2025

War as a legacy: On the systematics of transgenerational imprinting in the work of Julia Weidmann

This review presents Julia Weidmann's study, "Continuum of Wars: Intergenerational Narratives of the World Wars in Contemporary French Literature" (Winter, 2025), as a fundamental, comparative investigation of a central phenomenon in contemporary French literature: the intergenerational narration of the World Wars. The starting point is the observation that subsequent generations—from the "wound" generation to the "inheritance" generation—reconstruct familial wartime experiences in literary form, mediating between archival research and imagination. To this end, Weidmann develops an original model of a "war continuum" that replaces traditional numerical generational categories with a metaphorical, trauma-oriented scale. She operationalizes this concept in a four-stage analytical method, which she applies to a broad corpus of authors (including Claude Simon, Patrick Modiano, Ivan Jablonka, and Anne Berest). The review particularly praises the methodological clarity, the nuanced close readings, and the identification of recurring narrative structures across generations, but also highlights limited weaknesses, such as a certain schematization in the comparative analysis and the relatively marginal treatment of aesthetic details. Overall, the study appears as a substantial contribution to literary memory studies, providing a viable set of tools for analyzing transgenerational memory and simultaneously opening up new perspectives for the exploration of future narrative forms.

➙ To the article

Building bridges, deepening ditches: Pauline Dreyfus

Pauline Dreyfus's "Un pont sur la Seine" (2025), beginning with the catastrophe of a ferry accident in 1828, unfolds the story, spanning generations, of two village communities separated by the Seine, whose fates are intertwined in the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of a bridge. Through the Vernet family and its genealogical branches, the novel traces the transformation from an agrarian milieu to an industrial society and onward into a post-industrial culture of memory, with historical turning points—wars, the Popular Front, occupation, deindustrialization—inscribed as structuring forces in the lives of its characters. At the same time, the narrative insists on its own artificiality: characters appear less as psychologically singular individuals than as typified bearers of social positions, whose conflicts—for example, between a vintner and a factory worker, a Resistance heiress and a politician of memory—make the persistence of societal divisions visible. The essay explores how the central poetic principle of the novel lies in the multidimensional construction of the bridge: as a historical object, a topographical axis, a social diagnostic tool, and a philosophical metaphor that, in the sense of a self-reflexive poetics of history, does not foster reconciliation but rather produces and makes visible difference. In this dialectic of documentation and fiction, of historical accuracy and ironic distance, Dreyfus's text proves to be both a conscious continuation and a critical break with the tradition of the historical social novel: he demonstrates that the grand narratives of progress and connection fail in the face of micro-social realities and that every form of historical narrative—in the novel as well as in the museum project he conceived—must necessarily reflect on its own logic of construction.

➙ To the article

The Sitcom Dictatorship: Political Thought, Literary Form, Machiavelli and Giorgia Meloni in Hélène Frappat

Hélène Frappat's novel "Nerona" (2025) portrays the rule of a right-wing populist dictator as a simultaneously grotesque and frighteningly precise model of contemporary politics: In an unnamed European nation, Nerona governs by decree and constant media staging, while a polyphonic, fragmented narrative structure – speeches, interviews, prophetic chants, film scenes – makes visible the simultaneity of power, violence, and repression; central motifs are the mythologizing of one's own origins, the systematic construction of "enemies within," the perversion of humanitarian discourses, for example in the migrant camp, and the escalation to apocalyptic self-destruction, which culminates in the figure of the Matricidium and the Nero topos. The review argues that Frappat's literary form itself generates knowledge: by modeling populism as a "sitcom"—an endless repetition of affective and rhetorical patterns devoid of learning—she combines genre poetics with political theory; at the same time, the review reads the novel as a Machiavellian parody in which classical concepts like "virtù" or "fortuna" are transformed into cynical management logics. The intertwining of discourse analysis and aesthetics is highlighted: the polyphony functions as a democratic counter-model to monologic populism, while the figure of Nerona can be read as a condensation of real political actors (especially Giorgia Meloni) without lapsing into mere satire. Overall, the interpretation shows that Frappat's novel is less a dystopian exaggeration than a diagnosis: populist rule appears as a regime of language and perception, against which literature, through its formal complexity, offers a critical counter-perception.

