childhood

At irregular intervals, books from contemporary French literature that address this phase of life in a literary context are presented here under the title "Poetics of Childhood".

Between myth and mass murder: German-French novels under the shadow of the Third Reich

Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970) and Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (2006), despite the 36-year gap and two fundamentally different literary temperaments, are both Franco-German novels in the most precise sense: Tournier sends his Parisian garage owner Abel Tiffauges as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he experiences Germany as a mythological mirror land – herds of deer like heraldic animals, Göring's hunting lodge as a "palais sur rails", the Napola castle Kaltenborn as the fulfillment of an Erlking obsession – until the Jewish child Ephraïm inverts all his symbols at the end and transforms himself into the Star of David in the last sentence; Littell equips his first-person narrator, Max Aue, an SS officer and mass murderer, with Alsatian origins, a French mother, a Sciences Po education, and Parisian collaborators, so that Franco-German hybridity appears not as a humanizing bridge, but as a prerequisite for complicity—whoever knows Racine and Hölderlin equally well simply writes mass murder in better French. The present contrasting interpretation argues that both novels share precisely this commonality: They reject the comforting narrative that National Socialism was something culturally alien, imposed on the Franco-German heritage from the outside, and instead force their protagonists—the fascinated Frenchman as well as the hybrid perpetrator—to recognize their own education, fascination, and language skills as a gateway to the Nazi regime. The review sharply distinguishes between Tournier's mythological alienation – the crime is sublimated into archaic patterns (Erlkönig, Christopher, inversion of signs) in order to become visible – and Littell's hyperrealistic immanence, which denies any mythological shield and draws the reader into a complicity through Aue's cultivated narrative tone, from which he cannot escape; the review suggests that this difference is not only aesthetically but also historically explainable: in 1970 Auschwitz was still indescribable, it was sublimated – in 2006 it was academicized and museumified, and Littell insisted on its unprocessability. As Franco-German texts, both novels are also examined in terms of their language policy: the German, which Tournier leaves in the novel as reverently untranslated foreign material (Napola, Reichsjägermeister, Jungmann), and the French, which Littell chooses as the written language for the German mass murder – a literary sacrilege that turns the “clarté française” against itself and thus illustrates the thesis of the review that the Franco-German cultural community cannot close the black hole in its history, but can only circle around it.

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Proliferating bodies, silent flowers: the aesthetics of emanation in Ismaël Jude

The review of Ismaël Jude's "Une vie de jasmin" (éditions verticales, 2026) interprets the novel as a fundamental questioning of human identity, language, and civilization. At its heart is the character Jasmine, whose body, through a process of "dermaculture," produces plants, thus dissolving the boundary between humans and vegetation. Against the backdrop of a repressive, technocratic order—embodied by the allergic, authoritarian father and a world shaped by concrete and pesticides—the text develops a counter-aesthetic of proliferation, of "Émanation," and of a "sexuality without language," in which flowers appear not as symbols but as independent, untranslatable forms of life. The review demonstrates how this poetics intertwines with a traumatic family and colonial history: The name Jasmine proves to be an "acte manqué," a bloody trace of the Algerian War that does not create identity but rather undermines it. By combining ecological critique, queer physicality and language-skeptical poetics, the review ultimately interprets the novel as a plea for an unfixable life that spreads – like a pioneer plant – in the cracks of civilization and asserts itself beyond symbolic orders.

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From the film "Leurs enfants après eux"

The dignity of perseverance: literary rehabilitation of the France périphérique in the work of Nicolas Mathieu

In “Leurs enfants après eux” (Actes Sud, 2018), Nicolas Mathieu tells the story of a generation growing up over four summers in the dying industrial region of Lorraine: In the fictional town of Heillange, Anthony, Hacine, and Stéphanie drift between gravel pits, disused blast furnaces, and familial fault lines through a youth whose promises – advancement, freedom, self-definition – prove to be structurally blocked, so that even their most intense experiences of love, violence, or friendship remain constantly bound to the gravity of a space that no longer produces a future; the novel condenses this experience into a choral panorama in which individual biographies appear less as autonomous life stories than as variations on a collective fate of invisibility. In contrast, “Connemara” (Actes Sud, 2022) shifts the perspective to the present and to a different phase of life: Using Hélène, the seemingly successful social climber, and Christophe, who remained in his original social milieu, Mathieu tells the story of the illusion of social mobility itself – Hélène’s return from the Parisian elite to the provinces reveals her upward mobility as a story of alienation, while Christophe embodies the flip side, a life of continuity without departure, so that their fleeting reunion makes visible the impossibility of a coherent identity between origin and self-conception; the titular place of longing remains pure projection, a name for a life not lived. The essay reads both novels as a diptych that elevates the geographical space of périphérique France from mere backdrop to epistemic center: space appears here as an instrument of knowledge in which the contradictions of French meritocracy materialize, and the characters act as bearers of social positions whose scope for action is predetermined by origin, class, and symbolic orders. Mathieu's poetics are described as a tension between social-realist precision and literary economy—as a writing of ellipsis that, through choral structure, free indirect style, and the imbuing of landscape, body, and everyday details, generates a universal resonance without ever tipping into abstraction; at the same time, this writing insists that the implicit social critique lies not in explicit theses, but in the narrative form itself, in convergence without catharsis, in the "malgré tout" of precarious happiness, or in the "cœur en miettes" of an unfulfilled existence. This creates the image of a work that neither morally privileges ascent nor stagnation, but understands both as variants of the same double bind – and herein lies the political power of its literature.

