Dialogues

This section collects articles on contemporary French texts that engage in a dialogue with works of literary history, intertextually, sometimes critically updating, sometimes as homage or transformation.

Brittany begins in the mind: A tribute to Jack Kerouac by Pierre Adrian

Pierre Adrian's "Le rêve inachevé de Jack Kerouac" (2026) reconstructs and reshapes Jack Kerouac's failed Brittany trip (1965) into a dual model of movement encompassing literary pilgrimage and self-discovery: Starting from Kerouac's genealogical obsession – the return to a Breton origin that proves unattainable – Adrian constructs an associatively structured, intertextually dense travel narrative that imagines Brest as a melancholic space of resonance between American Beat aesthetics and Breton culture; the "unfinished" Satori serves as a leitmotif of a poetics of failure, in which the missed enlightenment becomes productive. The essay demonstrates that Adrian's text is less a documentary reconstruction than a continuation of Kerouac's "Satori à Paris": While Kerouac's spontaneous prose records an immediate, disoriented experience, Adrian's writing appears as a reflective, centripetal approach that semantically charges the historical failure and transforms it into an elegiac narrative. Thus, the structural parallel between genealogical quest and existential uprooting is explored, and Brest is read as a topos of a "waiting possibility." The interpretation pursues the thesis that identity here is not genealogically but literarily constructed ("terre sans aïeux"). A certain tendency toward mythologizing, however, remains discernible: The interpretation affirms Adrian's reading, which, admittedly, accentuates the ruptures and ironies in Kerouac's work in favor of a coherent symbolic representation of failure. Overall, the interpretation of Adrian's transformation of a biographical failure into a literary myth shows and makes plausible that Adrian is less explaining Kerouac than productively continuing his unfinished nature.

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The Monster and its Double: Pierre Rivière in Michel Foucault and Ismaël Jude

The review focuses on two radically different but inextricably intertwined books: the documentary volume “Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère”, edited by Michel Foucault, which makes the historical triple murderer Pierre Rivière visible as a focal point of competing discourses, and Ismaël Jude’s “grief” (éditions verticales, 2022), which performatively attacks precisely this discursive containment. While Foucault's book embeds Rivière's prison-written memoir within a polyphonic archive—legal files, medical reports, historical commentaries—thus demonstrating how a life becomes a "case" through institutional language, Jude propels this constellation into the present and dismantles it from within: His narrator reads Foucault, rewrites his terms (parricide becomes matricide, sororicide, fratricide), and transforms herself into the repressed female doppelgänger of the murderer. The review does not merely highlight this contrast as a difference between two methods—here the analytical distance of genealogy, there the furious, corporeal, language-destroying counter-speech—but as a kind of dialectical movement: Foucault shows how discourses appropriate a text; Jude shows that this critique itself remains a form of appropriation. The focus shifts decisively: Where Foucault reads the text as a battleground between justice and psychiatry and emphasizes its “strange beauty,” Jude insists on what disappears in the process—gender-specific violence, the bodies of the victims, the possibility of another, non-male voice. The review's argument derives its strength precisely from the fact that it does not pit these two perspectives against each other, but rather understands them as a necessary tension: It shows how Foucault's project creates the conditions under which Jude can write at all, and simultaneously how Jude shatters these conditions by radicalizing writing itself into an act. This creates a picture of a literary-theoretical constellation in which a central question becomes increasingly acute: If—as with Rivière—text and action merge, who then controls their meaning? And who is heard—or silenced?

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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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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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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.

