2023

The 35 categories of the French literary landscape: Frédéric Beigbeder

Frédéric Beigbeder's "Dictionnaire amoureux des écrivains français d'aujourd'hui" (Plon, 2023) is a monumental and deliberately contradictory work: a condensed inventory of living French-language contemporary literature, comprising 281 entries, which stretches the lexicographical form of the "Dictionnaires amoureux" series to its limits while simultaneously serving as a self-portrait of its author. Beigbeder defines his method as "resolutely subjective": his corpus includes only novelists living in August 2023 who write directly in French—essayists, poets, playwrights, and crime writers are excluded, while Francophone authors from Martinique, the Maghreb, Senegal, or Quebec are included, since the volume claims, in a literary-political sense, to map a literature that extends beyond France. The most conceptually bold and polemical element of the book is the taxonomy of twenty-eight “Logos des écoles et mouvements littéraires contemporains” – small symbols with which Beigbeder assigns each author to one or more schools, thus doing what literary studies have so far failed to do for the 21st century: to divide contemporary literature into binding currents, from “autoréalité” (the self as the primary raw material, with Ernaux and Angot as canonical figures) through “faction” or exofiction (Carrère, Jaenada, Aubenas) and the “glauquistes apocalyptiques” (Houellebecq, Despentes, Mathieu) to the “néo-hussards” (Tesson, Kauffmann, Parisis), the “décoloniaux voyageurs” (Chamoiseau, Condé, Daoud, Mbougar Sarr) and the “revelators of a maudlin past” (Modiano, Guez, Mukasonga, Littell). This review analyzes Beigbeder’s definition of the corpus, his implicit value criteria (style, originality of perspective, courage to provoke, existential risk), the characteristics of the individual groups based on exemplary entries, and finally the position Beigbeder occupies in his own panorama—as a novelist who has excluded himself but remains present as an authority on every page—in order to ultimately weigh both the volume’s genuine achievement (filling a real gap, the quality of the best portraits, the heuristic productivity of the taxonomy) and its structural limitations (the Parisian milieu-bound nature of the perspective, the canonization of the already established, the veiled political partisanship).

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Oedipus in Évreux: A German-French post-war tragedy by Denis Dercourt

Denis Dercourt's debut novel, "Évreux" (Denoël, 2023), tells a consequential family saga spanning seven decades, beginning amidst the bombing raids of 1944. Léon, born to an abused French woman and a German collaborator, grows up in an atmosphere of shame, silence, and moral coldness. The child of the ruins becomes a ruthless power broker who systematically exploits the guilt of his fellow citizens for blackmail, building an empire in the process. In parallel, the novel follows the fates of his estranged children and the historian Antoine, who attempts to uncover the hidden crimes of the past—and in doing so, becomes entangled in a deadly spiral of revenge and vigilante justice. The city of Évreux emerges as a morally contaminated space where the history of the Franco-German occupation is not overcome but rather perpetuated through personal narratives. The review consistently interprets the novel as a modern tragedy in the vein of Oedipus Rex, arguing that Dercourt is less concerned with presenting a historical chronicle than with developing a deterministic model of guilt. Central to this is the thesis of an "economy of guilt": transgressions are not atoned for, but rather instrumentalized and transferred into new power relations. Stylistically, the review supports this interpretation by pointing to the paratactic, protocol-like narrative style, which de-emotionalizes violence and presents it as a logical consequence of historical entanglements. Furthermore, it highlights that the figure of the historian embodies the ambivalence of enlightenment: knowledge does not lead to catharsis, but rather to renewed action. The review's argument is clearly structured—from the primal scene in 1944 through intergenerational repetition to the final act of vigilante justice—and aims to diagnose a postwar society whose official narratives of reconciliation are radically undermined by private histories of violence.

