2024

Political Rhetoric in Ruins: Mathieu Larnaudie and Nicolas Idier

This double review reads Mathieu Larnaudie's "Acharnement" (2012) and Nicolas Idier's "Matignon la nuit" (2024) as two complementary diagnoses of a political discourse that has lost touch with people and revolves only around itself. Both novels present highly reduced narratives: In Larnaudie's novel, a former speechwriter lives in seclusion in the provinces, writing speeches, rehearsing them, and discarding them, while real catastrophes appear only peripherally. In Idier's novel, an advisor is tasked with composing a speech in a single night at the seat of government but becomes increasingly lost in encounters, memories, and digressions. This is particularly evident in two images: the wooden platform on which Müller rehearses his speeches into the void, and the nocturnal crisis machine of Matignon, where language consists only of interchangeable "elements." The review also compares the writing styles of the two authors: Larnaudie's long, convoluted, and self-commenting prose appears as both an imitation and a critique of political rhetoric. Idier's fragmented and open style, on the other hand, seems like a sabotage of political discourse, opening up new possibilities. At the same time, the review connects this stylistic analysis with the characters, plot structures, and temporal organization of the novels: here, the endless repetition in Larnaudie's work; there, the condensed chronology of a single night in Idier's. Thus, form and political diagnosis mutually reinforce each other. The review's argument begins with an analysis of rhetorical mechanisms such as rhythm, punchline, and media staging, and then examines the position of the speaking characters: on the one hand, the dismissed speechwriter, on the other, the "sous-plume" within the government apparatus. The review also addresses the question of the audience, which is either entirely absent or appears only as a hyper-mediated mass. In the end, two hopeless options remain: either to continue writing despite the recognized meaninglessness (in Larnaudie's case) or to break out of the political discourse and look for another form of action (in Idier's case).

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Odysseus in Paris: An epic without a center, with James Joyce

The volume “Ulysse à Paris” (Seuil, 2024) continues the Homeric-Joycean tradition by radically pluralizing the epic structure of the wandering journey and relocating it to the socially, politically, and historically charged terrain of northern Paris. Published in collaboration with the journal Cockpit, this collective novel is not merely a loose anthology, but an aesthetically and theoretically coherent project that programmatically stages literary polyphony as a counter-model to epic unity. Instead of a sovereign hero, a network of heterogeneous voices unfolds, whose characters—from migrant subjects to feminist reformulations of mythical roles to flâneurs sensitized to the politics of memory—experience the odyssey as an event of displacement, precarity, and fragmented identity. The review explores how each contribution transforms specific Homeric episodes and Joycean techniques: be it through the emptying of the heroic (de Quatrebarbes), the ironic treatment of genealogical authority (Fiat), the politicization of mythical violence in the context of Holocaust remembrance (Comment), or the radical subjectivization of marginalized perspectives (Schavelzon, Noël). Tiphaine Samoyault emphasizes memory as a mode of a never-completed homecoming. Gabriela Vazquez condenses migration into an epistemic perspective that consistently conceives of the center from the periphery. The analysis traces the dense intertextual entanglement and reads formal techniques (polyphony, stream of consciousness, catalog technique) as carriers of historical and ideological meanings. It becomes clear that the central driving force of the volume is the deconstruction of homecoming: Ithaca no longer appears as an attainable place, but as an empty signature, replaced by provisional, often precarious forms of arrival that neither stabilize identity nor reconcile history. The review itself thus follows a twofold movement – ​​it reconstructs the genealogical depth of the project and at the same time insists on its diagnostic sharpness regarding the times – thereby revealing “Ulysse à Paris” as an epic that constantly questions its own possibility.

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Israel, Gaza and the French intellectual discourse after October 7: Interpretive authority according to Denis Sieffert

This review analyzes the French intellectual debate following October 7, 2023, as a deeply polarized field of discourse in which three central positions emerged: a dominant pro-Israel camp, a marginalized pro-Palestinian spectrum, and a fragile, long-silent intermediate position. At its core is Denis Sieffert's book "La mauvaise cause" (2026), which is read as a committed counter-narrative against what he sees as a hegemonic, pro-Israel discursive order. The review meticulously reconstructs Sieffert's argument—from the historical entanglement of France with Israel and the analysis of media and rhetorical mechanisms to the critique of prominent intellectuals such as Gilles Kepel and Eva Illouz—and demonstrates that his central point of departure lies in the repoliticization of the conflict as a colonial issue. In comparison with Kepel's geopolitical-religious studies approach and Illouz's sociological critique of the Western left, the review highlights the fundamental epistemic differences between these positions: While Kepel and Illouz problematize the reactions to October 7th, Sieffert focuses on the mechanisms of discursive power and the rendering invisible of Palestinian suffering. In conclusion, the review assesses the book as an important, albeit not unproblematic, intervention that exemplifies the political, media, and moral fault lines of contemporary France.

