2026

Autofictional testimony, therapeutic writing, and self-empowerment: Gisèle Pelicot

This article reads Gisèle Pelicot's "Et la joie de vivre" (2026, cited as EJV) not merely as an account of a spectacular criminal trial, but as a literary reflection on self-constitution through language: The text tells the story of a woman who, after the shocking revelation of systematic violence—mediated through the fragmentary, dissociative structure of memory, through flashbacks to a childhood marked by loss, and through the gradual escalation of her husband's crimes—must recreate her own self by narrating it. Central to this is the shift in shame and interpretive authority: Starting from an internalized shame, articulated in the inability to acknowledge what happened as one's own experience ("Non, ce n'est pas moi"), the book develops a poetics of reappropriation in which naming, the choice of name, and the narrative voice become acts of self-empowerment. The narrative organization does not follow the chronology of events, but rather the logic of trauma—in layers, ruptures, and repetitions—while recurring motifs such as the ritual of the set breakfast table or the symbolism of light in the landscapes open up counter-spaces to the violence. In the final part, this movement culminates in the public court trial, which is staged as a platform for a social discourse on patriarchal violence and finds its political climax in Pelicot's decision to be transparent: "La honte doit changer de camp" functions as an ethical and structural peripeteia. The reading analyzes this development as a consistently autofictional project that mediates between therapeutic writing and literary creation: it shows how Pelicot's text implicitly designs a poetics in which writing is neither documentation nor fiction, but an existential practice that brings the subject into being in the first place. At the same time, the article interprets the life-affirming tone—which has often been received as a "hymn to resilience"—not as an affirmative glossing over of the issues, but as a hard-won counter-reading to violence, which manifests itself in unspectacular gestures of autonomy (living alone, choosing one's own name, being able to love). The argument thus aims to liberate the book from the sphere of mere testimony and to understand it as a literarily sophisticated, formally reflective, and politically effective work, whose true radicalism lies in the assertion that rediscovering one's own words is identical to rediscovering one's own life.

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Vision at its limit: aesthetic overwhelm in the work of Nicolas de Crécy

Nicolas de Crécy's "Le syndrome de Kyoto" (Gallimard, 2026, cited as SDK) is an artist's novel that expands the pathology of an image-saturated consciousness into a cultural-diagnostic metaphor: At its center is Alexandre Vollin-Delbar, a painter whose hypertrophic art memory replaces any direct perception with art-historical overlays, thus making him both the ideal recipient and an incapable producer. The novel develops this constellation in a twofold movement of narrative representation (the stay in Kyoto as a failed attempt at healing) and reflexive self-reflection (the form of the text imitates the encyclopedic flood of images experienced by its protagonist), thereby making the individual illness legible as a symptom of an image-saturated present. The essay argues that Crécy's text should be understood less as a psychological case study than as a poetics of failure: the painter's "hypertrophy of art memory" acts as an intersection of perception theory, art criticism, and media analysis, revealing the paradox that the total availability of images leads not to increased creativity, but to its stagnation. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of Alexandre and the art historian Julie develops an alternative model of seeing—a distanced, historically reflective perception that does not overwhelm, but orders. The article explores how the novel systematically subverts classical forms (Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman), aligns its own narrative structure with the logic of hallucination, and simultaneously formulates a subtle satire on the art market, conceptual art, and digital visual culture. In the final image—the silent, free drawing after the silence of inner images—the review ultimately recognizes not a simple salvation, but a minimalist counter-poetics: art does not arise from the accumulation of references, but from the reduction to perception and gesture. Thus, in this reading, SDK appears as a commentary on the conditions of artistic creation in the age of total visibility that is as skeptical as it is precise.

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A Montaigne for now

Starting from the premise of the "textual mobility" of classical works, this review first outlines the extraordinary adaptability of Michel de Montaigne's Essays in modernity and the present day, drawing on interpretations by Michel Foucault, Antoine Compagnon, Tiphaine Samoyault, and current political appropriations. Against this backdrop, the edited volume "The International Reception of Michel de Montaigne's Essays: Forms, Interpretations, Conjunctures" (De Gruyter, 2026), edited by Olav Krämer, Andrea Grewe, and Susanne Schlünder, is presented, as it systematically documents this responsiveness for the first time from an international perspective. The review focuses particularly on those contributions that examine the reception of Montaigne in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as in contemporary philosophical and political discourses—for example, the studies on Flaubert, Nietzsche, Derrida, and the political instrumentalization of the skeptic. Thus, the volume appears less as a comprehensive overview than as a rich source of material for a history of modern appropriations of Montaigne, which confirms the thesis developed at the outset: The authority of the Essays does not rest on a fixed original text, but on its continuous variation, translation and ideological reinterpretation.

