (2020, cited as TEV) presents two different yet complementary approaches to the transformation of literary texts and uses their juxtaposition to discuss a fundamental shift in the understanding of literary works in academic studies: While TSM, based on the global reception and adaptation history of Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables," develops a theory of the classic as the result of incessant variation—the classic thus exists not despite, but because of its rewritings, abridgments, translations, and adaptations—TEV analyzes translation as a conflict-ridden act of cultural transformation that not only enables understanding but also reveals appropriation, the reduction of otherness, and political power relations; together, both studies lead to a consistently processual understanding of the literary text. The double review makes it clear that in both books, Samoyault undermines the notion of a stable, sovereign original and instead formulates a poetics of "textual mobility." In her analysis of the countless versions of characters like Cosette, she demonstrates that it is precisely the proliferation of variants that guarantees a work's cultural memorability, while her theory of translation replaces the seemingly harmonious discourse of cultural mediation with the concept of an "agonistic" translation that consciously preserves difference and friction. Taken together, variation thus appears as a twofold movement—on the one hand, as a survival strategy of the classic in cultural memory, and on the other, as a conflictual practice of linguistic and political negotiation. The double review therefore reads both books as theoretically intertwined interventions against a static concept of the work: literature does not arise from the immutability of an origin, but from the ongoing transformation through reading, adaptation, and translation. In doing so, Samoyault shifts the focus of literary studies from the authority of the original to the dynamics of its circulation in space and time, and calls for a philology that no longer attempts to fix "the one" text, but examines the processes by which texts change, multiply, and become effective in new historical and political constellations.

➙ To the article

From Savage Thinking to Farming: The Wheel in the Swamp by Mathias Énard

Mathias Énard's "Le Banquet annuel de la Confrérie des fossoyeurs" (Actes Sud, 2020, translated into German by Holger Fock and Sabine Müller, Hanser, 2021) follows Parisian ethnology student David Mazon to the remote village of La Pierre-Saint-Christophe in the Poitou region. What begins as fieldwork unfolds into a coming-of-age story: David attempts to map the village using the instruments of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Bronisław Malinowski, compiling categories, transcriptions, and tables, while around him a reality pulsates that defies categorization. In parallel, a second, metaphysical level opens up: The souls of the dead return in ever-changing forms, traversing battles, religious wars, revolutions, and world wars, until they reappear in the present-day soil as worms, wild boars, or farmers. At its heart is the grotesquely opulent banquet of the undertakers' guild at Maillezais Abbey—a Rabelaisian orgy of food, liquor, and debate, in which death is not repressed but celebrated. In the end, the field researcher David abandons his dissertation and establishes an organic farm with Lucie: theory gives way to work, observation to participation. The essay demonstrates that this narrative arc does not stage an idyllic return to nature, but rather a systematic disempowerment of the academic gaze. Initially, the village appears as a "New Continent," its inhabitants as objects of study—an ironically fractured reenactment of colonial ethnography. But method and reality diverge: dialect, physicality, death, and labor undermine all conceptual order. Intertextuality—from François Rabelais to François Villon—functions here as a poetics tool: it relativizes the authority of theory by dissolving it into excess, the grotesque, and (literally!) metabolism. The interpretation sees the rural landscape in the novel as a palimpsest of world history, peasant practice, and the ecological present, in which death and fertility, decay and future are inextricably intertwined. Knowledge here arises not from distance, but from a connection to the earth—as a radical, political revaluation of what knowledge can mean.

➙ To the article

Silence after the storm: Cécile Guilbert

In earlier works such as the novel *Les Républicains* (2017) and the chronicle collection *Roue libre* (2020), Cécile Guilbert established herself as an astute diagnostician of the political, intellectual, and stylistic decline of France and its society. Her most recent book, *Feux sacrés* (2025), however, represents a remarkable shift, turning to an autobiographical and spiritual self-reflection triggered by personal loss and a search for meaning in Indian philosophy. This essay explores how this turn to a “radical inwardness” in *Feux sacrés* can be understood not as resignation, but as a continued, albeit different, form of resistance to the diagnosed signs of decadence in the modern world.

➙ To the article

Night Stories: Laurent Mauvignier

Laurent Mauvignier sets many of his books in the fictional town of La Bassée, including "La maison vide" (2025), announced for release this fall and highly regarded for French literary prizes. As preparation, we read his night stories from 2020, the setting of which Mauvignier returns to in his new book. Laurent Mauvignier's novel "Histoires de la nuit" (2020) unfolds in the isolated hamlet of "L'écart des Trois Filles Seules," where the painter Christine lives as a neighbor of the farmer Patrice, his wife Marion, and their daughter Ida, whose seemingly idyllic rural life is shattered by the preparations for Marion's 40th birthday. This peace is shattered when Marion's ex-partner Denis, fresh out of prison and driven by years of revenge, arrives with his brothers Christophe and Bègue to punish Marion for her perceived betrayal and the estrangement from her daughter. This culminates in the brutal killing of Christine's dog Radjah and the kidnapping of the two women. As the evening unfolds, Marion's violent past is revealed, while Patrice, who has long suppressed the truth about his wife, joins Marion in a desperate fight for their family's survival and to protect their daughter during a night of bloody confrontations that exposes deep-seated traumas and familial depravity.