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Mesopotamia between archaic mythology, imperial present and postcolonial guilt: Olivier Guez

Olivier Guez's "Mesopotamia" (Grasset, 2024, German translation "Die Welt in ihren Händen," Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2026) reconstructs, in the form of historiographical fiction, the life of the British archaeologist and colonial official Gertrude Bell as a nexus of two intertwined narratives: the emancipation story of an extraordinary woman and the violent genesis of modern Iraq in the context of British imperialism after the First World War. The novel traces Bell's path from the scientific exploration of Mesopotamia to her pivotal role in the political reorganization of the region, weaving historical figures such as T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and Faisal I into a dense web of diplomacy, mythology, and power politics. Central to this is the poetic construction of Mesopotamia as a palimpsest in which archaic civilizations (Sumer, Babylon) and modern colonial interests overlap. This deep layering functions simultaneously as an ideological matrix of imperial legitimacy and as an ironic refraction of its hubris. The interpretation highlights that Guez's actual argument lies in the structural analogy between archaeology and colonial rule: both operate as forms of epistemic appropriation that translate knowledge into power and thus produce political orders whose fragility becomes evident in the postcolonial epilogue—from the fall of the monarchy to the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. The cyclical temporal structure and the mythical overcoding are interpreted as narrative strategies that make the British project appear as merely an episode in a longue durée of imperial repetitions; in doing so, the tendency to read the Franco-British rivalry primarily as a mirror structure is emphasized. Overall, the review shows how Guez stages Bell as a tragic figure caught between knowledge and complicity, thereby formulating a fundamental critique of the illusion of imperial power.

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Francia as a new Marianne: Allegory of a kaleidoscopic France in Nancy Huston's work

Nancy Huston's "Francia" (Actes Sud, 2024) is a novel that is both narratively focused and thematically expansive. At its heart is the transgender protagonist Francia, originally from Colombia, whom the novel follows as a sex worker in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris on a May day. This strictly defined timeframe forms the stage for a multifaceted panorama in which seventeen male clients—from diverse social, cultural, and biographical backgrounds—appear one after another, revealing their hidden needs, traumas, and self-deceptions. Through flashbacks, Francia's own story unfolds, from her birth as Rubén, through her transition, to her self-chosen identity, which, in the name "Francia," is programmatically intertwined with the country of France. The novel thus constructs a kaleidoscopic portrait of contemporary French society, in which issues of migration, gender, masculinity, and social inequality intertwine. The interpretation suggests that Francia can be read as a "new Marianne," a modern allegory of the French Republic itself: her body, her hybrid identity, and her social position encapsulate the contradictions of a country marked by postcolonial diversity, social tensions, and collective trauma. Accordingly, the essay argues that Francia is not merely an individual figure, but a symbolic projection screen for national self-understanding. It particularly highlights the dual perspective structure—the expansive inner view of the men versus Francia's sober, professional external perception—from which an implicit critique of male self-interpretation emerges: the men appear less as autonomous subjects than as driven by desire, fear, and societal expectations. Central to the analysis is the thesis of the universalization of "prostitution" as a social principle ("tout le monde est pute"), which negates the moral distinction of sex work and instead interprets exchange, need, and performance as universal human practices. This interpretation reads Huston's methods of multiperspectivism, polyphony, and metafictional self-reflection (the character of "Griffonne") as a poetics program: literature itself appears as an act of empathy and appropriation, ethically risky but epistemologically productive. Overall, it portrays the novel as a text that is both political and profoundly empathetic, one that does not doactically resolve societal conflicts but rather condenses and makes them visible in the figure of Francia—as a "new Marianne."