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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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Nobody kills: Constance Debré

Constance Debré's "Protocoles" (Flammarion, 2026) replaces a "literature of the death penalty" with the literary reproduction of its administration: The book traces the countdown of a condemned man's final 35 days and reconstructs, with cold, prosaic precision, the technical, bureaucratic, and logistical processes of execution in the United States. The individual no longer appears as a moral subject, but as a "corps du sujet," a body whose weight, skin, veins, resistance, and decomposition are regulated by protocols. The division of labor among the execution teams points to a system that anonymizes, fragments, and depersonalizes violence until "no one kills." In parallel, Debré sketches a topography of the United States as a landscape of regularity, surveillance, and moral erosion—from "We buy souls" signs to school monitoring software to an omnipresent sense of impending doom. The review interprets "Protocoles" as a break with the tradition of Hugo and Camus: instead of pathos, moral appeal, or existential reflection, Debré relies on the formal mimicry of legal protocols, thus depriving literature of its hermeneutic function. Debré's poetics of desubjectification, "purity," and the self-referentiality of the rule are examined. "Protocoles" exposes the modern logic of law, technology, and the administration of the death penalty as a totalizing order in which literature can only exist as a copy of power.

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Song of Songs without witnesses: Patrick Autréaux

Patrick Autréaux's "L'Époux" (2025) is a quiet, existentially intense novel that begins with the civil wedding of two men. A ritual intended as a sign of social recognition becomes an experience of radical isolation: through the conspicuous absence of their families, one geographically distant, the other ideologically and religiously opposed. The narrator observes his partner's tears; in this moment, years of silence, conformity, and suffered rejection are unearthed. From this point, the text unfolds a multifaceted retrospective in which a homosexual love story intertwines with biographical wounds, illness, and a profound spiritual quest. Central to this is the Jewish background of the partner's family, whose history is marked by the Holocaust, displacement, and exile, and whose traumatic experiences culminate in religious rigidity and the rejection of the relationship. Autréaux shows how these collective wounds poison familial bonds, generating silence, erasure, and exclusion. Engaging with the Song of Solomon and the work of Edmond Jabès, the novel develops a poetics of absence, silence, and exile, in which the beloved's body becomes the sacred. "L'Époux" thus reads as a modern Song of Songs, intertwining the intimate story of a homosexual love with the burden of Jewish memory and sketching a fragile yet persistent transcendence—"coming from the desert, as one comes from beyond memory."

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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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Shakespeare as a void: Philippe Forest

Philippe Forest's "Shakespeare: quelqu'un, tout le monde et puis personne" (Flammarion, 2025) is a book as radical as it is poetic, one that deliberately rejects any traditional biography and instead formulates the concept of "anti-biography." Starting from the almost complete biographical void of Shakespeare, Forest understands this void not as a deficiency, but as a productive space for literary insight. Shakespeare appears less as a historical individual than as a figure of "Someone, Everyone, and No One"—a resonating chamber of human existence in which questions of identity, power, love, time, death, and nothingness converge. Forest writes not only about Shakespeare, but through him and simultaneously about himself; every biography becomes a veiled autobiography, every analysis a fable in which life and work, theory and personal memory are inextricably intertwined. The analysis highlights how Forest reads Shakespeare as a thinker of existence, as a radically skeptical poet of an empty sky and a theatrical worldview, in which identity is a mask, history an illusion, and literature a gentle, comforting voice in the face of nothingness. It is a book that does not aim merely to impart knowledge, but rather to present an existential experience of reading.

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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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Nouvelle Vague as a novel: Patrick Roegiers

Patrick Roegiers' "Nouvelle Vague, roman" (2023) translates the thinking of cinema into prose, not retelling the Nouvelle Vague but re-staging it as an aesthetic movement. Instead of chronological film history or biographical portraits, a cinematic fabric emerges, assembling scenes, spaces, and characters like shots from an invisible camera. Roegiers lets the reader drift through the editorial offices of "Cahiers du cinéma," through the apartments, filming locations, and symbolic landscapes where Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Varda invented their cinematic language. Historical facts, anecdotal material, and iconic film scenes are woven into a larger literary rhythm like found footage, a rhythm that doesn't fix the narrative thematically but shapes it as a fragile, vibrant composition of images, movements, and perspectives. The review argues that the novel derives its power precisely from the fact that it performatively inscribes the aesthetic principles of the Nouvelle Vague itself into its prose. It is understood not as a contribution to film historiography, but as a literary choreography that reproduces the thinking of filmmakers—their distrust of conventions, their predilection for the fragment, the present, improvisation, and direct observation—in textual form. The interpretation demonstrates how Roegiers' montage techniques, his anachronistic encounters, and the fusion of documentary material and fiction reactivate the openness and fluidity that made the Nouvelle Vague an aesthetic revolution. The literary form itself becomes a laboratory for a freely moving perception, demythologizing historical figures while simultaneously revealing their aesthetic radicalism anew—as a continuation of a revolt that was never truly complete.