➙ To the article

Burning Edges or Why Jeanne Rivière Sleeps with Nicolas Mathieu

Jeanne Rivière's "Lorraine brûle" (Gallimard, 2025, cited as LOB) paints a picture of an unnamed first-person narrator in her early forties who leads an uncertain life in post-industrial Lorraine between Metz and Nancy, a life shaped by bodily experiences, motherhood, and subcultural practices: As a single mother of twelve-year-old Tarzan, an office worker, and a drummer in punk bands, she moves through a landscape of disused blast furnaces, supermarkets, swimming pools, and illegal concerts, while friends like the radically self-determined Lynn, the anarchic Nora, and above all, the terminally ill Baya, form a female counter-image to the bourgeois order; Baya's death from pancreatic cancer forms the emotional center of a loosely structured annual chronicle spanning from January to summer, its episodic structure rhythmized by recurring swimming passages, so that death (physical decay) and movement (body in water) overlap as an underlying axis. Against this backdrop, the essay reads the novel as a programmatic "poetics of fragmentation": the formal fragmentation—abrupt chapters, shifts in tone, a mixture of autofiction, essay, reportage, and poetry—appears not as an artistic deficiency, but as a fitting response to a reality torn apart by deindustrialization, uncertainty, and loss, in which cohesion itself has become a fiction. Particularly noteworthy is the thesis that the equivalence of different elements (everyday life and catastrophe, comedy and grief, bodily detail and social analysis) formulates an unspoken political stance that rejects hierarchies and places the marginal at the center. By consistently merging form and content—the fragmentation of life being reflected in the fragmentation of narrative—the argument gains its greatest persuasive power where it interprets the aesthetic clash of tones, physicality (blood, illness, sexuality), and Lorraine's space-creating function as interwoven planes; at the same time, it shows that writing itself, within the novel, functions as a means of survival and coping with grief, one that does not overcome fragmentation but rather makes it usable. Thus, in the review's interpretation, LOB appears less as a depiction of a social environment than as a radically contemporary search for forms in which fragmentation becomes a resistant way of life and the very essence of poetic unity.

➙ To the article

Returning from the valley of digital simulation to the poetry of dust: Arnaud Sagnard

Arnaud Sagnard's "La Vallée" (2025, cited as LV) follows the story of farmer's son and programmer Thomas Hèvre, tracing a journey from the material world of the Morvan region through the disembodied tech sphere of Paris and Silicon Valley, where the novel's central thesis is fulfilled: that the "valley" is less a place than a mental state of aggregation that absorbs reality and returns it as a simulation, all the way to the radical emptiness of the Amargosa desert. At the heart of this journey is a neural implant that merges fiction and reality, thus removing the last boundary of human experience. Thomas—initially the machine's ingenious "cheat code"—gradually realizes that he is complicit in the creation of an invisible ideology of dematerialization that transforms humanity into a disembodied phantom, until he escapes this logic and seeks a fragile counter-world of presence, silence, and unmediated experience in the desert. The essay argues that the novel is not only a cultural critique of dystopia, but also a text that reflects on the conditions of storytelling in the age of total digital integration by systematically working through the oppositions of code and myth, communication and silence, inner and outer worlds in character constellation, spatial structure, and metaphor; the interpretation of Silicon Valley as a "depression" in the geological, psychological, and economic sense is particularly insightful, giving the critique of the tech industry an existential depth, while the analysis simultaneously makes it plausible that the novel performatively offers its own answer: as a literary space that, precisely through distance, ambiguity, and non-totality, enables an experience that no implant can simulate.