➙ To the article

Rimbaud Fictions: Alain Blottière

Alain Blottière's novel "Azur noir" (2020) can be interpreted as "Rimbaud fiction," in which the protagonist, Léo, develops an obsessive and transformative relationship with the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. For Léo, Rimbaud is not merely a literary figure but becomes a central element of his personal experience, his perception of the world, and his creative development, particularly within an apocalyptic scenario of the "end of the world." The novel unfolds a rich intertextuality that extends to biographical details, poetic concepts, and thematic parallels. The narrative is set in a context of the end of the world ("fin du monde"), characterized by extreme heat waves, fires, floods, and environmental disasters. Léo finds this present unbearable, and the "Rimbaud fiction" becomes his "ultimate refuge." Rimbaud's world, as Léo perceives it in his visions, is a "paradise" without the horrors of the present – ​​a Paris before industrialization, full of horses, clean air and untouched nature.

➙ To the article

Son of the dead: Asya Djoulaït

The novel "Ibn" tells the harrowing story of fifteen-year-old Issa, whose world collapses when his mother, Leïla, dies during the afternoon prayer. The five daily prayers—Fajr, Dhuhr, 'Asr, Maghrib, and 'Icha—not only structure time but also reflect Issa's emotional odyssey, marking the protagonist's growing despair and determination. Driven by his grief and his refusal to once again entrust his mother (after his father's death) to strangers' funeral rites, Issa undertakes the courageous but hopeless attempt to orchestrate the funeral himself. He plans to build a personal mausoleum for his mother and to perform the ritual washing and funeral prayers himself, even if it means violating traditional norms. These independent actions stand in stark contrast to the expectations and concerns of his mother, Leïla, who had always striven to help him settle in France and establish a stable position, whether through education, the deliberate choice of Montreuil as his home to avoid ghettoization, or his participation in Quranic school to anchor him in the Muslim community and prevent him from feeling "lost." Issa navigates between religious rules, personal convictions, and the harsh reality of death, which confronts him with his own identity as the "son of the dead."

➙ To the article

Paris awakens – the day will bear your name

Paris s'apaise. Mon père est all près, je le sens. Je retrouve son odeur, le grain de sa voix, all ces details que la mort nous vole. Je vais devoir le laisser partir à nouveau mais je l'ai ramené au présent. Il a marché sur mes épaules, déambulé dans les rues de this ville qu'il nous an offerte, à mon frère et moi. C'est le rêve qu'ils ont eu, avec ma mère: offerr Paris à leurs enfants. Que tout commence ici. Alors this ville est mienne, oui, parce qu'elle m'a été donnée. Et tout ce qui bruisse en elle, la clameur du passé, le fracas, les révoltes, les foules pressées, le pas hésitant des poetes, les solitudes côte à côte et les grands espoirs de foules, sont miens. Je prends tout. Je retrouve Paris. Et je sens mon père sourire avec douceur, heureux de voir que tout continue au-delà de lui.

Read more

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

Samuel Beckett in the retirement home

20th August 1989

[Radio]

Bonjour à tous, l'émission «Les Archives du théâtre» vous emmène, ce soir, sur les traces du plus francais des Irelandais, d'un maître de la langue et de l'absurde: Samuel Beckett. L'écrivain dramaturge fête, this année, les vingt ans d'un prix Nobel qu'il refusa d'aller chercher lui-même – par timidité, ont dit certains, par provocation, ont dit d'autres. Toujours est-il que this date est l'occasion pour nous de vous faire découvrir les trésors caches des archives du théâtre. In a few seconds, you discover an interview with the actor Vittorio Caprioli diffused throughout Waiting for Godot It's a joy for the first time in Italy. This archive is based on an integral diffusion of the piece, in French, mise en scène – with its origin in 1953 – by the great Roger Blin for the Comedie-Française, on April 2, 1978.