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

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

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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."

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The Republic works: François Bégaudeau

François Bégaudeau's "Désertion" (2026) tells the story of the quiet but irreversible erosion of Steve's life, a young man from the Normandy countryside. Raised in a stable family, shaped by school, media consumption, and pop-cultural obsessions, he gradually drifts away from all social ties. Minor slights, linguistic invisibility, and institutional indifference accumulate over the years until he finally goes to Syria and joins the Kurdish YPG. The novel deliberately avoids dramatic turning points or psychological explanations, portraying Steve's path not as a logical consequence of radicalization, but as a structural consequence of a life that is no longer seen or addressed anywhere. Desertion is depicted here less as a rupture and more as a progressive process of societal blind spots. The review argues that Bégaudeau subverts expectations of a linear, politically causal narrative. The novel unfolds a poetics of displacement, parallelism, and affective subjectivity, in which small everyday events, school, family, and media form the framework for Steve's life. The Syria section sabotages the expected radicalization: instead of ideological seduction, there are conversations, everyday life, and contradictory discourses. This structure allows "Désertion" to be read as a literary representation of an "anarchic" refusal of meaning, in which the formal functionality of social institutions exposes the existential voids that make Steve's disappearance possible in the first place.

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Counter-archive of the children's colony: Simon Johannin

Simon Johannin's "Le Fin Chemin des anges" (2025) reconstructs the fates of the boys who lived and died in the children's colony on Île du Levant—an institution marked by isolation, violence, and forced labor. At its heart is Louis, a sensitive, homoerotically inclined boy whose "deviance" in the 19th century leads to moral and legal condemnation and plunges him into the colony's system. There, the children are weakened, humiliated, and forced to work; many die of hunger, disease, or abuse. Louis's life is reconstructed from fragments, flashbacks, and archival remnants, while the ruins of the place serve as a resonating chamber for the silenced voices. The novel portrays the colony not as an educational institution, but as a machine for the systematic destruction of young bodies and lives—making audible the violent history of a place largely silenced by the archives. Johannin's novel is exemplary of the new "Locus" book series in that it makes an abandoned place legible as a palimpsest-like repository of traumatic history. The article shows how Johannin interweaves spatial, archival, and poetic levels to give a voice to those children who were de-individualized and erased in official documents. The text's dual movement is particularly emphasized: on the one hand, the precise analysis of the colony's architecture as a disciplinary apparatus; on the other, the imaginative reconstruction of a single biography that stands for a multitude of lost lives. The review explores how Johannin politically charges sexuality, physicality, and memory by exposing the pathologization of Louis's homosexuality as a mechanism of societal violence and interpreting the poetics of touch—the "flashes" that emerge from the ruins—as a form of literary witnessing. Overall, the essay identifies the novel as a counter-archive that transforms the silence of a violently forgotten place into narrative presence, thereby making the ethical dimension of literature visible.

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Poetics of Childhood: David Ducreux Sincey

David Ducreux Sincey's "La loi du moins fort" (Gallimard, 2025) paints a bleak picture of childhood and adolescence, in which trauma, violence, and power struggles play central roles. The first-person narrator grows up in a hostile environment, marked by his mother's abuse and early exposure to death and morbidity. His encounter with the young politician Romain Poisson offers him a chance for liberation, but this is only achieved through the radical adoption of his own merciless logic of survival. From childhood games to political manipulation, the novel unfolds the gradual transformation of a victim into a perpetrator, in which the titular law of the weak—killing before being killed—legitimizes the act and becomes the central philosophy of life. This review demonstrates how the novel intertwines political dimensions with the story of childhood and exposes the mechanisms of power, manipulation, and violence. The analysis reveals that “La loi du moins fort” is not only a coming-of-age novel, but also a reflection on the dark sides of human existence and the fatalistic logic of survival.