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The Law as Sound: Constance Debré

In its analysis of Constance Debré's novels "Offenses" (2023) and "Protocoles" (2026), this essay illuminates the continuous transformation of her writing from autofiction to socio-political analysis. "Offenses" tells the story of an unnamed young man from the Parisian suburbs who murders an elderly neighbor. The act is not psychologically exploited, but rather used as a starting point to expose the structural violence of the justice system and the social injustices of society. Debré shifts the focus from the individual crime to the institutional "noise" of the court and the ritualized order in which the individual is reduced to physicality and silence. The analysis highlights that the radical reduction of plot and subjectivity—both perpetrator and victim remain nameless, their biographies play no role—is a deliberate choice to expose the hierarchy and arbitrariness of social and legal procedures. Critics compare Debré's approach to Dostoevsky, but point to the lack of moral purification and the aesthetic coldness that make *Offenses* a "muscle-bound" literary work that challenges readers while simultaneously opening up a philosophical reflection on guilt, power, and structural violence. With *Protocoles*, Debré shifts the focus to institutionalized violence on a different level: the bureaucratic organization of the death penalty in the USA is described precisely and almost documentaryally, while her fragmentary style still incorporates personal observations and poetic moments. Whereas the subjective dominates in *Offenses*, in *Protocoles* the "you" enters into the bureaucratic processes, creating a paradoxical sense of both intimacy and distance. This interpretation analyzes how Debré, through this shift, emphasizes the structural dimension of violence and control, deriving the poetic effect less from introspective reflection than from the confrontation with ritualized power. Both novels demonstrate that Debré consistently examines the conditions of literary subjectivity and human autonomy in contexts where law, power, and social norms reduce the individual, and the reception praises her ability to aesthetically and argumentatively reveal the mechanisms of subjugation and structural violence.

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Alain Pacadis as an icon of the Parisian underground scene: Charles Salles

Charles Salles' novel "Alain Pacadis, Face B," published in 2023, paints a multifaceted portrait of the French journalist and "glam-punk icon" Alain Pacadis. The book illuminates Pacadis' life, which exemplifies the radical social and cultural upheavals of postwar Paris. It follows him from his impoverished youth and his first political demonstration in 1968, which reveals his disorientation and search for identity, through his formative experiences with drugs, sexuality, and the Parisian underground scene of the 1970s, to his tragic death in 1986. The novel explores the deeper, more complex personality beyond the surface: his family history, his Jewish and Greek roots, personal traumas such as his father's death and his mother's suicide, and his profound insecurities. These less visible, intimate layers of his being constitute his "B-side."

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Ploughman of the Earth: Gaspard Kœnig

Gaspard Kœnig's "Humus" (2023, German translation 2025), firmly rooted in the grand tradition of realist literature, delves deep into the substance of soil and its inhabitants, the earthworms, to explore existential questions about the relationship between humanity and nature, idealism and pragmatism, failure and new beginnings. It is the story of two young agronomy students, Arthur and Kevin, whose paths initially intersect before diverging radically, reflecting the complexity of contemporary environmental conflicts. The novel does not simply choose between the protagonists' two major options, but rather analyzes both the flaws and the merits of each.

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The forgotten drama from 1940: Aurélien d'Avout

Aurélien d'Avout, La France en éclats: écrire la débâcle de 1940, d'Aragon à Claude Simon (Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles, 2023), 390 pp. A turning point and a rupture in the French self-image: Aurélien d'Avout's study, La France en éclats, illuminates why the year 1940, and June in particular, is often shrouded in a "veil of silence" in France. Although the…

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Burlesque and uncanny: two interpretations of the monstrous in Arthur Dreyfus