Trois, deux, un, zero… Allô Paris, ici Rome. Les consolations théâtrales s'assemblent, se dispersent, se refont à nouveau, selon les humeurs des artistses, les exigences des impresarii, les caprices du cinéma. The metteur en scène Luciano Mondolfo and the actor Vittorio Caprioli are retrouvés on the planches d'un petit et élégant theater Romain: the theater du 6 via Vittoria. Ils y ont associé leur talent à celui de Marcello Moretti qui vait, on s'en souvient, empporté un très grand succès à Paris comme Arlequin dans la pièce de Goldoni – Arlequin, valet deux maîtres – donnée by the Piccolo Teatro. Avec Claudio Ermelli, Antonio Pierfederici, Caprioli et Moretti, ils jouent depuis plusieurs semaines, avec le plus grand succès, an Italian version d'En attendant godot de Samuel Beckett. The painting by Giulio Coltellacci is created in a saisissant decoration par for its simplicity and sobriété tragedy. Le Tout-Rome intellectuel va au spectacle. Je vous en felicite, monsieur Caprioli, et je me felicite moi-même de vous avoir devant le micro pour this émission spéciale…

Read more

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

Memorialist of the King

Tahar Ben Jelloun immediately announced that the novel would cause a stir in Morocco: Maël Renouard is publishing the confession of a writer who, like Racine for Louis XIV or Voltaire for Louis XV, is employed as a historian by the Moroccan King Hassan II. The novel gleefully employs the rhetorical figures and turns of phrase of the great classical style of the 18th century.

Read more

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

Air turbulence with Oulipo

The workshop for potential literature, Oulipo, remains productive and, with Hervé Le Tellier, has made it to the shortlists of several literary prizes during the summer break. A play on possibilities: What if something unimaginable were to happen in March 2021, something we currently consider science fiction? What if we had to encounter our doppelgangers? What if this plane encounters terrible turbulence on its way to the USA? True to Oulipo's group poetics, it's another play on references, quotations, and mise-en-abyme effects, all presented in a witty, clever, and exciting way. The group's president, Hervé Le Tellier, invents an alter ego with a novel of the same name, Victør Miesel, and the ø is not coincidentally a mathematical symbol; Tellier himself studied mathematics and linguistics, as he explains in his book. Toutes les familles heureuses had written.

Read more

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

A cycle of novels about emotions

After his Marie novel cycle, Jean-Philippe Toussaint had written the novel The USB key started a new one, the second volume of which Emotions The death of the father connects both texts; the narrator explores a wide range of emotions: joy and sorrow, surprise, fear and anger, even disgust.

Read more

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

Three bodies, three eras

Lorenzo is a young Renaissance painter who wants to revolutionize art while pursuing his quest for beauty and indulging his passions. Baptiste belongs to a respectable bourgeoisie. In May 1968, he yearns for more freedom, but above all, for more excess. Tahar, finally, has fled to France and wants to obtain a residence permit. "Everyone is trying at all costs to achieve their goal: to achieve beauty, to turn the world upside down, or to give meaning to exile. Even though times and places separate them, these beings are permeated by the same excitement: the fire of passion."Publisher's text)

Read more

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

Snapshots of a Jewish exile in France

Saturn Her novel appears on almost all the longlists for the literary prizes this fall. The novelist and psychoanalyst Sarah Chiche tells her tragic story and that of her family, which once plunged her into a deep depression. Like a film, she captures snapshots from her father's childhood: the 1950s, Algiers, her father Harry, growing up with his older brother Armand, and his wealthy parents Louise and Joseph. The men in the family are hospital doctors. The Jewish family were not among the French colonists, but had lived in Algeria since their expulsion from Spain in the 15th century. A lavish life until the Algerian War, then exile in France, perpetrators and victims of the past.

Read more

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

A novel observes the birth of the internet.

"We accompany journalist Dimitri on his meticulous search for the French engineer Louis Pouzin, the true developer of the internet. Everything was ready: datagrams in Rocquencourt, the French Cyclades network, the launch of the web in Geneva. Lobbying and French politics prevented the cradle of this revolutionary technological invention from being in Europe in 1974."Parinfo)

Read more

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

Utopia of political modernity

On the occasion of the 2020 American presidential election: The writer Stéphane Denis imagines a principality somewhere in Europe between Switzerland and Liechtenstein, which "borrows characteristics from Monaco and Empress Sissi" (Etienne de Montety). A country long forgotten by modernity and the European Union, where the people are ruled by a sovereign more concerned with organizing his personal pleasures than with enacting laws.

Read more

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

screaming miracle

The language of Frédéric Arnoux is written in the argument of a marginality with four millenniums of surprenant neologisms, with the title: « Merdeille », mot-valise, union antinomique très parlante, qui dit clairement que « dans ce monde de merde il ya encore quelques merveilles! » ; ou encore « écolomie » imageant par…

Read more

Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to give you the best possible user experience. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognizing you when you return to our site, and helps our team understand which sections of the site are most interesting and useful to you.