Maylis de Kerangal

Odysseus in Paris: An epic without a center, with James Joyce

The volume “Ulysse à Paris” (Seuil, 2024) continues the Homeric-Joycean tradition by radically pluralizing the epic structure of the wandering journey and relocating it to the socially, politically, and historically charged terrain of northern Paris. Published in collaboration with the journal Cockpit, this collective novel is not merely a loose anthology, but an aesthetically and theoretically coherent project that programmatically stages literary polyphony as a counter-model to epic unity. Instead of a sovereign hero, a network of heterogeneous voices unfolds, whose characters—from migrant subjects to feminist reformulations of mythical roles to flâneurs sensitized to the politics of memory—experience the odyssey as an event of displacement, precarity, and fragmented identity. The review explores how each contribution transforms specific Homeric episodes and Joycean techniques: be it through the emptying of the heroic (de Quatrebarbes), the ironic treatment of genealogical authority (Fiat), the politicization of mythical violence in the context of Holocaust remembrance (Comment), or the radical subjectivization of marginalized perspectives (Schavelzon, Noël). Tiphaine Samoyault emphasizes memory as a mode of a never-completed homecoming. Gabriela Vazquez condenses migration into an epistemic perspective that consistently conceives of the center from the periphery. The analysis traces the dense intertextual entanglement and reads formal techniques (polyphony, stream of consciousness, catalog technique) as carriers of historical and ideological meanings. It becomes clear that the central driving force of the volume is the deconstruction of homecoming: Ithaca no longer appears as an attainable place, but as an empty signature, replaced by provisional, often precarious forms of arrival that neither stabilize identity nor reconcile history. The review itself thus follows a twofold movement – ​​it reconstructs the genealogical depth of the project and at the same time insists on its diagnostic sharpness regarding the times – thereby revealing “Ulysse à Paris” as an epic that constantly questions its own possibility.

➙ To the article

The world as surface, the surface as world: trompe l'œil and ekphrasis in the work of Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal's novel "Un monde à portée de main" (2018) follows Paula Karst, a young Parisian woman who learns the art of trompe l'oeil at a Brussels institute and later works as a decorative painter in film studios, church restorations, and villas, until she finally contributes to a monumental reproduction of the Lascaux cave paintings. This essay reads the novel as the literary counterpart to its own theme: just as Paula's painting aims to obliterate itself in favor of a deceptively realistic surface, Kerangal's prose also proceeds ekphrastically and illusionistically—conjuring colors, materials, and visual spaces so sensuously that the reader forgets the words behind the world. The perfect trompe l'oeil requires not only the moment of deception but also that of disillusionment—only when the eye recognizes the illusion as art does the work unfold its true beauty. From there, the interpretation expands the question to the relationship between original and copy, which is radically subverted in the novel, from the Brussels training to the Egyptian funerary statue in the Turin museum: The copy is not a lie, but a creation of reality – and Paula's work on Lascaux ultimately poses the oldest question in art history anew: What is an original if the cave paintings of prehistory themselves wanted nothing more than to make the world so real that one could touch it?

➙ To the article

Surf and Resonance: Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal's latest novel, "Jour de ressac" (2024), is primarily analyzed in this article through the overarching principle of analogy, correspondence, and resonance found in her books (including "Naissance d'un pont" 2010, "Réparer les vivants" 2014, "À ce stade de la nuit" 2014, "Un monde à portée de main" 2018, "Kiruna" 2019, "Canoës" 2021, "Seyvoz" 2022 with Joy Sorman, and "Un archipel" 2022), which serve as the structural basis of the author's oeuvre. The plot opens with a phone call from the criminal police in Le Havre, which confronts the protagonist with the discovery of an "unidentified man" and plunges her deeply into her own past as well as the history of her hometown. Le Havre itself appears as a "ghostly city," whose destroyed and rebuilt layers, particularly those resulting from the Allied bombings of 1944, form a palimpsestical landscape of memory, where the present is permeated by echoes of the past. The novel's central metaphor, the "ressac"—the ebb or break of waves on the shore—symbolizes how memory rolls in in powerful waves, breaks, and leaves behind a shimmering image that passively affects the narrator, yet provides the impetus for writing. The text thus becomes less a conventional crime novel and, through the pronounced introspective dimension of the first-person narrator, a poetics-based reflection on the workings of memory and the way in which the past reverberates in the present. The novel's fascination lies in its profound exploration of identity and impermanence. The unidentified dead man on the beach becomes a central, empty "sign" that serves as a catalyst for the protagonist's search for meaning. She doesn't become a classic investigator, but rather a "medium" who uses the traces of the dead man as a projection screen for existential questions about loss and identity. Her profession as a voice actress, which requires empathizing with "foreign voices" and merging with other identities, is threatened by the existential threat of artificial intelligence and the possibility of voice cloning. Writing itself becomes a "mode of contact" that aims to make the experience of reality and its deeper connections sensually tangible through analogies. Meaning is not found, as in a crime novel, in a final identification of the dead man, but in the narrative journey itself. The narrator finds support and identity in the act of storytelling, making the act of storytelling itself a "survival mechanism and a source of meaning" in a world marked by loss and uncertainty.

➙ To the article

Music Fictions: Kerangal with Pinget, Garcia and Reza

Maylis de Kerangal's "Canoës" brings together several dimensions of musical references in the work of Pinget, Garcia, and Reza: firstly, the semiotic-formal structuring and intertextual work, and secondly, the profound connection between musicality and physicality, between one's own identity and dimensions of musical experience. Resonance refers to the phenomenon where one body vibrates or sounds in sync with another, as in the case of the drone strings of lutes.

➙ To the article
Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to give you the best possible user experience. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognizing you when you return to our site, and helps our team understand which sections of the site are most interesting and useful to you.