Arthur Dreyfus's "La troisième main" (POL, 2023) tells the life story of young Paul Marchand in the form of a "journal en désordre," a story shaped by the First World War and a grotesque medical transgression. The first half of the novel sketches a childhood in Besançon, the continuity of which shatters with the death of his father and the progressive neglect of his mother. When Paul is severely wounded, he awakens not in a hospital, but in the basement of the androgynously styled Camille Gottschalk, who performs bizarre transplants on humans and animals. From Paul's stomach grows a "third hand" belonging to the German Hans—a living, alien arm that ensures his survival and simultaneously transforms him into a monster. The text interweaves war, bodily horror, and the search for identity, leaving open the question of whether its protagonist is a victim, perpetrator, or accomplice in his own survival. The article reads Dreyfus's novel in two ways: as an uncanny parable about alienation and as a grotesque, burlesque body fantasy. In one reading, Gottschalk's laboratory is a place of scientific horror, the third hand an uncanny foreign body that undermines autonomy and identity. In the other, the same scenario appears as a dazzling, libertine spectacle in which a Candide-like narrator staggers through an anatomical cabinet of curiosities, where gender boundaries, morality, and body shapes are gleefully transgressed. Oscillating between horror and excess, the monstrous becomes the stage for survival—and the "third hand" a symbol for the ambiguity between alienation and belonging, revulsion and pleasure.

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Choreography of memory: Patrick Modiano on his 80th birthday.

Since his debut novel, "La Place de l'Étoile" (1968), Patrick Modiano, who this year turns as old "as the post-war era" (Andreas Platthaus), has created a poetic world permeated by shadows of memory, shifting identities, and mysterious absences. His novels—melancholic, elliptical, interwoven with forgetting and return—revolve around a paradoxical movement: remembering through loss, experiencing through disappearance. In this aesthetic tension, dance takes on a special role: as a motif, as an image, as a narrative form. Particularly in his most recent novel, "La danseuse" (2023, English translation 2025), this motif becomes a poetic metaphor: the dancer becomes the figure of remembering, the projection screen for a groping first-person narrator, and the allegory of an almost incomprehensible life. Here, dance is not at the center of a plot, but is staged as a floating trace, as a rhythmic principle of storytelling, as a fleeting figure that choreographs the storytelling itself.

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A child of German-French history: Sylvain Prudhomme

Sylvain Prudhomme's novel "L'enfant dans le taxi" (2023, German translation "Der Junge im Taxi," Unionsverlag, July 2025) explores the shadows of Franco-German history, particularly the post-war period, and their impact on individual destinies and family relationships. The work interweaves the narrator Simon's personal search for a repressed family secret with the complex history of the French occupation of Germany. At its heart is the discovery of the existence of M., the German son of the French soldier Malusci and the German woman Liselotte H., conceived during the occupation on Lake Constance. His existence was actively denied for decades to maintain idealized family narratives, the fragility of which is exposed by Simon's research. Lake Constance itself becomes a central symbol of the mystery and the hidden depths, while the taxi in which M. travels as a teenager to visit his father symbolizes his desperate, yet naive, hope for connection. The story shows how communication is blocked by silence and misunderstandings until the truth is finally revealed through characters like Franz and Louis. The novel transcends a mere family history by portraying collective repression as an active, performative practice in which "peace" often goes by the "other name of denial." The text emphasizes that the revelation of the truth does not lead to an objective reality, but rather to a continuous construction of truth shaped by desires and emotions. Furthermore, the novel is closely linked to Algeria's colonial history, as the first clue to the hidden family secret—M's existence—emerges through Bahi, an Algerian laborer on Malusci's farm in Oran. Ultimately, the novel suggests a possibility for healing historical trauma based on empathy and the acceptance of the complexities of human history.

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Pierre Bayard corrects Alfred Hitchcock

In his book "Hitchcock s'est trompé" (Editions Minuit, 2023), Pierre Bayard offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rear Window." Bayard's central thesis is that Hitchcock was mistaken in his masterpiece and that the generally accepted solution to the crime—that the neighbor Lars Thorwald murdered and dismembered his wife—is incorrect. Instead, the film diverts attention from an actual crime, another example of Bayard's books of "police critique."

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Mannerism as a symptom: Laurent Binet

Laurent Binet's "Perspective(s)" is a historical crime novel presented as a multi-perspective epistolary novel that delves into the aesthetic, political, and epistemological debates of 16th-century Italy, while simultaneously posing a profoundly modern question: How is truth constructed through the interplay of perspective, power, and medium? How can art—whether painted or narrated—be both sincere and effective? Perspective serves as an epistemological guide and stylistic organizing principle. It represents both the Renaissance's breakthrough in painting techniques and its Mannerist distortion and uncertainty, as well as Binet's narrative strategy, in which he acts as a "translator" of old letters, thereby exposing both historiography and fiction as narrative constructs.