➙ To the article

Bourdieu's Fool: Theoretical parody and social diagnosis in Fabrice Pliskin

After a robbery, jeweler Antonin Firminy shoots one of the fleeing perpetrators and, following his release from prison, becomes a self-proclaimed avenger of the "oppressed" in Paris under a new identity, legitimizing his actions through a radicalized reading of sociology. In parallel, journalist Mandrillon follows his case, becomes entangled in his own moral contradictions, and ultimately transforms Suburre's story into a successful book that offers more interpretation than enlightenment. Fabrice Pliskin's novel "Le fou de Bourdieu" (2025, Le Cherche Midi) can be summarized as a narratively dense and intellectually sharp case study of the dangerous appropriation of theory: At its center is Firminy, who, after a fatal act of violence and a traumatic period of imprisonment, undergoes a radical reinvention of himself under the name Suburre, adopting Pierre Bourdieu's sociology not as an analytical tool, but as an existential system of interpretation. From his reading, he develops a worldview that translates social determinism into moral absolution and ultimately into a program of counter-violence exhausted by petty crime, symbolic destruction, and ideological manifestos. Meanwhile, the journalist Mandrillon observes, processes, and uses these events for literary purposes, never quite taking a firm stance. The novel is less about refuting sociological theory than about demonstrating its performative distortion: concepts like habitus, domination, and symbolic violence are absolutized in the mode of resentment and translated into action, creating a dialectical structure in which explanation becomes justification. Particularly powerful is the analysis of the constellation of characters as a reflection of two forms of responsibility avoidance—Suburre's ideological radicalization and Mandrillon's rhetorical self-relativization—which makes the novel readable as a parable of a discursively overheated society, where language replaces action and theory becomes a projection screen. Furthermore, by interpreting the formal structure of the text as an "experimental setup," the novel demonstrates its effect not primarily through plot, but through the consistent escalation of a way of thinking that detaches itself from reality and simultaneously deforms it.

➙ To the article

The cold language of files: How France managed its homosexuals: David Alliot

In "Les secrets de Sodome: un siècle et demi d'homosexualité clandestine" (Plon, 2025), David Alliot reconstructs the clandestine everyday life of homosexual men between 1830 and 1981, based on the archives of the Paris police prefecture. His approach is explicitly not apologetic, but analytical: from the "administrative coldness" of registers, surveillance reports, and raid protocols, he elucidates how the state and society monitored, classified, and morally pathologized a minority that, while formally no longer a crime since 1791, was culturally ostracized. Meeting places such as hôtels garnis, balls at the Magic City, or the Vespasiennes emerge as social micro-spaces where desire, fear, and control intersected. At the same time, individual biographies—from aristocrats to male prostitutes, from singers to activists—are freed from the anonymity of files. The result is a sweeping social history that traces the evolution of repression from monarchical ostracism through the biopolitical morality of the Third Republic and the discriminatory legislation of 1942, continuing under De Gaulle, to the watershed of 1981. Alliot shows that the abolition of the criminalization of "sodomy" by no means signified social acceptance, but rather gave way to an era of subtle surveillance in which identities were cataloged instead of acts being prosecuted. Only with the political upheaval under François Mitterrand did systematic police recording end; legal equality followed in 1982. But the book concludes with a sobering insight: rights are historically contingent—every crisis can reactivate the old reflexes of moral exclusion.

➙ To the article

Jean-Luc Lagarce, the Absent One: Biographical Fiction as Metatheatre in the Work of Charles Salles

Contemporary French literature and theater have found in Jean-Luc Lagarce a figure whose significance has far outlived his untimely death in 1995. Lagarce, who often operated on the fringes of the established cultural scene during his lifetime and faced financial and institutional obstacles throughout his life, has posthumously become one of France's most frequently performed playwrights. Thirty years after his death, author Charles Salles, with his novel "Lagarce, fiction," published in August 2025 by Table Ronde in the Vermillon Collection, attempts to fictionally reconstruct this multifaceted personality. Salles, who previously portrayed another "meteorite" of the Parisian cultural landscape in his acclaimed debut novel "Alain Pacadis, Face B" (2023), shifts the perspective in his second work from the social to the intimate, without losing sight of the socio-political coordinates of the era. This report analyzes the life and work of Jean-Luc Lagarce, places it within the narrative framework of Charles Salles, and establishes the essential links between the playwright and the work of his biographer.

