Being a man

One is not born a man, one becomes one through heroic tales and taboos, role models and actions, glances and desires. In contemporary French literature, manhood is being challenged: images of masculinity are observed, deconstructed, or transgressed; homosexuality and heterosexuality are questioned; and what was once considered self-evident manhood becomes a field of literary exploration.

Song in Chaos: Apocalypse, Nomadism and Resistance in the work of Mathieu Belezi

Mathieu Belezi's "Cantique du chaos" depicts a post-apocalyptic world that has emerged from a biblically exaggerated flood event, and whose political and existential order is characterized by violence, emptiness, and uprooting: At its center is the aging desperado Théo Gracques, who, after a failed attempt to retreat as a hermit, flees with Chloé and her children across devastated Europe and America, while his present is incessantly intertwined with the lyrically condensed memories of his lost love Léonore and the death of their child; after further losses and increasing physical decline, his journey ends in a standstill at the Orinoco, where he dies and leaves his last poem to a young woman who keeps it in remembrance. The essay interprets this narrative arc as a triply structured poetics—between road novel, epic, and lyric cycle—in which being on the move is simultaneously spatial movement, the work of remembering, and the dying process. It precisely elucidates how Belezi, through the interweaving of a mythical opening hymn, prosaic chapters of escape, and poetic diary entries, establishes a "poetics of the end": writing here appears not as a representation of the world, but as the final autonomous act in a world without alternatives. The hybrid form is interpreted as a response to the depicted catastrophe—the baroque abundance of language against the emptiness of the devastated world, the lyrical transcendence of time against the linearity of decay, the female characters as bearers of action and tradition against the exhausted male narrator. By closely linking these formal and thematic lines, the review shows the novel not only as a dystopian narrative, but as a reflection on the conditions of literature itself: The “cantique” becomes the last, precariously continuing form of meaning-making in the face of total disintegration.

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All the Guilty: The Pelicot Trial as Documentary Theatre by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle

Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have created an oratorio in 40 fragments from the trial material of the Mazan rapes, “Le Procès Pelicot”, which transforms the historical criminal trial against Dominique Pelicot and his 50 co-defendants into a polyphonic theatrical document: indictments, witness statements, street interviews, psychiatric reports, feminist manifestos, perpetrator biographies and SMS dialogues are assembled into a panorama that aims to reveal not the legal truth, but the deep social structure of violence. This interpretation traces how Rau operates on several levels simultaneously: poetically, through the choice of the oratorio as a form of meditative contemplation without scenic action; intertextually, through the framing with Petrarch's "Ascension du Mont Ventoux" as a critique of the male gaze; and dramaturgically, through the arrangement of the 40 fragments, which ranges from the external legal framework through perpetrator biographies and sociological analysis to feminist counter-arguments. The interpretation reveals that Rau's most powerful decisions are often decisions of omission: no pathos, no political class, no synthesis of open questions of justice. At the center is Gisèle Pelicot herself—not as a saint or icon, but as a political actor whose refusal to accept the hus-clos becomes the fundamental gesture of the entire piece and who, in the epilogue, beyond the 40 numbered fragments, has the last word.

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Belonging as exclusion: the foreign language and the father as Yekkes at Manor Dory

