Frédéric Beigbeder

Frédéric Beigbeder's "Dictionnaire amoureux des écrivains français d'aujourd'hui" (Plon, 2023) is a monumental and deliberately contradictory work: a condensed inventory of living French-language contemporary literature, comprising 281 entries, which stretches the lexicographical form of the "Dictionnaires amoureux" series to its limits while simultaneously serving as a self-portrait of its author. Beigbeder defines his method as "resolutely subjective": his corpus includes only novelists living in August 2023 who write directly in French—essayists, poets, playwrights, and crime writers are excluded, while Francophone authors from Martinique, the Maghreb, Senegal, or Quebec are included, since the volume claims, in a literary-political sense, to map a literature that extends beyond France. The most conceptually bold and polemical element of the book is the taxonomy of twenty-eight “Logos des écoles et mouvements littéraires contemporains” – small symbols with which Beigbeder assigns each author to one or more schools, thus doing what literary studies have so far failed to do for the 21st century: to divide contemporary literature into binding currents, from “autoréalité” (the self as the primary raw material, with Ernaux and Angot as canonical figures) through “faction” or exofiction (Carrère, Jaenada, Aubenas) and the “glauquistes apocalyptiques” (Houellebecq, Despentes, Mathieu) to the “néo-hussards” (Tesson, Kauffmann, Parisis), the “décoloniaux voyageurs” (Chamoiseau, Condé, Daoud, Mbougar Sarr) and the “revelators of a maudlin past” (Modiano, Guez, Mukasonga, Littell). This review analyzes Beigbeder’s definition of the corpus, his implicit value criteria (style, originality of perspective, courage to provoke, existential risk), the characteristics of the individual groups based on exemplary entries, and finally the position Beigbeder occupies in his own panorama—as a novelist who has excluded himself but remains present as an authority on every page—in order to ultimately weigh both the volume’s genuine achievement (filling a real gap, the quality of the best portraits, the heuristic productivity of the taxonomy) and its structural limitations (the Parisian milieu-bound nature of the perspective, the canonization of the already established, the veiled political partisanship).