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In memory of Pierre Nora (1931–2025)

On June 2, 2025, the eminent French historian Pierre Nora died in Paris at the age of 93. As editor of the monumental seven-volume series "Les Lieux de mémoire" (1984–1993), he decisively shaped the understanding of national memory culture and made a significant contribution to the reflection on French identity. Born in Paris in 1931, Pierre Nora escaped Gestapo persecution as a child. This early experience profoundly influenced his thinking about history, memory, and nation. In two books published in recent years, Nora presented his memoirs, "Jeunesse" (2022) and "Une étrange obstination" (2023), in which he freely recounted his life as a publisher and historian, and in particular traced his career.

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Poetics of Childhood: Marouane Bakhti, Comment sortir du monde (2023)

Marouane Bakhti's "Comment sortir du monde" (2023) tells the story of a young man with a migrant background who attempts to liberate himself from familial violence, cultural alienation, and inner fragmentation through memory, language, and spirituality—not to abandon the world, but to create his own vulnerable yet resilient place of existence within it. This is a text of self-empowerment that, in poetically dense chapters, depicts the childhood, adolescence, and early self-discovery of a queer first-person narrator with a French-Arab background. In doing so, he develops a poetics of childhood in which memory is not retrospectively ordered, but reconstructed as a sensual and fragile experience. The narrator writes from the perspective of the wounded, wonder-filled child, whose perception of nature, language, and physicality is simultaneously magical and threatened. The fragmentary form, interspersed with images, smells, sounds, and poetic associations, reflects the fragmented and open nature of the child's consciousness. Childhood appears not as lost innocence, but as the origin of difference, of shame, desire, and speechlessness—but also as a source of resilience that defies oblivion. The novel makes it palpable that writing here is not merely remembering, but a careful re-creation of that inner world which had fallen "out of the world."

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Poetics of Childhood: Nathacha Appanah, La mémoire délavée (2023)

Nathacha Appanah's autofictional work "La mémoire délavée" (2023) is a multifaceted exploration of family origins, colonial history, and identity. At its heart lies the literary reckoning with the history of her own ancestors, who arrived on the island of Mauritius as Indian indentured laborers (engagés) in the 19th century. The title itself hints at the central theme: the blurred, faded memory—both individual and collective—that must be reconstructed through oral tradition, family anecdotes, gaps, and archives. This search is simultaneously a return to her own childhood: back to a time in Piton, a Mauritian village, to a childhood shaped by a family history marked by silence, fragments, and unspoken traumas. Childhood appears in this text as a biographical origin, a literary starting point, and an epistemological horizon: Through the child's wonder, sensory perception of the world, and the existential questions of the child who wants to know "where we come from," the text takes shape as a poetic space of memory.

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Grotesque Republic: Nathalie Quintane

Nathalie Quintane (born 1964) is a poet, novelist, and teacher at a collège in Digne. With her novel "Tout va bien se passer" (2023, English translation: Everything Will Be Alright), she presents a work that uniquely combines literary forms, historical reflection, postmodern irony, and sharp political analysis. At its heart is a grotesque scene: a minister, reduced to his torso, traverses Paris on his way to the Élysée Palace. He is accompanied by the narrator's perspective as well as by historical and fictional voices, most notably Lucile Franque, a real but virtually unknown 18th-century painter who enters the novel as a time traveler. The novel takes us through the Élysée, not as a place of state dignity, but as a stage for absurd rituals of representation. The novel unfolds a textual tapestry of scenic miniatures, essayistic interludes, surreal passages, comic exaggeration, and documentary meticulousness. The ministerial torso represents a politics that has lost all integrity, reduced to a mere shell. The Élysée Palace becomes a palace of empty signs, a sham of a democracy where only symbolic gestures circulate.