The novel reveals how Jewish identity functions simultaneously as a historical protection and as a normative inscription on the body, placing the individual in an irresolvable tension between diaspora and Israeli belonging. A son writes to his dead father in a foreign language, demonstrating how history, origin, and power are indelibly inscribed on bodies, names, and desires—and how one can only escape them by retelling them. Manor Dory's "Le Gorille" (Grasset, 2026) explores how identity is produced through historical, bodily, and linguistic inscriptions—and how these inscriptions cannot be overcome, but only transformed. The starting point is the constellation of an autobiographically grounded epistolary novel in which a son writes to his dead father in order to escape his grasp and simultaneously recreate him in literary form. From this starting point, the essay reconstructs the central lines of movement in the text: the childhood experience of a physically and symbolically different father (non-circumcision, name change from Reinhard to Ezer), the author's own adolescence as a phase of violent approach to this very body and simultaneous resistance (culminating in a psychiatric episode and homoerotic impulses), and adult life, in which genealogical, political, and erotic conflicts converge in a transnational existence between Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris. The interpretation reads the novel along the lines of the thesis that different power structures—family, religion, state, masculinity—function homologously insofar as they mark, discipline, and make legible the body; circumcision acts as a paradigmatic figure, but is expanded through names, languages, and institutional practices. Particular attention is paid to the poetics employed: the choice of French as the “private” language of writing, the mosaic structure as a reflection of a non-linear memory, and the figure of deadnaming as an intersection of Zionist naming politics and queer-theoretical thought. At the same time, the review highlights the central paradox of Jewish existence, which the novel encapsulates in a concise image: what ensured survival in Europe (the uncircumcised body) signifies exclusion in Israel—a historical reversal realized in the father's body and made explicit in the son's writing. From this perspective, writing itself appears as an ambivalent practice: not as liberation from violence, but as its displacement into a self-determined form, as a “translation” that makes loyalty possible only through betrayal. The ending—the announcement of an uncircumcised, multilingual child—is interpreted as a deliberate interruption of a context of inscription, the continued influence of which the novel simultaneously reflects upon and does not negate.

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

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

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Genealogy of Hate: Autobiography, Antisemitism and the Poetics of History in Édouard Drumont and Christophe Donner

As this essay demonstrates, Christophe Donner's novel "La France goy" unfolds a genealogical narrative project in which individual family history and collective ideological history intertwine: The starting point is the first-person narrator's archival search for his great-grandfather Henri Gosset, which quickly expands into a far-reaching reconstruction of French antisemitism since the late 19th century. Through Gosset's social mobility and his entanglement in the circles of Léon Daudet and Edgar Bérillon, the family is directly integrated into the ideological network of the time, while in parallel, Édouard Drumont's biography unfolds as an "anatomy of hatred," revealing how personal failure, social humiliation, and media strategies condense into a powerful antisemitic narrative. This network is complemented by counter-figures such as the anarchist Marcelle Bernard, as well as by the genealogical perspective on the grandfather Jean Gosset, whose death in a concentration camp brings the historical threads to a brutal culmination. The interpretation argues that Donner's method is neither purely autobiographical nor classically historical, but rather, as a kind of "genealogical archaeology," develops a reflexive poetics of the archive in which documents, fiction, and self-observation intertwine, systematically subverting the boundaries between self-biography and biography. Central to this is the thesis of a structural continuity of antisemitism, which is not asserted discursively but demonstrated narratively by making visible ideological, linguistic, and affective sediments across generations. Donner's literary achievement is seen in not only morally condemning antisemitism, but also revealing its aesthetic and narrative appeal: Drumont's success is understood as the result of a narrative logic that transforms diffuse resentments into a coherent story. This leads to a sophisticated critical approach that understands writing itself as an ambivalent power—as a medium of both ideological seduction and enlightened counter-work—and reads the novel as a whole as an attempt to gain a form of historical knowledge that transcends mere factuality through the literary exploration of genealogical entanglements.

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

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

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

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

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Late works as a laboratory: Jean-Jacques Schuhl and Simon Liberati