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Rehabilitation of the mother: Émilie Lanez on Hervé Bazin's “Vipère au poing”

Émilie Lanez's exposé "Folcoche: le Secret de Vipère au poing" reveals that Hervé Bazin's famous novel "Vipère au poing" was less an autobiographical indictment of a monstrous mother than a calculated literary revenge by a criminally troubled son who wanted to erase his past and seize his inheritance: While Bazin portrays the mother Paule in his bestseller as a sadistic "folcoche" who torments her children, Lanez reconstructs, based on police files, psychiatric dossiers, and family correspondence, that Jean Hervé-Bazin was a mythomaniac fraudster whose novel served as a tool for blackmail and whose portrayal of the mother was a "murder on paper"; At the same time, Lanez's other works, "La Garçonnière de la République," an investigation into the secret, barely accountable power practices of the political elite around the presidential residence La Lanterne, and "Noël à Chambord," an analysis of Emmanuel Macron's monarchical self-presentation at the Château de Chambord, show that the author systematically exposes the gap between public staging and hidden truth – so that the review argues that Lanez not only destroys the myth of the heroic son in "Vipère au poing," but fundamentally unmasks the moral blindness of French institutions that protect perpetrators and silence victims.

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Peace in a world of ghosts: Cyrille Falisse

Cyrille Falisse's debut novel, "Seuls les fantômes" (Belfond, 2025), begins with an abrupt breakdown: Melvile, abandoned by his partner, loses all inner stability. The separation is portrayed not as heartbreak, but as a physical and psychological collapse, in which the silencing of desire is made visible by the recurring phrase "Je ne jouis plus" (I no longer enjoy). Melvile's withdrawal, his fragmented daily routines, and the voices that intensify his inner monologue mark a psychological overstimulation. Central to the novel is the figure of the "ghostly"—the "fantômes"—as a metaphor for intrusive memories and unresolved emotional imprints that drive Melvile to a systematic reckoning with his past. Decay, physical impotence, obsessive thoughts, and the oppressive atmosphere of his apartment reflect his crisis. At the same time, he structures his inner world through writing and digital identity, with images of nature and water illustrating the processing of traumatic memories. The narrative center remains the search for lost loved ones, the confrontation with guilt, and the gradual integration of loss, while the story evolves into a narrative of travel and quest that is less geographically than psychologically motivated. Falisse's argument lies in the close connection between inner crisis, psychological processing, and narrative form. The precise, unpretentious language makes emotional upheavals immediately palpable and combines metaphorical density with concrete physicality. Digital forms of communication, mental loops, and a fragmented temporal structure form a narrative system that makes Melvile's isolation, reflection, and slow stabilization visible. The book shows that memory, loss, and desire must not be suppressed but rather processed and integrated. Falisse succeeds in portraying existential experiences in a balance between vulnerability and formal rigor: The ghosts of the past remain but lose their destructive power, and Melvile recognizes his fragility as a strength—a conclusion that combines psychological insight and literary precision.

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New phase of French memoir literature: Matthieu Niango and Benny Malapa

“Le Fardeau” by Matthieu Niango and “Un nègre qui parle yiddish” by Benny Malapa (both 2025) portray two family histories in which the 20th century is revealed as a genealogical upheaval. Niango’s novel follows a son’s archival research, uncovering his mother’s Lebensborn origins and the paradoxical legacy of Jewish victimhood and Nazi persecution. Malapa’s sweeping family epic tells the love story and survival tale of a Cameroonian-German man and a Polish-Jewish woman, refuting any myth of ethnic purity. Both books demonstrate how colonialism, racism, and antisemitism intertwine and how hybridity becomes the antithesis of totalitarian ideologies. With their differing aesthetics—documentary-analytical in Niango's work, oral-epic in Malapa's—they demonstrate that identity is an open process of memory: a web of ruptures, transmission, and responsibility. The review argues that both novels mark a new phase in French memory literature, in which national history is no longer explored through grand collective narratives, but rather through intimate family archives, minority biographies, and transgenerational traumas. It reads the two works as counter-narratives to identity-based, ethnonational interpretations of "French" origin. Niango and Malapa uncover genealogical assemblages that conceive of Europe's history of violence relationally. The novel forms model two ethics of remembering: responsibility through analysis (Niango) and responsibility through transmission (Malapa).