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The flower as text, body and danger: three novels by Colette Fellous, Célia Houdart and Constance Guisset

What connects three very different contemporary French novels—Colette Fellous's "Quelques fleurs" (Gallimard, 2024), Célia Houdart's "Les Fleurs sauvages" (POL, 2024), and Constance Guisset's "Fleur de peau" (Flammarion, 2026)? At first glance, only the botanical nature of their titles; but on closer reading, a shared and multifaceted literary project: the questioning, displacement, and in some cases, radical destruction of that symbolist tradition which, since Mallarmé, has encoded the flower as a sublime, incorporeal sign—as "l'absente de tous bouquets," absent from every real bouquet, ascending into pure idea. This comparative review shows how the three authors inherit and disrupt this legacy in their own unique ways, by reclaiming the plant-like and bringing it back into the corporeal, the ecological, and the pharmacological. Fellous, whose autofictional essay operates within the formal framework of the lyrical narrative, cultivates the flower as a mnemonic device and a poetics of self-portraiture: her flowers are silent witnesses to lived experience, condensations of childhood, mother, Tunis, and Paris, and the book she is writing is literally "en ces fleurs caché"—hidden within the flowers, awaiting the act of writing that will liberate them. Houdart, on the other hand, strips the flower of any subjective claim: in the laconic polyphonic narration of her Provençal characters, wildflowers are ecological symbols of a nature indifferent to humankind and—in the case of the hallucinogenic datura, which poisons two characters—even prepared to harm them, unintentionally and without message; botanical knowledge here becomes an ethical and epistemic necessity. Finally, Guisset turns the romantic floral aesthetic on its head with a gesture of critical commentary on the system: Her florist Ava has spent thirteen years arranging the beauty of flowers, accumulating an invisible poison through pesticides in her skin – the flower, chosen as a counter-world to the financial world, turns out to be its accomplice, and the woman's body a barometer of a global commodity economy that bases beauty on toxic substances. The essay reads these three very different text projects along a common dimension of analysis: the function of the flower as a temporal figure, as a bodily figure, and as a linguistic figure. It argues that contemporary French literature uses the flower motif to span a scale ranging from mnemonic cultivation to ecological sobriety and pharmacological paradox – culminating in Ismaël Jude's concurrently published novel "Une vie de jasmin," which is used as a fourth comparative text, in a linguistically skeptical ontology of pure emanation that consistently takes Mallarmé's idealization to its logical conclusion using the means of the body and biology.

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The unreliable voice of colonial rule: Mathieu Belezi

Mathieu Belezi's novel "Moi, le glorieux" (2024) develops a delirious, monologic stream of memory from the fictional colonial ruler Albert Vandel, nicknamed "Bobby," who, in 1962—on the eve of Algerian independence—endures his 145-year-old, grotesquely exaggerated allegory of the entire colonial history in his fortified villa in Algiers. Starting from this besieged present, the text unfolds, in associative flashbacks, a century of colonial rule: the violent construction of the estate, the economic exploitation, the sexual control of women, the political self-presentation within the framework of colonial rituals, and finally the apocalyptic departure into the desert, which ends in the protagonist's violent death at the hands of those he had imagined as his "subjects." Central to this is the figure of Ouhrias, a young Algerian woman who, as a silent companion and resistant refuser of listening, both accompanies and subverts the monologue. The argument developed in this essay reads this novel as a radical experiment in narrative self-exposure: Belezi completely relinquishes the power of speech to the ostentatiously unreliable first-person narrator and refrains from any explicit moral commentary, so that the critique arises not from a dissenting voice, but from the exaggeration of colonial logic itself. The analysis demonstrates how this strategy operates on several levels: in the monologic narrative structure, which transforms communication into domination; in the temporal structure, which presents history as an unbroken continuity of colonial violence; in the constellation of characters, which systematically silences colonial subjects; and in the semantic fields of body, animal metaphor, and possession, which underpin the narrator's ideology. The essay particularly emphasizes the function of satirical exaggeration and the structural discrepancy between narrated self-perception and actual violence, which functions as a "satirical machine." Finally, the essay demonstrates that the novel also represents an autopoetological reflection, staging the colonizer as the author of his own story while simultaneously revealing the instability of this authorship. Taken together, "Moi, le glorieux" thus appears as a text that does not criticize colonial violence from the outside, but rather exposes it so radically in the mode of its own discourse that it discredits itself in the very act of speaking.

