Philippe Besson – Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature

Rimbaud Fictions: Philippe Besson

31.08.2530.08.25

Philippe Besson's novel "Les jours fragiles" (Julliard, 2004) begins with the final years of the poet Arthur Rimbaud's life and paints an intimate portrait from the perspective of his sister Isabelle. The novel is a suggestive Rimbaud fiction that illuminates the complex relationships within the family and Isabelle's inner world as she approaches the myth of her brother.

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On the genre of the presidential novel

05.12.2524.02.22

The interrelationship between political power and cultural-aesthetic, here fictional, representation in the form of praise of poets, patronage, copinage, or indeed a French presidential novel of recent terms and already for 2027 (in Houellebecq's latest novel "Anéantir") needs to be examined.

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Between times and countries: Resistance as a time-travel novel by Martin Winckler
Based on Martin Winckler's own biography as a Jewish doctor born in Algeria, caught between colonial history, French memory culture and later emigration, the review reads his novel "L'Amour à temps" (POL, 2026) as a literary condensation of precisely that experience of uprooting and historical overlay. The text intertwines the popular time-travel narrative with the historical depths of the German occupation, the resistance of marginalized groups, and the emancipatory impulses of 1968: The prologue begins with the striking image of the library of Tours in flames, and the young doctor Maurice D'Alget pulling a wounded soldier from the fire amidst smoke and collapsing shelves – a scene that paradigmatically combines the destruction of knowledge with the impulse to rescue. The story then centers on the 83-year-old narrator Rachel, who in 2026 reconstructs her own past, intervening in 1942 via a time portal; this is particularly condensed in the scene of her visit to her grandparents in occupied Paris, where, trembling all over, she tries in vain to warn them of the impending wave of arrests – a moment in which historical knowledge becomes an existential, but limited, agency. This dual movement – retrospective narration and physically experienced past – transforms time travel from a speculative motive into an ethical procedure of bringing history to life, which ultimately culminates in the drastic act of Rachel killing a collaborator, thereby changing an individual fate but not negating the logic of persecution. The essay highlights that Winckler hybridizes the genre – as a "roman choral", which organizes collective memory against silencing through a multitude of unattributed voices, and as an autopoetological project in which the narrator herself appears as an instance of archiving, commenting and legitimizing. The temporal structure becomes an ethical aporia: knowledge of historical catastrophes creates responsibility without necessarily guaranteeing agency; time travel only allows "interventions on the surface" that shift individual fates but do not revise history as a whole. From this perspective, the novel appears as a decidedly contemporary narrative of remembrance, which – as the review pointedly highlights – transfers the language of the resistance of 1942 into the political present, thus making visible the continuity of violence, ideology and resistance. Overall, the interpretation reads the text as a combination of bodily memory, multilingualism, and polyphonic witnessing, whose common vanishing point is a poetics of storytelling as resistance: writing here becomes a practice not of preserving the past, but of constantly updating it anew in the act of passing it on.
The Body as a Battlefield: Boris Bergmann
Boris Bergmann's "Les Corps insurgés" (2020), in an intricately interwoven triptych structure, traces the life paths of three figures—the Renaissance artist Lorenzo, the Parisian '68er Baptiste, and the contemporary migrant Tahar—whose experiences are organized along the lines of individual body parts, thus unfolding a poetics of the body as a historical repository and political arena: cheeks, esophagus, liver, or heart function not only as anatomical markers but also as semantic condensations of shame, desire, violence, and resistance, thereby embedding individual biographies within broader contexts of power and discourse. The formal structure clearly draws on the tradition of "blasons," that early modern genre which rhetorically isolates and poetically elevates individual body parts, transforming it into a modern, fractured aesthetic in which fragmentation no longer serves to celebrate but to problematize the body. The novel's argument—and this is also its aesthetic point—unfolds less discursively than structurally, through the parallel editing of the three time periods, which generates analogies and contrasts: While Lorenzo explores the body as a site of artistic transgression against ecclesiastical authority, Baptiste's story reveals the creeping ossification of a once politicized body, and Tahar's story radicalizes this line to an existential climax marked by migration, precarity, and potential self-destruction. The text's argumentative sharpness lies precisely in its consistent connection of social and ideological processes to bodily experience. It does not treat violence abstractly, but rather understands it as inscription on the body, and in the final twist—Tahar's decision for life at the moment of potential detonation—it creates a fragile yet insistent counter-figure to the logic of destruction.