➙ To the article

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.

➙ To the article

The creeping rise of fascism in France: Nathalie Quintane

Nathalie Quintane's "Soixante-dix fantômes (choses vues)" (La fabrique éditions, 2025) is a literary snapshot of contemporary France, which—almost imperceptibly yet inexorably—is shifting from democratic normality to authoritarian routines. In 61 pointed miniatures, Quintane shows how far-right attitudes are taking root in everyday life: in casual gestures, in language use, in the dehumanization of the most vulnerable, and in aesthetic references that bring the reactionary past back into the present. The subtitle alludes to Victor Hugo's "Choses vues," whose republican narrative of upward mobility is here reversed: while Hugo documented political emancipation, Quintane registers democratic decline. The review emphasizes this deliberate counter-reading to Hugo and highlights how Quintane interprets everyday details as early political warning signs, whose "ghosts"—historical and contemporary—create a climate of fear, paralysis, and social coldness. Thus, the book emerges as an equally poetic and alarming account of a society on the brink, urging the reader not to overlook the subtle signs of an authoritarian normalization.

➙ To the article

Between armor and rift: Virility as myth, masculinity as experience

The volume "Masculinité" (Grasset, 2025) brings together literary texts, essays, and reflections that reveal masculinity not as a fixed identity, but as a historically fraught and currently fragile field. The starting point is the distinction between virilité and masculinité: while virility denotes the narrow, normative ideal of the tough, dominant, invulnerable man, the contributions show the contradictory experiences of real men who suffer under these expectations or fail to meet them. The texts tell of boys forced into rituals of toughness at an early age, of fathers who want to pass on strength and in doing so reproduce violence, of bodies shaped and marked by work, sports, circumcision, or migration, and of men who are crushed between cultural models of masculinity. In the introduction, Dantzig diagnoses masculinity as a historically overloaded power construct that simultaneously privileges and deforms, and whose dark sides—dominance, violence, destruction—must not be ignored. Habib-Rubinstein's presentation shifts this finding into literary practice, interpreting the volume as a laboratory of plural voices in which no new norm is established, but rather fragility, doubt, and exploratory movements are made visible. This creates a multi-voiced panorama of masculinity in transition: exhausted by the myth of virility, open to new, uncertain, and narratable forms of manhood.

➙ To the article

Three Last People: Education After Civilization by Sacha Bertrand

Sacha Bertrand's novel "11:02h, le vent se lève" paints a picture of a world where civilization lies buried like a "suffocated carcass" beneath the toxic fog of the Amer River. Amidst an unforgiving mountain range, isolated as a "gigantic island" of jagged rocks, the former librarian Myriam leads a life of absolute stasis, symbolized by a clock permanently set to 11:02. This solitude ends when she captures Jonas, an "earthly" being of pure instinct, whom she attempts to mold in her own image through violence and language, hoping to quell the beast within. However, the painstakingly constructed security of her "ordered garden" clashes with the arrival of a stranger, whose violent death opens Jonas's eyes to Myriam's paranoid need for control and ultimately drives him to flee to an uncharted "elsewhere." The review argues that Bertrand's debut novel transcends the boundaries of classical dystopia by locating the horror not in a totalitarian system, but in the "disappearance of shared horizons of meaning." The text is interpreted as a critical variation on the Robinsonade, in which technical skill and discipline lead not to freedom, but to an oppressive power structure of dependency and psychological confinement. A key argument of the analysis concerns the landscape, which functions not as a romantic backdrop, but as a "resistant force" that denies humanity any metaphysical interpretation and throws it back upon its naked physicality. Ultimately, the critique demonstrates that humanity in this world can only be preserved through an "ethic without hope."