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The Stolen Sun: Art as a Collective Utopia in Duvalier-Era Haiti by Luce Perez-Tejedor

This essay interprets Luce Perez-Tejedor's "Saint-Soleil" (Seuil, 2026) as a novel that intertwines the emergence, flourishing, and destruction of a Haitian artistic community in the 1970s with the long duration of colonial violence. At its core is the project of a collective, ritually grounded artistic practice that defies Western aesthetics of genius and market logic: peasants, workers, and outsiders develop—guided but not dominated—an independent visual language from local materials and spiritual practices, whose vibrant colors and expressive gestures unfold an aesthetic splendor that is directly and sensually perceptible. At the same time, this artistic development is embedded in the repressive political context of Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, where violence, corruption, and control of living space are omnipresent and constantly threaten the community's utopia. The moment it becomes visible, art is endangered: international recognition, mediated by André Malraux and others, turns into appropriation, and the images become commodities in a global art system that perpetuates colonial ways of seeing. This interpretation reads the novel as a systematic juxtaposition of two incompatible logics—an aesthetic-spiritual practice of the shared and an economic logic of extraction, which materializes not only in the art market but also in drastic motifs such as the blood plasma trade. The concentric structure of the plot, the vertical spatial order (mountain vs. city), the semantic fields of sun and blood, and the parallel montages (gift vs. theft) are all read as expressions of the same historical dialectic. Thus emerges the image of a novel that reflects on its own poetics while simultaneously demonstrating that every representation of this art is already entangled in the very mechanisms it criticizes.

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

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

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Hydrological metaphors and social negotiation processes: on the political ecology of water in the work of Gaspard Kœnig

Gaspard Kœnig's "Aqua" (L'Observatoire, 2026) is set in Saint-Firmin-sur-Orne and unfolds the story of a Norman village caught between the forces of nature and human planning. The novel opens programmatically with a single falling raindrop, which, as an independent actor, introduces the water system, its cyclicality, and its unpredictability. From this perspective, the plot develops: floods, droughts, and the conflict over the "source des anciens" (the ancients' water resources) put the village community under pressure. The narrative structure is cyclical and elemental: natural events, historical memories, and social interactions intertwine in a movement dominated not by a linear ending, but by continuous adaptation and displacement. Characters such as Martin Jobard, who embodies technocratic modernization, and Maria, guardian of local experience and situational care, structure the events as contrasting poles whose conflict unfolds through polycentric decisions and common-pool resource models. The novel interweaves hydrological, geological, and social layers, transforming landscape, rivers, and springs into political and metaphorical actors. – The essay emphasizes that "Aqua" not only narrates ecology or village politics, but that the narrative structure itself reflects the tension between chaos and order. The chapters are arranged so that natural events rhythmically structure social and political processes: floods, fluctuating water levels, and the memory of past inundations cause central conflicts to escalate gradually, simultaneously transforming power relations and possibilities for action. The narrative style – from the prosopopoeic depiction of the falling drop to cyclical river and landscape imagery – reveals how human control always remains provisional. Character actions, place descriptions, and hydrological details intertwine to form a relational framework in which water functions as the lifeblood of the community. The essay argues that Kœnig uses the anti-teleological structure of the novel to illustrate the interminability of ecological and social conflicts in literary terms: politics, technology and nature do not appear as sovereign entities, but as interlocking dynamics that can only be negotiated situationally.