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Isis in Montmartre: Gérard de Nerval as patient and prophet in Diane Morel's film

Diane Morel's "Le Mystère Nerval" (Fayard, 2024) begins in 1841: Gérard de Nerval is admitted to Dr. Blanche's clinic, covered in blood and obsessed with the idea that an "Isis" is dead. From this scene unfolds a multifaceted narrative that intertwines criminal intrigue and a portrait of the poet. The young physician Émile Blanche investigates in literary Paris, among Gautier, Houssaye, and the radical Petrus Borel, stumbling upon the murdered journalist Flore—and a political conspiracy against the July Monarchy. But the true dynamic lies deeper: Morel integrates Nerval's motifs—the "black sun of melancholy" from the sonnet "El Desdichado," the doppelgänger motif from "Aurélia," the Valois landscapes from "Sylvie," the Egyptian Isis as a cipher for the "eternal feminine"—into the structure of the plot. The chaotic writing process, visualized as a tapestry of hundreds of scraps of paper, becomes a poetics program: fragment, dream, and vision are not symptoms, but forms of knowledge. Even the therapeutic scene in which Nerval's own translation of "Faust" releases him from catatonia stages literature as a counterforce to clinical rationality. – The review reads this novel not only as a historical crime story, but also as a poetic experiment: Morel defends Nerval's "madness" against the grasp of positivism by taking its inner logic seriously. The crime plot of this biofictional work reflects Nerval's obsession with "morte amoureuse" (lovesick death); Flore becomes the earthly manifestation of that Isis who, in Nerval's work, is simultaneously mother goddess, lover, and lost unity. Dream and reality permeate one another until, in the end, in the ruins of Chaalis—a topos from "Sylvie"—the real dead woman and the mythical Lorelei merge into one another. This creates the image of a poet whose inner turmoil is not pathologized but understood as aesthetic radicalism. In this reading, Morel's novel appears as a plea for a poetics of the unstable: against the "order" of the clinic, he sets the productive disorder of the imagination – and makes Nerval's statement about dreams as a "second life" the narrative principle.

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Between origin and upward mobility: Novels of class change by Moraton, Robin and Sizun

This article focuses on three French novels that explore social mobility from different literary perspectives: Gilles Moraton's "Transfuge" (Nadeau, 2025), Patrice Robin's "Le Visage tout bleu" (POL, 2022), and Marie Sizun's "10, villa Gagliardini" (Arléa, 2024). Robin's novel, told from an autobiographical perspective, recounts the educational ascent of a boy from a rural, artisan background whose near-fatal birth and his parents' harsh working conditions shaped his social starting point; his path to the intellectual sphere remains fraught with guilt and the physical imprint of his origins. Moraton depicts the development of a protagonist from a lower-middle-class or proletarian background who gains access to the cultural elite through educational institutions, yet remains a "crossover" between classes, ruthlessly analyzing his own metamorphosis. Sizun, in turn, reconstructs the childhood of a girl in postwar Paris who, through education and self-discipline, gradually emerges from the confines of the "villa Gagliardini" into a different social sphere; here, the class shift appears as a subtle, intra-familial shift closely linked to female self-empowerment. – The essay argues that these three novels not only address class change thematically but also present it as a structural problem of narration. At the center is the figure of the "transfuge" as a doubly positioned subject who retrospectively recounts an origin left behind without ever being able to completely shed it. The analysis focuses particularly on the tension between the narrating and narrated self, the linguistic problem of the shift in social register, the staging of rupture or continuity in the temporal structure, and the ethical dimension of characterization. In its comparative reading of the novels' endings, the review highlights that Robin aims for a conciliatory integration of origins, Moraton emphasizes the enduring intermediate position, and Sizun designs a quiet form of inner continuity. Thus, the review demonstrates that class change as a literary motif presents an aesthetic and ethical challenge because it sets identity, language, and narrative perspective all in motion.