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Colonialism in the Roman Noir: Thomas Cantaloube

While Thomas Cantaloube's "Requiem pour une République" focuses on the Algerian War and "Frakas" illuminates the neocolonial machinations of Françafrique, "Mai 67" is dedicated to the little-known but historically significant repression on Guadeloupe in 1967. With this volume, Cantaloube has created a work that is simultaneously a political thriller, a literary indictment, and a compelling examination of the structural power relations of the Fifth Republic.

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Stroking something invisible: Debora Levyh

Debora Levyh's debut novel, "La version" (2023), explores the radical otherness of a world whose language, understanding of time, and social organization differ fundamentally from our own. This article demonstrates how the text undertakes a literary reflection on the limits of language: the narrator can observe the foreign culture and recognize its patterns, yet the translation into her own language remains inadequate. Through the absence of fixed identities, constant objects, and linear narrative structures in this alien world, the novel creates an atmosphere of disorientation that compels readers to question their habitual ways of thinking. Levyh's work is placed within the context of literary traditions of poetic anthropology and compared to works such as Henri Michaux's "Voyage en Grande Garabagne" and Julio Cortázar's "Historias de Cronopios y de Famas," which also experiment with surreal social constructs. Levyh's poetics of periphrasis results in an always slightly misguided approach to concepts, whereby language appears not as a fixed system of meaning, but as a fluid medium that does justice to the experience of the untranslatable. While, for example, Dante's Paradiso XXXIII addresses the inadequacy of human language in the face of the divine, and Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" uses a mathematical thought experiment on different dimensions to illustrate how limited categories of perception restrict the imagination, Denis Villeneuve's film "Arrival" links the deciphering of a non-linear alien script with the experience of an altered perception of time. The distinctive feature of Debora Levyh's "La version" lies in its radical exploration of linguistic and cultural otherness, which challenges the reader not only in terms of content but also aesthetically. The beauty of this writing lies in a dense, almost meditative atmosphere, arising from the impossibility of fully comprehending the utterly foreign. A book for readers who wish to embark on an intellectual and sensual exploration of the limits of what can be translated.

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Crucifixion of the pop icon in Bayamack-Tam's "Autopsye mondiale"

Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam's "Autopsie mondiale" explores the boundaries between theater, prose, and political allegory: at its heart is a fictional performance in which Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, the allegorical figure of world opinion, and a fan conduct a trial on stage. This dramatic constellation transcends individual lives, serving as a mirror for universal themes such as guilt, identity, responsibility, and the power of public opinion. With sarcasm, pathos, and social critique, Bayamack-Tam exposes the mechanisms of modern culture and its signs of decay.

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Virgil and the Scent of the Great Fire

C'est le 16 Juillet je scrute le Journal du Ciel. Je note le nom de ce jour, ce matin il vit encore. Dans quelques jours, une semaine, au plus tard, il ne sera plus, j'aurai oublié son nom, je ne saurai plus son âge. It was prudent to inquire in the morning of 16 July, at 5:30 a.m., this time another étoile, seule, nue, pure, un infime trou de lumière dans les ténèbres. Scintille comme le clin d'œil de l'actualité, un pétillement d'En-Haut. My imagination can bring the Ukraine back to the West. Je ne l'exerce pas. L'étoile et my nous nous parlons. Je suis dans l'état de la disciple d'un Virgile du tout premier siècle des apocalypses, qui reçoit une lettre celeste.

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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.

Free language from phrases and empty words

Paul prefers to rest all the way to the heart of the empport, plutôt que s'arracher à la torpeur, this pleine conscience de lui-même qu'il goûtait enfin. Il n'était pas seul ; It is a habitable part of the universe; chaque grain de poussière available to the senses ; les vers de terre étaient à leur place (les vers de terre étaient superbes, tout comme les scarabées, les fourmis, les champignons molletonneux) ; les oiseaux chantaient des psaumes ; les étoiles révélaient son destin: all semblait parfait – sitôt qu'il eut fait abstraction des hommes. Peut-être était-ce vrai, les hommes étaient les gardiens de l'enfer des other hommes qui leur servaient eux-mêmes de geôliers.

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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.
Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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