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Land of Child Kings: Palestine Between Violence and Mercy by Yasmina Khadra

Yasmina Khadra's new novel, "Le prieur de Bethléem" (Flammarion, 2026, cited as PB), thematically follows his so-called "Trilogy of the Great Misunderstanding," which created a literary cartography of the crisis regions of the early 2000s: Afghanistan under Taliban rule (with "The Swallows of Kabul"), Israel and the Palestinian territories during the Second Intifada (in "The Assassin"), and Iraq in the context of the Iraq War after the 2003 American invasion (in "The Sirens of Baghdad"). As in these novels, Khadra here also combines a suspenseful plot with a moral reflection on violence, humiliation, and radicalization. The story centers on the French-Israeli publisher Alexandre Yakovlevoi, who receives a manuscript from a Palestinian monk and is shortly thereafter kidnapped by its author. As Alexandre is forced to listen to the life story of Prior Wahid—a chronicle of displacement, familial loss, and political violence in Palestine—a personal entanglement gradually unfolds: Alexandre himself, as a young soldier in Israel, was involved in the killing of Wahid's pregnant cousin. The novel develops from this a confrontation that aims not at revenge, but at moral insight. In parallel, visionary and almost messianic scenes—such as mysterious healings in Jordan or the appearance of a pilgrim in the ruins of Gaza—open up a spiritual perspective in which Khadra places the conflict within a universal horizon of human responsibility. The essay interprets the novel as a late continuation of the trilogy, one that deepens and simultaneously transforms its diagnosis of the "great misunderstanding" between East and West. While the earlier works primarily analyzed the genesis of violence from humiliation and political powerlessness, here the focus shifts to a moral confrontation between perpetrator and victim. The essay's argument explores several levels: first, the novel's political dimension as a critique of military violence and the asymmetrical perception of the Middle East conflict; second, the psychological structure of guilt, embodied in the figure of the French-Israeli publisher; and third, a religious-symbolic level on which Khadra envisions a moral rebirth. It is particularly emphasized that the novel does not remain within the realm of political realism but formulates a utopian counter-movement: truth, empathy, and the "saving gesture" appear as possibilities for breaking the cycle of trauma and retribution. The interpretation therefore reads PB less as a political novel in the narrow sense and more as a literary attempt at disengagement, a quest to transform the Middle East conflict into a universal ethic of humanity.

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Abyss and illusion: Hell as the emptiness of global modernity in the work of Jérôme Ferrari

Jérôme Ferrari's new novel, "Très brève théorie de l'enfer" (Actes Sud, 2026), presents a dark parable about the metaphysical state of globalized modernity. At its center is a Corsican philosophy teacher who flees the moral monotony of his homeland and, after a stopover in Algeria, arrives in Abu Dhabi, where he lives as a privileged expatriate while invisible migrant workers construct the glittering city. A narrator, speaking within the narrative framework to the "King of Time," unfolds a "theory of hell" according to which damnation arises not from spectacular crimes, but from the "dryness of the heart" and a culpable blindness to the truth. The protagonist's and narrator's retrospective account of the embedded story provides a concrete case study: his attempts to become someone else through escape and religious metamorphosis fail; His wife and daughter disappear, and his return to Corsica proves to be the final exile of a man who, as a “double apostate,” regains neither homeland nor identity. – The essay reads the novel as the second part of a trilogy on the dialectic of “indigenous” and “travelers,” in which Ferrari analyzes the encounter between mobility, power, and moral blindness. By intertwining the metaphysical framing narrative with the social topography of Abu Dhabi—the artificial Corniche, the Mussafah industrial zone, the Louvre construction sites—hell appears not as an otherworldly place, but as a structure of the present: a state of ontological indifference in which privileged travelers conceal their own emptiness through movement, role-playing, and cultural masks. The journey thus becomes the paradoxical engine of a spiritual descent. Ultimately, there is the realization that in the globalized world, every escape to an “elsewhere” remains merely a variation on the same deception—an endless cycle of exile, guilt, and failed metamorphosis.

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Three intermedial Orpheus variations: Palermo, Berlin and Trump's USA in the work of Sébastien Berlendis