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Art as work: Dominique Auzel on Gustave Caillebotte

In the book Ouvriers, artisans du beau selon Caillebotte In the 2024 volume of the book series "Le roman d'un chef d'oeuvre," Dominique Auzel undertakes the ambitious yet delicate task of intertwining art historical analysis, historical research, and literary imagination. His starting point is a single painting, Gustave Caillebotte's Parquet robots from 1875, but it quickly becomes clear that this painting serves less as an isolated masterpiece than as a crystallization point: for questions about modernity and realism, about work and body, about social visibility and aesthetic dignity, and finally about the inner biography of an artist whose work had long been overshadowed by his Impressionist contemporaries.

Caillebotte's painting occupies a unique liminal position within modernism. It stands in contrast to the established narratives of Impressionism because it is neither entirely dissolved by the dissolution of form nor by the pure primacy of atmosphere. Rather, Caillebotte combines a rigorous, almost classical compositional discipline with the radical choice of modern subjects. His cityscapes, interiors, and scenes of work are permeated by clear lines, precise perspectives, and unusual viewpoints reminiscent of photographic or architectural techniques. Here, modernism reveals itself less as a departure into formal indeterminacy than as a new order of seeing: urban space, private interiors, and the human body are grasped as structured yet contingent fields of experience.

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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.

From footnote to counter-narrative: Olivier Rolin on Victor Hugo

In "Jusqu'à ce que mort s'ensuive" (Gallimard, 2024), Olivier Rolin develops a consistent counter-narrative from a marginal passage in "Les Misérables." In Hugo's work, Emmanuel Barthélemy and Frédéric Cournet appear merely as exemplary figures within the barricade mythology of 1848, their fates morally resolved in a few sentences. Rolin liberates them from this symbolic function and reconstructs their lives from the June Uprising through exile in London to duel and hanging. From Hugo's miniature emerges a richly detailed chronicle in which Barthélemy appears as a product of the Bagno and Cournet as a contradictory republican—not as archetypes, but as historical figures without a logic of redemption. This review interprets Rolin's book as a demythologization through precision. Rolin does not openly contradict Hugo, but rather begins where his epic order begins to crumble. Against Hugo's condensation, he sets chronology, archival material, and narrative sobriety. Thus, the focus shifts from meaning-making to description: Jean Valjean's redemption contrasts with Barthélemy's hardening, the emphatic title "Les Misérables" with the administrative coldness of "Jusqu'à ce que mort s'ensuive." The stark ending at the gallows is read as a methodological choice: history does not generate meaning on its own. Literature can make it visible—but not redeem it.

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Starry sky over Rome: Renaud Rodier

Against the backdrop of a politically decaying Rome on the night of Giorgia Meloni's election, Renaud Rodier's third book, "Si Rome meurt" (Anne Carrière, 2025), follows aspiring filmmaker Pietro as he embarks on an obsessive search for his missing father, whom he believes he has rediscovered in the form of a prophetic homeless man on the margins of society. Guided by the astrophysical theory of the holographic universe, Pietro designs his central film project as a process of cinematic writing, attempting to transform Rome's urban entropy into a coherent aesthetic construct using grainy Super 8 footage. Renaud Rodier's novel unfolds as an intermedial palimpsest, exploring the existential question of what can be saved if Rome dies, through a dense interweaving of traumatic memory and cinematic vision. By elevating astrophysical metaphor to space poetry, the novel transforms the social entropy of Rome into a transcendent, astronomical topography that relocates the discourse on the "Eternal City" as an indestructible information code beyond temporal decay.

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The writer on horseback and the crisis of dialectics: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Années noires

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle is a profoundly contradictory figure in literary history, whose work has often been received through ideological lens. He was a prolific author of plays, novellas, poems, novels, essays, and journalistic pieces. Biographically, it is noteworthy that, on the one hand, from the 1930s onward, Drieu became an influential advocate of French fascism and a protagonist of intellectual collaboration. On the other hand, he married a Jewish woman in his first marriage, never ceased to flirt with communism, and used his connections to the German embassy to protect close friends like Jean Paulhan from persecution. His aesthetic merit is undisputed, although the evaluation of his work is invariably intertwined with his political and moral compromise. Drieu's work reveals a deep inner conflict and disorientation, characterized by alternating self-loathing, hatred of others, and war fantasies.