➙ To the article

Roman noir as criticism of the state: Benjamin Dierstein

With his completed trilogy "Bleus, Blancs, Rouges" (2025-2026), Benjamin Dierstein presents a monumental noir epic that maps France between 1978 and 1984 as a political, moral, and institutional crisis zone. Intertwining fictional fates with real historical figures and scandals, he unfolds an unflinching saga about terrorism, intelligence services, Françafrique, and the transition from the Giscard era to the "Mitterlandie" (the French term for France). Dierstein combines meticulous archival research with narrative force and satirical sharpness, portraying a republic whose power structures are riddled with rivalries, corruption, and systematic cover-ups. The trilogy reads simultaneously as a suspenseful thriller and a dissecting diagnosis of a state in which political reason and moral integrity have irrevocably diverged.

➙ To the article

Contamination after October 7: Amanda Sthers

Amanda Sthers' novel "C" (Grasset, 2025) paints a bleak panorama of contemporary France after October 7, 2023, in which private life, political discourse, and historically sedimented traumas intertwine. It begins with a fungal infestation in the Paris apartment of Jewish editor Rebecca Vermusein and her husband Gilles, which quickly proves to be a central motif: the fungus is not presented as a mere horror element, but as the materialization of an antisemitism that circulates invisibly, normalizes itself, and ultimately bears deadly fruit. Parallel to the disintegration of the marriage, the novel depicts the disintegration of the French "vivre ensemble": political radicalization, selective empathy in the aftermath of October 7, the moral self-exoneration of Western elites, and the isolation of Jewish individuals form a tightly interwoven scenario. In its connection to Sthers' novel "Les gestes," "C" simultaneously reveals itself as the culmination of a longer-term project that conceives of Jewish identity not as a stable sense of belonging, but as a historically burdened body of memory. This review analyzes this constellation by reading "C" as a continuation and radicalization of the motifs established in "Les gestes": from the "archaeology of intimacy" to the "biology of hatred." The central argument is that Sthers presents antisemitism not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a structural product of a moral climate in which discourses, aesthetics, and affect intertwine. The review demonstrates how the novel, through the metaphor of mushrooms, connects normalization, seduction, and violence, and how it thereby subjects contemporary feminism, identity politics, and anti-Zionism to rigorous scrutiny. “C” is not understood as a novel of ideas, but as a literary diagnosis of a state of affairs: without catharsis, without a conciliatory outlook, but with the insistent demand to recognize the spores before they bear fruit again.

➙ To the article

The Ocean: Ecofiction, Narrative Instance and Ethical Tension in Vincent Message

Vincent Message's novel "La Folie Océan" (Seuil, 2025) blends ecofiction, romance, and political thriller. At its heart is Maya, a marine biologist and plankton researcher who lives between the abstract world of international biodiversity bodies and the concrete threats facing the Breton Atlantic coast. Her relationship with Quentin, a diver and environmental activist from a fishing family, connects scientific knowledge with the embodied experience of the sea. Starting with an act of symbolic violence—the murder of a gannet—the conflict surrounding industrial fishing, nature conservation, and local power dynamics escalates to radicalization, disappearance, and murder. The ocean appears not only as a setting but also as the novel's structuring principle: as a sensually experienced habitat, a scientifically mediated data system, and an ethical space of resonance where ecological destruction, political violence, and intimate life choices are inextricably intertwined. This review analyzes the novel as a literary experiment in mediating between knowledge, perception, and responsibility. At its core lies the question of how ecological complexity can be narrated without descending into mere didacticism or a simplistic aesthetic of catastrophe. Message's poetics of the invisible are explored: plankton, microorganisms, statistical models, and latent threats structure the text, as do love, fear, and desire. Particular attention is paid to the interplay of scales—from the microscopic to the planetary—and the parallel narrative of global science and local activism. Ultimately, the lives of Maya and Quentin converge across the sea: not through reconciliation or return, but through a shared experience of loss, persistence, and movement. The ocean acts as a mediating force, spatially separating their stories while simultaneously connecting them symbolically by inscribing individual biographies into a larger, open temporality of the living.