This review reads Sébastien Berlendis's new novel, "24 fois l'Amérique" (Actes Sud, 2026, cited in FA), in conjunction with two earlier books ("Revenir à Palerme," 2018, and "Seize lacs et une seule mer," 2021), as part of a cohesive poetic constellation. All three texts explore a common narrative motif: a first-person narrator follows the trail of a missing woman, traversing landscapes steeped in history, memory, and melancholy. While the first novel unfolds an almost claustrophobic search for the lost lover, Délia, in a decaying Palermo, staging photography as a medium of remembrance, the second relocates this search to the summer lakes of Berlin, where Super 8 films of a mysterious woman become the starting point for a leisurely reconstruction of the past. FA now expands this movement into a road movie through the American Rust Belt: The narrator travels from New York to Lake Michigan to find Marianne, who has been present for years only through drawn postcards. The novel unfolds a visually structured journey through motels, industrial wastelands, and lake landscapes, in which photographic equipment, overexposed images, and cinematic shots become central metaphors for the unreliability of memory. Marianne appears less as a real figure than as a "presence through absence," whose trace the narrator follows in a landscape of fragmented memories. – The article argues that these three novels can be read as an intermedial variation on the Orpheus myth. Berlendis's narrator constantly moves in a paradoxical motion between memory and the present: Like Orpheus, he tries to retrieve a lost Eurydice, but the search does not lead to the recovery of his beloved, but rather to an aesthetic transformation of the loss. The analysis reveals that this poetics is strongly influenced by visual media. Photography, film, and Polaroid images not only structure the characters' perceptions but also the formal organization of the texts—particularly in the most recent novel, whose twenty-four episodes resemble cinematic shots from a melancholic road movie. Simultaneously, the article interprets this latest novel as an indirect political novel about contemporary America: The journey through the Rust Belt leads through deindustrialized cities, religiously charged landscapes, and migrant-dominated urban spaces, resulting in a multifaceted portrait of a socially fractured country. The interpretation argues that Berlendis does not formulate this political dimension programmatically but rather allows it to emerge from a poetics of observation in which personal memory, media perception, and historical landscapes are intertwined.

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Pascal Bruckner: the philosopher as son

In "Un bon fils" (2014, cited as BF) and his most recent book, "De mère inconnue" (2026, cited as MI), the nouveau philosophe Pascal Bruckner undertakes a twofold familial self-examination that can also be read as an intellectual biography. While BF portrays the violent and ideologically rigid father figure—an antisemitic and authoritarian man whose worldview both shaped the young Bruckner and forced him to distance himself—MI reconstructs the long-neglected story of his mother. The two books thus form a complementary diptych: on the one hand, the father as a symbol of a repressive, resentment-laden mindset; on the other, the enigmatic, sometimes absent mother, whose biography raises questions about origin, identity, and emotional heritage. Together, these autobiographical texts sketch a genealogy of Bruckner's intellectual self-positioning. The review demonstrates how central themes in Bruckner's essayistic publications can be explained by this familial constellation. His critique of Western ideology of guilt (in works such as "La tyrannie de la pénitence," "Le sanglot de l'homme blanc," and "Je souffre donc je suis") appears newly legible against the backdrop of his personal experience of guilt, authority, and moral self-examination. Similarly, his analysis of modern discourses on victimhood can be linked to his exploration of familial power dynamics and roles of victim. The review therefore argues that BF and MI are not merely autobiographical documents, but key texts for understanding Bruckner's work of ideological critique: in them, family history, moral reflection, and political essay writing intertwine to form an intellectual self-interpretation.

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From Mods to poets: calculated disappearance in the works of Charles Baudelaire and Cyrille Martinez

Cyrille Martinez's novel "Comment habiller un garçon" (éds. verticales, 2026) tells the story of an unnamed narrator who, after a depressive period in which he lies apathetically in bed and views his growing pile of clothes as a symbol of his inner disintegration, slowly returns to society. A job as a library assistant in Avignon marks the first step out of isolation; initially, he tries to make himself socially acceptable through simple, "decent" clothing. But it is only his encounter with the Mod subculture around Joe in the Place des Corps-Saints that opens up a more radical perspective to him: clothing no longer appears as a means of conformity, but as an instrument of mental discipline, social distinction, and aesthetic self-creation. Through rituals—shaving the "French Line," acquiring an M51 parka, perfecting bespoke trousers—he is initiated into a code that demands maximum effort and absolute formal rigor. In parallel, the novel anchors this stylistic practice intertextually: figures like George Brummell and Charles Baudelaire provide models of an ascetic elegance aimed at invisibility. The symbolic climax is the exchange of a rare soul record for a mythically charged "habit noir" said to have belonged to Baudelaire. With this black tailcoat, the narrator completes his metamorphosis from fashion adept to poet: fashion becomes a precursor to poetry, identity a consciously worn form. – The interpretation reads the novel as a study of identity construction through external signs and situates it within Martinez's oeuvre, which repeatedly examines subcultural spaces as laboratories of self-creation. Argumentatively, it combines motif analysis (piles of clothes, parka, turn-up trousers, tailcoat) with poetological contextualization: the documentary "infralangue," the pop-literary use of lists and catalogs, and the dense intertextuality appear as formal correspondences to the thematic project. Masculinity here is defined not biologically, but aesthetically – as discipline, as resistance to militaristic-virile stereotypes, and as a symbolic reversal of social hierarchies ("better dressed than the boss"). Martinez connects Mod aesthetics with Baudelaire's concept of modernity: artificiality becomes salvation from formless "nature," the black tailcoat the paradoxical signature of an identity that finds its fulfillment in disappearance. Thus, this interpretation sees the novel not as a nostalgic coming-of-age story, but as a poetics manifesto in which the reflection on clothing itself becomes the act of writing.