Andreas Geisler's scientific project, documented in the monograph L'écrivain à cheval: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's narrative work between modernity, anti-modernity and postmodernity (Brill Fink, 2024) aims at a comprehensive rereading of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle's prose. The central concern of the work is to establish a carefully balanced relationship between Drieu la Rochelle's work and the man, thereby revealing those layers that have thus far remained hidden behind the dominance of the author's biographical and political context. Geisler's work was completed at the University of Bonn. The impetus for the work arose in a seminar at the University of Heidelberg, where Catherine Péant sparked Geisler's interest in the contradictory literary output of the années noires awakened. Paul Geyer, the supervisor of the project in Bonn, also established contact with Jean-François Louette at the Sorbonne.

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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.

The Naive and the Philistines in Voltaire and Dominique Fernandez

In "Un jeune homme simple" (2024), Dominique Fernandez traces the journey of young Arthur from the Auvergne, an uneducated provincial who finds himself in hyper-ideologized Paris. His encounters with, among others, radical feminist, ecological, and literary circles reveal contemporary society as permeated by moralism, woke dogmas, and cultural conformism. The protagonist's naiveté serves as a touchstone for modern elites: precisely because Arthur doesn't understand the capital's "codes," he exposes its hypocrisy and ultimately chooses to return to the Auvergne, where "safe, proven values" and a simple love await him. – The review explicitly places the novel within an intertextual lineage to Voltaire's "L'Ingénu" and interprets Arthur as a contemporary reincarnation of the enlightened outsider. Like Voltaire's Huron, Arthur, through his unvarnished judgment, exposes the absurdities of each era—once religious rites, now ideological orthodoxies. However, Voltaire's impulse is reversed: where the ingenu is forced into resistance in the world, Fernandez sees withdrawal as the only remaining form of integrity. The review's argument thus employs a twofold comparison: it reads Fernandez's satire as a modern continuation of Voltaire's critique—and simultaneously as an ironic antithesis in which the naive hero no longer fights but leaves corrupt civilization behind. Central to the review is also the observation that Fernandez portrays contemporary sexual liberation not as progress, but as a new form of conformism: what was once transgressive appears in Parisian circles as a commercialized ritual that has lost its rebellious energy. Fernandez's treatment of homosexuality in his work reveals this loss of the "gloire du paria" as a recurring motif: from "L'Étoile rose" (1978) and "La Gloire du Paria" (1987) to the double novel "L'homme de trop" (2021/2022), he describes the assimilation of the once resistant minority as a cultural leveling that gives rise to desires for a new radical difference – most recently in transgender.

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Jordan Bardella's dream France: The beauty and stature of the replacement candidate

Jordan Bardella's two books – "Ce que je cherche" (2024) and "Ce que veulent les Français" (2025) – form a strategic double figure of self-myth and self-legitimization. The first work stylizes Bardella's rise from a child of the banlieues to a "republican success story" in the Rassemblement National, linking this to a pathos of national greatness reminiscent of Bonaparte and De Gaulle. The search for "grandeur" becomes the self-justifying narrative of a savior of the "forgotten French." The second book transforms this claim to salvation into a gallery of seemingly authentic civic portraits, which, however, only represent the voices of a homogeneous, work-ethically moralized "people" that he himself embodies. Bardella thus merges narrative journalism, political mythology, and campaign rhetoric into an aesthetic form of populist pathos in which "empathy" becomes a stage for ideological simplification. The nation appears as a sacred community opposed to elites, migration, and Europe; difference is morally devalued. – This article reads these works as twin acts of political self-promotion: literature as candidacy. It shows how both volumes support the Bolloré media complex and its right-wing populist agenda: the first as a biography of a “designated replacement candidate” for Marine Le Pen, the second as an emotionalized election campaign under the guise of populist authenticity. The analysis interprets Bardella’s pathos of the “true France” as projective self-deification and reveals that his ideal France aims not at plurality but at symbolic power: the beauty and grandeur of a candidate – aesthetically precise, politically dangerous.

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Semionaut of Doom: Mathieu Larnaudie

Mathieu Larnaudie's "Trash Vortex" (2024) is a sharp satire depicting the downfall of a global elite who, faced with ecological and political crises, seek refuge in bunker dreams, libertarian fantasies, and cynical profit strategies. At its heart is Eugénie Valier (alias Liliane Bettencourt), heiress to an industrial empire, who doesn't pass her inheritance on to her son but instead bequeaths it to a foundation dedicated to cleaning up the ocean's garbage patches—an act somewhere between a utopian gesture and a familial vendetta. The novel thus unfolds a panorama of power, greed, and decay, in which a fascination with one's own demise forms the last unifying narrative of an exhausted civilization.