Marc Bloch in the Pantheon: Historian, resistance fighter, martyr of the Republic
On June 23, 2026, Marc Bloch will be interred in the Panthéon—82 years after the Gestapo shot him near Lyon and left his body in the ditch. This text attempts to understand the significance of this gesture: for France, which honors in Bloch a citizen whose civil and academic rights were once curtailed by the French state; for Germany, which must recognize in him a victim of its own state power; and for the discipline of history, which, for the first time, sees one of its own entering the nation's temple. He was a medievalist and an officer, founder of the Annales and a resistance fighter, a man who treated the self-evident as requiring explanation and who never abandoned the truth, even when it cost him his life. What holds his works together, from the "Rois thaumaturges" to the unfinished "Apologie," is less a method than an attitude: the refusal to tell history from within a single community. He chose "dilexit veritatem" – he loved the truth – as his epitaph. The Republic is now giving him the answer he did not receive in 1940.
Political Rhetoric in Ruins: Mathieu Larnaudie and Nicolas Idier
This double review reads Mathieu Larnaudie's "Acharnement" (2012) and Nicolas Idier's "Matignon la nuit" (2024) as two complementary diagnoses of a political discourse that has lost touch with people and revolves only around itself. Both novels present highly reduced narratives: In Larnaudie's novel, a former speechwriter lives in seclusion in the provinces, writing speeches, rehearsing them, and discarding them, while real catastrophes appear only peripherally. In Idier's novel, an advisor is tasked with composing a speech in a single night at the seat of government but becomes increasingly lost in encounters, memories, and digressions. This is particularly evident in two images: the wooden platform on which Müller rehearses his speeches into the void, and the nocturnal crisis machine of Matignon, where language consists only of interchangeable "elements." The review also compares the writing styles of the two authors: Larnaudie's long, convoluted, and self-commenting prose appears as both an imitation and a critique of political rhetoric. Idier's fragmented and open style, on the other hand, seems like a sabotage of political discourse, opening up new possibilities. At the same time, the review connects this stylistic analysis with the characters, plot structures, and temporal organization of the novels: here, the endless repetition in Larnaudie's work; there, the condensed chronology of a single night in Idier's. Thus, form and political diagnosis mutually reinforce each other. The review's argument begins with an analysis of rhetorical mechanisms such as rhythm, punchline, and media staging, and then examines the position of the speaking characters: on the one hand, the dismissed speechwriter, on the other, the "sous-plume" within the government apparatus. The review also addresses the question of the audience, which is either entirely absent or appears only as a hyper-mediated mass. In the end, two hopeless options remain: either to continue writing despite the recognized meaninglessness (in Larnaudie's case) or to break out of the political discourse and look for another form of action (in Idier's case).
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 – making "Ulysse à Paris" visible as an epic that constantly questions its own possibility.
Diaspora as a movement: Manuel Carcassonne
Manuel Carcassonne's "Le Retournement" (Grasset, 2022) begins with an unassuming sentence – "Souvent, Nour et moi, nous nous disputions" – and unfolds from this the story of a man who only late in life, between Parisian publishing offices and a hospital bed in the Hôpital Cochin, between reading Flavius Josephus and the streets of devastated Beirut, comes to the realization that "Jewish heritage" is not a neutral finding, but an existential ascription. Triggered by his encounter with Nour, the Lebanese Christian writer from Achrafieh, whose persistent confusion of "israélite" and "israélien" exemplifies the problem of identity, and by a personal crisis, the narrator embarks on an associative journey through the history of the "Pope's Jews," through family archives, philosophical readings, and contemporary politics. The review interprets this deliberately hybrid book, which oscillates between love story, essay, and historical archaeology, as a literary form of "retournement": not as a return to an origin, but as a movement of displacement and superimposition, in which identity emerges precisely where it defies definitive definition. From the recurring conflict at the beginning to the exhausted gesture of sleep at the end—Nour, walking through the rubble of Mar Mikhael after the explosion of August 4, 2020, and the narrator kissing her without having found any answers—the text, the review argues, demonstrates that Jewishness in late modernity refers neither to faith nor land nor language, but to a specific experience of time, memory, and otherness: a continuous movement that unfolds in the act of writing itself.