➙ To the article

Hitler's visit to empty Paris: Michel Guénaire

Michel Guénaire's "La visite" (Grasset, 2025) reconstructs Hitler's two-hour visit to Paris on June 23, 1940, not as a historical episode, but as a highly concentrated aesthetic act. The text depicts a deserted city, which Hitler traverses at dawn like a museum without an audience: Paris appears as a "dead star," as pure architecture, detached from social life. Guénaire replaces action with perception, making the walk, the gaze, and the silence the very substance of the narrative. The city becomes both the benchmark and the rival against which Hitler's aesthetic ambitions are ignited: Paris is admired, assessed, and simultaneously interpreted as a challenge to the never-realized "Germania" project. In the encounter with monuments such as the Opéra, the Trocadéro, and the Invalides, the narrative unfolds as a political-aesthetic study of power, form, and appropriation, in which architecture becomes the language of totalitarian imagination. The review reads "La visite" as a model case of authoritarian rule and analyzes Guénaire's argument beyond its historical context. It shows how the text does not explain power psychologically, but rather exposes it as a form of perception and staging: Hitler appears not as a thinking subject, but as a seeing entity, surrounded by an archetypal entourage of technicians, artists, and functionaries who aesthetically secure power. The deserted city, however, refuses the expected response, thus revealing the emptiness of totalitarian gestures. The review particularly emphasizes the metaphor of the "silent film," with which Guénaire describes the visit as an unreal, almost surreal moment—a peaceful staging at the heart of a war of annihilation. From this perspective, "La visite" becomes a universal reflection on authoritarian systems: The focus is not on the individual dictator, but on the recurring structures, roles, and images through which power produces itself—and ultimately fails in a world that cannot be fully appropriated.

➙ To the article

Japan and its own de-Westernization: Emmanuel Ruben

Emmanuel Ruben's "L'usage du Japon" (2025) portrays the country as a "topographical lightning strike": not an exotic counter-image to the West, but a fractal, trembling archipelago that defies any definitive definition. Ruben reads the country as a geographer and draftsman, shaped by a "tatamized" pop-culture childhood of judo, Nintendo, and manga, and confronts this imaginary Japan with an often Americanized, urban, disorderly reality. Between ukiyo-e, comics, maps, and Zen gardens, he discovers Japan as a realm of the clear line, the miniature, and the infraordinary, where nature is totally stylized and everyday life ritualized. Figures like Ino Tadataka become mirrors of his own writing: to measure here does not mean to possess, but to physically expose oneself to the fragment. Kyoto appears as a moss-covered graveyard of the gods, heavy with the sacred, while Shinkansen bullet trains, high-tech toilets, and glass cities mark a silent ultramodernity. The review highlights this tension as a permanent “de-Westernization”: Japan forces a dilution of the self, an acceptance of the incomplete, and the realization that map, text, and image never catch up with the territory – which is why Japan ultimately remains less a destination than a process, a vibrant school of seeing and disappearing.