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Beyond Civilization: Fabrice Humbert

Fabrice Humbert's novel "De l'autre côté de la vie" (2025) unfolds an apocalyptic escape story in which the first-person narrator—a Parisian lawyer—flees a capital city engulfed in civil war with his children. The journey toward a semi-mythical "Republique du Jura" becomes a moral descent: what begins as an attempt at protection transforms into a phenomenological study of brutalization. Language itself is revealed as the vehicle of poison—"the words prepared the ground"—while violence arises from fear and conformity. The novel combines dystopian social analysis with an existentially charged poetics: childhood appears as the last vestige of humanity, nature as deceptive solace, utopia as a fragile wishful image that perishes in the flames. The parable does not primarily depict external catastrophes, but rather the erosion of humanity through the disintegration of shared values ​​and the social "fluidity" of former civility. The review interprets this novel as a continuation of Humbert's complete works and places it within a systematic, thematically and poetologically coherent context. It argues from two perspectives: firstly, the novel is read as a literary condensation of all previously developed motifs—the disintegration of social bonds, the media's poisoning of reality, the illusion of utopias—and secondly, as a radicalized self-correction by the author, one that skeptically breaks with earlier moral hopes. The critique reveals how the narrator, as a lawyer, subjects his own language to a "purification" and formulates the work as a counter-speech to violence, even as it simultaneously demonstrates the limitations of such discourse. The review makes it clear that Humbert takes his central theme—the self-endangerment of civilized humanity—to an uncompromising literary conclusion in this novel.

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Behind the mask: David Thomas

David Thomas's "Un frère" (2025, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt) faces a twofold challenge: on the one hand, the author recounts the life and death of his brother Édouard, who suffered from schizophrenia for four decades; on the other hand, he simultaneously reflects on the difficulty of writing about mental illness in a literary way without reducing the subject to their diagnosis. How can a fictional or literary text do justice to the experience of mental illness? How can suffering, alienation, and the fragmented perception that schizophrenia brings be translated into narrative forms without appearing voyeuristic or simplistic?

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

Transformations and deconstructions

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

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

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This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.

Childhood as a stage, theatre as healing: Axel Auriant

Axel Auriant's novel "Rue de la Gaîté" (2025) follows the development of a young man named Baptiste, who finds in the world of theater not only a professional calling, but above all a vehicle for coping with his childhood traumas and re-evaluating his self. The novel interweaves the protagonist's inner struggles with his external experiences at the Cours Florent and the Théâtre Montparnasse.

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Changing lives: Claudine Galea

Claudine Galea's novel "Les choses comme elles sont" (Éd. Verticales, 2019) takes the childhood and adolescence of an unnamed protagonist in Marseille and its surrounding area during the 1960s and 70s as the starting point for an exploration of childhood, family dynamics, and the impact of historical events on individual development. At its core, it is the story of the "Petite," who evolves from a curious child to a rebellious teenager and finally to a young woman on the cusp of all possibilities. The novel portrays an existential family history of great hardship, marked by "black holes" that are unspeakable yet indelible. Simultaneously, the reader breathes in the linguistic density of the eras lived through in Marseille and the bitter aftereffects of history stretching from one shore to the other of the Mediterranean. Galea's fresco combines a lyrical writing style with the distance required to examine the darker corners of France's national narrative.

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Returning David's Star: Nathacha Appanah

The novel "Le dernier frère" (Éditions de l'Olivier, 2007, German translation: Unionsverlag, 2012) by Mauritian author Nathacha Appanah is a work of great poetic density and narrative complexity. At its heart is a childhood friendship between Raj, the narrator, and David, a Jewish boy who arrived in Mauritius on the internment ship "Atlantic." The novel explores how individual identity is formed through memory, loss, and experiences of violence. The text is simultaneously a historical analysis and an intimate narrative. Appanah intertwines the individual story of a Mauritian boy with the broader historical context of the internment of Jewish refugees by British colonial authorities in Mauritius during the Second World War. This creates a narrative tapestry of historical facts, psychological introspection, and poetic reflection that offers the reader not only a literary but also an ethical experience.

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Planned obsolescence: Guillaume Poix

In his novel "Les fils conducteurs" (2017), winner of the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste, Guillaume Poix confronts us with the contradictions of Western idealism, the devastating consequences of global consumerism, and the moral corruption that arises when well-intentioned actions collide with the complex realities of exploitation. The novel, which plunges us into the dangerous world of the Agbogbloshie e-waste dump in Ghana, tells the parallel stories of the French-Swiss photojournalist Thomas and the young Ghanaian boy Jacob. The central theme of the novel is the dismantling of Western arrogance and naiveté, embodied in the character of Thomas. Driven by his idealism and desire for relevance, the photographer Thomas wants to expose the ecological catastrophe and illegal recycling practices in Agbogbloshie. But his journey becomes a moral descent that makes him complicit in a tragedy. The narrative problematizes how the Western gaze, which oscillates between documentation and voyeurism, ultimately contributes to complicity.

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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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