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Ways of writing the Real: Ivan Jablonka

Ivan Jablonka The Three Continents or the Literary World, Threshold, 2024.

Introduction: Interpreting and Changing

In The Third Continent Ivan Jablonka, Professor of Contemporary History at Sorbonne Paris Nord and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), undertakes a remapping of the intellectual world and its forms of writing. According to him, the traditional intellectual landscape has been dominated since the 19th century by two "continents": fiction and scientific research. The first continent, "fiction," is considered a realm of pleasure and freedom, while the second, "grey literature," is understood as a sphere of truth and rigor, with novels contrasted with the social sciences. This binary division, Jablonka argues, is outdated.

The real problem lies in the non-recognition or marginalization of those writings of the real (“écrits du réel”) that belong neither entirely to fiction nor to purely academic research. These “wandering texts” (“textes errants”), as Jablonka calls them, encompass reports, testimonies, biographies, news reports, diaries, and travelogues. They are neither granted the dignity of the first continent nor fully welcomed by the second, which at best considers them “sources.” Jablonka asks how these texts, which represent a different way of understanding the world and a different kind of literature, can find their rightful place.

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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.

France's Contamination 2036: Robert Merle and Emmanuel Ruben

Emmanuel Ruben's novel "Malville" (Stock, 2024) fits into a long line of apocalyptic literature, ranging from biblical prophecies to Robert Merle's "Malevil" (1972, English translation 1975), whose title is deliberately invoked here as an intertextual reference: On the level of social critique, "Malville" is a reckoning with French nuclear policy since the 1970s. Today, Ruben meticulously traces how political decisions—from Macron's revival of the nuclear program to the rise of the far right and the dissolution of the European Union—led to catastrophe. Robert Merle's "Malevil" is narrated from the first-person perspective of the farmer Emmanuel Comte, who, after a sudden nuclear strike, survives in the isolated castle of Malevil along with a small group of friends and neighbors. Even before the actual plot begins, it becomes clear that Rubens' "Malville" is intended to be read as an intertextual dialogue with Merle – a continuation, variation and at the same time a critical reversal of his apocalyptic novel.

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Overlooked interior: Particles, marks and scratches at Thomas Clerc

Thomas Clerc's books "Intérieur" and "Cave" are closely linked, forming a coherent yet evolving exploration of space, self, and the act of writing. While "Intérieur" is a meticulous inventory of his living space, "Cave" expands this topographical obsession into a journey into the hidden, the unspoken, and desire. The movement from visible, above-ground life to the invisible, subterranean realm of the cave symbolizes a twofold process: the continuation of an already established literary method and its radical deepening into the complexity of human interiority and desire.

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From idealization to problematization: Images of mothers in contemporary French literature

Transformations and deconstructions

The band Mater Genetrix: les images de la mère dans the contemporary literature of French expressionEdited by Marina Hertrampf, this volume offers an insightful examination of the portrayal of mothers in contemporary French and Francophone literature. The work illuminates the transformation and deconstruction of traditional images of motherhood and demonstrates how literary texts function as seismographs of social change.

The editor emphasizes the mother as the origin of all life and literary creation, with the treatment of these "ancient and archetypal" literary topoi ranging from mythologizing and glorifying to deconstructing. The definition of motherhood encompasses biological and social aspects, with literary representations often reflecting an imagined motherhood. Historical upheavals such as the Industrial Revolution, the two World Wars, and the feminist movements have altered the image of women and mothers, yet traditional roles persisted in literature for a long time. Only from the second half of the 20th century onward did mothers become increasingly autonomous and central to literary works, with writing about motherhood becoming progressively "feminized." Particularly in the Francophone literature of the Maghreb and Quebec, a shift from passive, idealized mothers to more active, critically examined figures is evident. Writing about mothers becomes a new literary trend, often autobiographical, as a search for the lost self and identity, and fulfills a therapeutic function. The spectrum of portrayals ranges from nostalgic praise to extremely problematized mother figures and the thematization of taboos such as toxic mothers, infanticide, post-partum pathologies, the death of the child, alternative forms of motherhood or non-motherhood.

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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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