Amanda Sthers

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