Jean-Jacques Schuhl's "Les apparitions" and Simon Liberati's "Performance" (both 2022) revolve around aging writers whose physical decline becomes the starting point for a radically renewed literary experience. In "Les apparitions," Schuhl portrays a narrator who, after a severe internal hemorrhage and cerebral hypoxia, is haunted by so-called "apparitions": autonomous, highly present visual events that refuse to be either dreams or hallucinations. The text unfolds a poetics of montage, quotation, and desubjectification, in which the self increasingly recedes behind alien images, voices, and fragments. "Performance," on the other hand, tells the story of a 71-year-old author who, after suffering a stroke, finds renewed creative energy through a commission about the Rolling Stones. This energy, however, is largely fueled by a scandalous relationship with his young stepdaughter, who serves as a projection screen for an excessive desire. Liberati's novel combines illness, decadence, pop culture, and transgression into a provocative staging of aging as an aesthetic experience at the limits of human experience. – The review reads both novels as paradigmatic works of old age, which understand aging not as a phase of taking stock or moderation, but as an aesthetic extreme. It argues that Schuhl and Liberati develop two contrasting but complementary models of the "aging creative": a receptive, disempowering imagination in Schuhl's work, which almost dissolves the self in the act of writing, and an aggressive, transgressive imagination in Liberati's work, which asserts a final form of artistic sovereignty precisely in moral and physical decline. At the heart of the analysis is the thesis that pathology, illness, and proximity to death become "material for thought" in both texts, from which new forms of literary intensity emerge. The review thus shows how the late work functions not as a swan song, but as a laboratory in which literature radically re-examines its own limits in the face of mortality.

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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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Destruction as a possibility: Manhood and violence in the work of Bernard Bourrit

Bernard Bourrit's novel "Détruire tout" (2025) reconstructs a real femicide in 1960s Switzerland, yet consistently rejects a linear perpetrator psychology or moral resolution. Drawing on archives, observations, and essayistic fragments, the perpetrator, Alain, appears less as an individual monster than as a symptom of a patriarchal, rural, and authoritarian social structure that enables violence. This review demonstrates how Bourrit exposes the narrow confines of rural life, male normalization, unspoken emotions, and asymmetrical gender relations, analyzing masculinity in particular as a fragile, overburdened construct whose claim to control morphs into destructive violence. The male body becomes the arena for social injustices, while Carmen emerges as a projection screen for societal expectations, without being reduced to a mere figure. Formally and ethically, the text avoids using the murder as a narrative climax, leaving it as an empty space, thus focusing attention on the underlying conditions rather than sensationalism. Thus, the review understands “Détruire tout” as a literary investigation of social violence, which unfolds its political and aesthetic power precisely in the failure of explanation and catharsis.

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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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Exposed body and melancholy of the trail: Joy Majdalani and Robert Mapplethorpe

This review interprets Joy Majdalani's novel "Le goût des garçons" (2021) and essay "Jimmy Freeman" (2025) as two complementary stages in a consistent literary project. The novel "Le goût des garçons" is a subjective exploration of female desire, shaped by the tension between religious upbringing, guilt, and self-empowerment. Male figures appear less as psychologically developed characters than as projection surfaces on which power, fantasy, and transgression can be tested. "Jimmy Freeman" takes these themes further, shifting them from the narrative risk of the novel to a poetic-essayistic reflection: Starting with Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph of Jimmy Freeman, Majdalani explores desire, objectification, and the violence of form from an art-theoretical and existential perspective. The essay functions as a condensation and commentary on the novel, in which autobiographical experience, aesthetic analysis, and ethical self-examination overlap. Central to this article is the homoerotic art of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work is interpreted as a hinge between classical beauty and radical body politics, as a perfectly formed, disciplined object of desire. At the same time, the analysis reveals that this aesthetic objectification of the body is always accompanied by a melancholy of trace, for photography preserves only the imprint of a living, mortal body. In the tension between formal eternity and physical transience, Mapplethorpe's work unfolds a desire that is as monumental as it is profoundly vulnerable. His photographs represent an art that simultaneously canonizes and exposes the male—especially the Black—body, thereby making questions of power, the gaze, and subjugation unavoidable. This tension is overshadowed by the knowledge of AIDS and the early deaths of Mapplethorpe and many of his models, giving the images, in retrospect, the character of a final flicker—immortalized in beauty, mortal, and irretrievable.

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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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Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
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