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Fantasia colonial and postcolonial: Ritual practice in the works of Assia Djebar and Fouad Laroui

Fouad Laroui's novel "La vie, l'honneur, la fantasia" (2025) reconstructs a childhood experience from the perspective of an adult first-person narrator: the ritualized murder of Arsalom during the Moroccan equestrian ceremony of the Fantasia. This execution appears as a collective act of restoring honor against a modernity imagined as corrupt, in which Arsalom, with his "arrogant mobility" and economic greed, becomes the enemy. The Fantasia thus becomes a social matrix in which power, concealment, and ritual violence intertwine; the precision of the mounted shooting ritual—"a single detonation among fifteen others"—marks the symbolic unity of the "corps collectif" and simultaneously exposes the dysfunction of state institutions, which are unable to dismantle corruption and informal codes of honor. In contrast, Assia Djebar's "L'amour, la fantasia" (1985) opens up Algeria's colonial archive poetically and polyphonically: the fantasia becomes an ambivalent symbol of both male power demonstrations, female vulnerability, and literary remembrance against colonial historical politics. Where Djebar employs fragmented polyphony to reactivate a repressed past, Laroui works with analytical linearity to make visible contemporary entanglements of honor, economics, and institution. This review emphasizes this complementary tension: Djebar creates a counter-archive of voices; Laroui dissects the present and shows how ritualized violence extends into modern legal logics. Together, these two narratives present the fantasia as an interface between history and the present, where continuities of colonial violence and their postcolonial transformations can be exemplified.

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The beauty of archaic violence: Pierre Michon and Aeschylus

Pierre Michon's "Agéladas d'Argos (Contre Thèbes)" (Flammarion, 2025) reinterprets Aeschylus' Theban myth through the lens of art. The narrative shifts between the modern museum in Reggio Calabria, home to the discovered Riace Bronzes, and the ancient sites, intermingling the voices of the author Michon, the playwright Aeschylus, and the sculptor Agéladas II. Michon obsessively focuses his reflections on the materiality of bronze, which he sees as the only enduring form capable of capturing "raw, bloody history." At the center is the warrior Tydeus (Bronze Figure A), whom Michon elevates to "the most beautiful murderer in art history," his archaic savagery becoming the inescapable definition of beauty itself—a poetic premise that also defined his Homeric book, "J'écris l'Iliad." As in the Iliad, where archaic violence and desire become the ecstatic experience of storytelling, Michon, in Agéladas d'Argos, transforms raw, bloody history into the material, imperishable form of bronze. – This review focuses on Michon's radical political theories, which trace a shocking, unbroken line of violence through civilization. Michon establishes a direct analogy between the Seven Chiefs of the Theban campaign and the Once (in Michon's novel of the same name) of the French Revolution—the "killers of the king." He interprets this historical flow as a consequence of the "decisive coup of the Logos" in the 6th century BC, thereby exposing democracy as a cynical "massacre with a clear conscience." In this interpretation, Tydeus embodies the ambivalence of political power: he is simultaneously "the legitimate violence of the Logos" and "the no less legitimate violence that the world exercises in return." The work concludes with the assertion of the eternal efficacy of archaic violence, which defies the commercial and intellectual conventions of modernity.

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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