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Nikolai Gogol, Nicole Caligari and the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015

At the heart of this interpretation lies Nicole Caligaris's novel "Le gogol" (2026): In a train station café at dawn, an exhausted narrator from the Ministry of Culture encounters a disturbed man in an oversized military coat who mistakes her for a judge and insists on finally giving his account of events. This coat, acquired in the chaos of the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015, in a bar called Mar Cantabrico, is too heavy, too wide, not "tailor-made": It becomes the visible symbol of a trauma that cannot be shed. While the man recounts gunfire, an escape through a trapdoor, and a nightly wait for a radio signal that never arrives, the narrator reflects on her own devaluation within the bureaucratic project system. Two existences, both marginalized, both trapped in systems that transform people into files, CVs, and "passive assets." From here, the interpretation traces a path back to Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" (1842): There, too, the life of an unassuming civil servant hangs on a garment, but while Akaki Akakievich fights for his overcoat as a longed-for prosthesis of identity and is destroyed by its loss, Caligaris's "Gogol" wears a foreign, historically charged heirloom that defines him without ever having been his own. The argument vividly illustrates how the motif shifts from a promise of upward mobility to a metaphor of trauma: In Gogol's work, the stolen overcoat exposes the cruelty of a Tsarist hierarchy; in Caligaris's, the military overcoat becomes a material archive of collective violence and a symbol of a present in which identity can only be reconstructed fragmentarily. Through this intertextual continuation, the analysis shows that the “little man” of the 19th century has not disappeared in the 21st century – he now stands in the café, talks about radio static and torn puzzles, and demands nothing less than a modern “habeas corpus”: the right to be recognized as a vulnerable, historical existence.

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

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

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Historical truth in the age of AI and identity politics: Jean-Frédéric Schaub

Jean-Frédéric Schaub's polemical essay, "Le passé ne s'invente pas" (The Past Does Not Invent Itself), positions historical scholarship as the last bastion against disinformation, digital manipulation, and identity politics of history. Against the backdrop of generative AI, political propaganda, and an anti-scientific relativism, Schaub develops a defense of historical truth that is both methodological and political: history, he argues, is not a literary genre but a science grounded in material traces, the core of which lies in the recognition of the "unavailability" of the past. This review traces how Schaub distinguishes himself from uchronic models such as Binet's "Civilizations," from narrative theories in the wake of Hayden White, and from "reparative" imaginaries—for example, those of Saidiya Hartman—while acknowledging authors like Patrick Modiano and his "Dora Bruder" as examples of a literary ethic of renunciation. At the heart of this discussion lies the question of whether enduring the gaps – rather than poetically filling them – truly represents the only legitimate form of epistemic justice. The review elucidates the internal logic of Schaub's argument, illuminates his critique of relativism and "ventriloquism," and discusses the extent to which his strict demarcation between science and literature is convincing in the age of hybrid forms – or whether it generates new tensions between factual accuracy and moral imagination.