➙ To the article

Between Gulag and Taiga: Andreï Makine's ambivalent humanism

Andrei Makine's "Prisonnier du rêve écarlate" unfolds the fate of Lucien Baert as an emblematic life story of 20th-century Europe: from the communist promise of salvation through the Gulag, war, and loss of identity to the disillusioning return to the West. The novel intertwines historical catastrophes with a poetics of deceleration and nature, in which the Siberian taiga appears as a counter-space to ideological and economic violence. Lucien's metamorphosis from French worker to survivor "more Russian than the Russians" transforms identity into something suffered, not something acquired. Between witnessing, myth, and metaphysical reflection, Makine develops a humanistic vision that exposes all major ideologies—Stalinism as well as Western consumerism—as destructive, without, however, resorting to simplistic dichotomies. What remains is a fragile dignity of the individual, preserved in memory, nature, and silence. This review reads the novel as an ambivalent work poised between political indictment and poetic transfiguration. The review highlights Makine's position between France and Russia as a productive space of tension and demonstrates how his critique of the West's "Homo festivus" is intertwined with a problematic aestheticization of Russian capacity for suffering. It analyzes the different epistemic modes of witnessing and knowledge (body versus archive) as well as Makine's place within the tradition of European camp and memory literature. At the same time, the review insists on the political risks of this poetics in the present day: the taiga as a moral counter-space and the final act of violence remain literarily effective, but are ethically and politically precarious, as they are susceptible to nationalist or authoritarian interpretations. It is precisely in this tension that the review locates the novel's central value: as a necessary, unsettling document of an ambivalent humanism that does not console but rather disturbs.

➙ To the article

Repairing the fault lines in the text: Hélène Frédérick

Hélène Frédérick's "Lézardes" (2025) is a hybrid novel that interweaves diary miniatures, autobiographical reminiscences, essayistic passages on the cultural history of proofreading, and poetological reflections, elevating the "crack" (la lézarde) to a central aesthetic and epistemological metaphor: The story is told from the perspective of a proofreader working in Paris, whose daily life in the editorial office is linked to flashbacks to a childhood in the artisan milieu of Quebec, particularly to her father's workshop, whose meticulous repair work is read alongside philological attention. The review argues that the novel performatively enacts its themes: the fragmented, anti-linear structure, the shifts in perspective between "I" and the addressing "you," the deliberate cultivation of ellipses, "shaky sentences," and apparent incoherencies reflect the very fissures that the text defends as a condition of perception, memory, and poetry. In terms of content, Frédérick develops a poetics of the invisible by placing the threatened profession of proofreader—historically linked to libertarian circles—at the center as an ethical practice of doubt, close observation, and resistance to linguistic and social homogenization; argumentatively, the review reads the novel as a decidedly anti-model to efficiency, standardization, and algorithmic unification. Autobiography, linguistic reflection, and social history thus converge to form the thesis that literature – and writing in general – does not emerge from coherence and perfection, but from breaks and gaps, which is why the lézardes appear less as a deficiency than as productive observation points where subjectivity, history, and language first become visible.

➙ To the article

A novel of Franco-Romanian friendship: Cătălin Mihuleac

Against the backdrop of Franco-Romanian relations from the First World War to the early communist postwar period, Cătălin Mihuleac's "Les Demoiselles de Fontaine" unfolds the story of a cultural fraternization forged through education, language, and personal loyalties, ultimately shattered by political means. At its heart are the French officer and later university professor Marcel Fontaine, his Romanian companions, and especially those young women whose Francophilia is condemned as guilt under the communist regime. This review interprets the novel less as a historical narrative than as a European reflection on the fragility of cultural ties: France appears not primarily as a state, but as a projection screen for humanism, education, and universalist values, while Romania is portrayed as a space of appropriation, hope, and eventual disillusionment. Mihuleac demonstrates, the review argues, that while cultural transfer shapes identities and connects generations, it remains extremely vulnerable without institutional protection. What was considered moral capital in the interwar period was criminalized after 1947. The review further highlights the character Petru Negru, whose joyful engagement with folklore and ethnography appears not as regressive superstition, but as an alternative form of knowledge in which historical experience, collective memory, and a resistant understanding beyond official ideologies converge. By intertwining fairy tales, folklore, and historical chronicle, the novel paints a picture of a European promise that shatters not through individual failure, but through systemic change. The review therefore emphasizes the text as a literary monument to a failed, yet blameless, project: it is not the people who fail, but the political orders that cannot sustain cultural loyalties.

➙ To the article
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.