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Diaspora and Nationalism: European Transitional Period 1913 by François Sureau

François Sureau's novel "Loin de Salonique" (Gallimard, 2026) is set in 1913 in Monastir (Bitola) and Thessaloniki, and unfolds a panorama of the politically overheated Balkans immediately before the First World War through a mysterious murder case: The unofficial investigations of the Frenchman Thomas More and the Jewish businessman Paul Seligmann lead through a web of diplomacy, trade and intelligence activities, revealing the tectonic tensions that were shaking the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire; Thessaloniki appears as a Sephardic, multilingual diaspora city whose fragile plurality contrasts with the hardening nationalisms, while France is simultaneously portrayed as a universalist reference power and a power-political actor. The review argues that the criminal case forms a narrative surface for making a historical diagnosis: through the double coding of the character Thomas More – as an allusion to the humanist and author of "Utopia" and as a modern, disillusioned observer – the novel highlights the discrepancy between normative idea and political reality; methodically, the review develops its interpretation by first outlining the geopolitical liminal space, then analyzing the symbolism of the naming, elaborating on the representation of Jewish diaspora as a relational form of identity, and finally determining the genre-poetic mixture between detective novel, historical novel, and political essay, thus arriving at the judgment that the work offers less a criminal resolution than a melancholic meditation on the disintegration of a European model of order.

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Hermaphroditic Writing: A Night at the Museum with Éric Reinhardt

Éric Reinhardt's "L'imparfait" (Stock, 2026), part of the book series "Ma nuit au musée," begins with a seemingly simple premise: a night alone in the Galleria Borghese. However, from this institutionally framed experiment unfolds a multifaceted text that interweaves self-examination, art contemplation, myth, and romantic fantasy. At its center is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, whose dual physicality becomes the central figure of the entire book: identity appears not as a fixed form, but as a phenomenon dependent on perspective. The night in the museum dissolves the familiar order of time; memories, previous visits to Rome, imagined scenes, and present perceptions merge. Artworks are not explained in art historical terms, but experienced as counterparts—as silent, resistant bodies that permit intimacy while simultaneously maintaining distance. In parallel, the story of Gloria and Bruno unfolds, transforming Ovid's ancient myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus into a modern tale of transformation and love. Ultimately, what remains is less a completed plot than an atmospheric state: the awareness that beauty, identity, and memory exist only in the mode of the incomplete—in the imperfect tense. The review makes it clear that this book should not be read as a museum report, but rather as a poetics experiment. It shows how Reinhardt uses the hermaphrodite, Bernini's sculptural hybridity, and mythical metamorphosis as models for his own writing: the text itself becomes "hermaphroditic" by fusing essay, novel, and autobiography. The review particularly highlights the tension between proximity and unavailability: the narrator can lie beside the statue, cover it in his imagination—but he cannot possess it. The ending, too, is interpreted as deliberately sobering: with morning, the world returns, loud and prosaic, while art sinks once more into its marble inwardness. The experience of the night remains as an echo, not as a transformation.

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The perfect murder as a chimera: Julie Wolkenstein's game with truth and power

Julie Wolkenstein's novel "Chimère," published by POL in 2026, unfolds during the first lockdown of 2020 as a sophisticated, polyphonic revisit of a supposedly long-closed case: in 1994, the manipulative art collector Osmond fell to his death after a private viewing in Rome. In a "false" crime novel that is less concerned with identifying the perpetrator than with seeking the truth, five women—aunt, sister, friend, accomplice, and widow—reconstruct the life of a man whose psychological subjugation ("emprise") has deformed their biographies from diverse media and linguistic perspectives. Closely intertextually linked to Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady" and simultaneously structured by the scientific paradox of microchimerism, the novel combines family investigation, gender reflection in the light of #MeToo, and criminal suspense into a "chimeric" poetics of identity. The review reads “Chimère” as a turning point in Wolkenstein’s work: as a return to fiction after autobiographical books, as a homage to James, and as a virtuoso construction of a play on truth, memory, and liberation – a novel that shows that every revelation remains a projection and that even the perfect murder only gains its form in the medium of storytelling.

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1966 or the Birth of Our Present: Antoine Compagnon

Antoine Compagnon's "1966, année mirifique" (Gallimard, 2026) reconstructs the year 1966 not merely as a historical point in time, but as an epistemological turning point in French modernity. Drawing on the press, literature, theory, film, everyday objects, and political debates, Compagnon demonstrates how long-term trends converged in this year: the massification of universities, the rise of youth to the economic class, the breakthrough of consumer society, the canonization of theory and structuralism, and the entry of the Holocaust into the French collective memory. Figures such as Foucault, Barthes, Aragon, Malraux, and Sartre are presented less as isolated geniuses and more as symptomatic representatives of a profound transformation in which 19th-century humanism and the existentialist concept of meaning were replaced by systems thinking, semiotic logic, and technocratic rationality. 1966 thus appears as the true turning point between the old order and the new world: youth is integrated through consumption, culture becomes a commodity, theory the new currency of intellectuals, while the political explosions of 1968 are already structurally prepared. The review reads Compagnon's book as a genealogy of our present. It highlights his skeptical tone by interpreting the mass expansion of education described by Compagnon as the origin of today's "Potemkin universities," interpreting structuralism as an ideological precursor to an algorithmically managed world, and unmasking the youth culture of 1966 as the birth of the perfect consumer. 1966 is not only explained but also morally questioned. In doing so, it elucidates the book's internal logic—the replacement of meaning with system, of experience with sign, with an emphasis on loss, alienation, and long-term damage. The review also critically reflects on the book's blind spots, such as the male-dominated perspective and the marginal treatment of feminism, colonialism, and the gay rights movement. The review makes it clear that while the “epistemological revolution” of 1966 is brilliantly analyzed, its social and political scope is narrowed more than the complexity of the era would allow. Overall, the review reads Compagnon less as a chronicler of a miracle year than as an unintentional witness to a fateful turning point.

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Eric Vuillard, the roots of Trumpism, and versions of Billy the Kid

Éric Vuillard's "Les orphelins: une histoire de Billy the Kid. Récit" (Actes Sud, 2026) dismantles the Billy the Kid myth by reading the famous figure not as a romantic outlaw, but as a damaged, prematurely lost child—an orphan in both the biographical and historiographical sense. Starting with a court transcript of Billy's first murder, Vuillard shows how official documents obscure violence and reverse perpetrator-victim relationships. The demand to "rewrite the scene" does not signify a correction in the name of a better truth, but an ethical rewriting: Billy appears as a physically weaker youth acting in panic. In this way, history is revealed as a field of distortions that literature cannot heal, but can expose. The Récit rejects linear narrative, reducing battles and heroic deeds to marginalia and focusing on gaps, dust, bodies, and fear. What remains is not a hero, but an orphan: a figure without origin, possessions, voice, or future, who stands as an example for all those who suffer history without being allowed to write it. – The article reads Vuillard's text as an angry, deliberately partisan counter-poetics to official historiography. It emphasizes that Vuillard does not reconstruct, but intervenes: through the confrontation of archival material with a lyrically heightened narrative voice that exposes archives as instruments of power. Truth here arises not from factual accuracy, but from the force of testimony and the visualization of structural violence. From this perspective, Billy becomes the vector of a broader critique: of the aestheticized brutality of the American myth, of the genealogical connection between capital, state, and lawlessness, of the illusion that freedom has ever been innocent. The review therefore understands “Les orphelins” as part of Vuillard’s long-term writing project in various historical versions – and literature as a precarious but necessary disruption that uses the debris of language to write against the false narratives of power.

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Light from dead stars: Georges Perec's mother at Olivia Elkaim

In her exploration of Georges Perec's mother, Cécile, Olivia Elkaim, in "La disparition des choses" (2026), chooses the motto borrowed from André Schwarz-Bart, "Nos yeux reçoivent la lumière d'étoiles mortes" (Our eyes receive the light of dead stars), as her poetic program: that which illuminates us today comes from lives long extinguished. Elkaim's book reconstructs Cécile's journey from the everyday life of a Jewish-Polish immigrant and hairdresser in Belleville, through her separation from her five-year-old son at the Gare de Lyon, to her arrest, Drancy, and deportation to Auschwitz. In parallel, the narrator pursues her own research in archives, conversations with Perec's friends, and in the writer's own texts, whose entire oeuvre is permeated by the absence of his mother. Where historical documents are lacking, Elkaim turns to imagination: she invents scenes, gestures, voices to give the "eternal absent" woman back a body and everyday life. The result is less a biography than a literary mausoleum—a book that doesn't factually reconstruct Cécile, but makes her afterglow visible. The article reads Elkaim's novel as both a complement to and a correction of Perec's "oblique" poetics of memory, as Philippe Lejeune calls it. While Perec formally encrypted loss—through anagrams, lists, lipograms, and writing around an absence—Elkaim places the mother's human fate at the center and replaces the aesthetics of lack with a poetics of tender reconstruction. The review shows how the book mediates between document and fiction and gains its ethical strength precisely in its admission of uncertainty—no grave, no date, only an "acte de disparition." Memory does not appear as the possession of truth, but as continued work on what is painfully missing.

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