Between Glue and Life: A Phenomenology of the Book
Michel Jullien's "Le Format d'un livre" (Verdier, 2026) unfolds a phenomenology of the book that is as precise as it is sensuously rich, starting not with the text but with the object: the weight of the pages, the smell of the paper, the posture of the reading hands. In loosely connected, narratively grounded chapters, Jullien combines miniatures of book history—from the dépôt légal of the Renaissance to the typography of the Pléiade—with autobiographical scenes and ethnographically precise observations of reading as a physical practice. The book thus appears as a unique kind of time receptacle: it stores not only texts but also traces of lived experience—fingerprints, found objects, wear and tear—and derives its meaning from the interplay of material, form, use, and memory. Jullien's essay therefore moves beyond classical genres, between object description, cultural history, and self-narration, vividly demonstrating that the book speaks even before it is read.
Dismantling German-French historical myths in Eric Vuillard's récits
Éric Vuillard's "La bataille d'Occident" (2012) and "L'ordre du jour" (2017) are two war narratives that tell the First and Second World Wars not as national histories, but as products of mutually intertwined Franco-German mythologies: The Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71 forms the structural horizon of both texts, from which the complementary self-images of both nations – the German mythology of rationality and the unstoppable military apparatus, and the French "élan" myth of the glorious offensive – emerge as traumatic reflections of each other. The essay argues that Vuillard's literary method essentially consists of a twofold deconstruction: firstly, he demonstrates that the supposed German efficiency is a bluff—the Wehrmacht's tanks are stuck in traffic on the road to Linz, Schlieffen moves paper figures across a yellowed map—and secondly, that French revanchism collapses in Joffre's culinary Alsatian fantasies, while soldiers in red uniform trousers march into machine-gun fire. The unifying explanatory model is neither national character nor political irrationalism, but rather capitalist interest and class logic: the twenty-four industrialists who financed Hitler in 1933 appear in Vuillard's work as the civilian continuation of the same accounting rationality that led Schlieffen to devise his plan of annihilation as a profit gamble. As a genre of Récit – a hybrid form between essay, historiography and novel – Vuillard practices an autopoetologically reflected poetics of the counter-archive, which sets the repressed names of the victims, the collapsed myths of the perpetrators and the continuing amnesia of corporations against the domestication of history into the folkloristic "déesse raisonnable" of a stagnant historical politics.
Society in a mode of fragmentation – literature as a response to the crisis of representation: Robert Lukenda
Robert Lukenda's study, "Representing Society in the Age of Singularities: Narrative Responses to France's Contemporary Crisis of Representation," is a comprehensive analysis of how contemporary French literature responds to the experience that "society" as a coherent whole has become increasingly elusive. Starting with scenes such as Annie Ernaux's ethnographic view of the supermarket or Éric Vuillard's reconstruction of nameless revolutionary actors, Lukenda demonstrates that literature intervenes precisely where political and media discourses distort or fail to capture social reality. In a first, broad theoretical section, he unfolds France's historical and contemporary crisis of representation—from the tension between the republican claim to unity and social inequality to the fragmentation into "France périphérique" and metropolises—before analyzing literary responses in the second part: autosociobiographical self-examinations (Ernaux, Eribon), documentary reconstructions (Vuillard), collective narrative projects ("Raconter la vie"), and serial formats. The review argues that Lukenda convincingly defines literature as a medium of "mediation" that makes social relations visible where classical forms of representation fail; at the same time, it critically emphasizes that this literature often privileges the perspective of the "invisible," while elites, political institutions, and inherent aesthetic logics remain underexposed. These works create an image of a France that only inadequately describes itself—and of a literature that makes this gap visible without being able to fully close it.
A thriller as a Corneille tragedy: Patrick Besson
Patrick Besson's crime novel "Presque tout Corneille" (Stock, 2025, cited as PTC) functions like a Corneille tragedy disguised as a holiday comedy: Georges Charpy, a fired Parisian journalist, encounters his former boss at the Hotel Aiglon in Corsica and begins to humiliate him at every conceivable game—swimming, tennis, chess, table tennis—driven by his Corsican wife, Colomba, who, like Mérimée's eponymous heroine, pushes the man toward a vendetta without ever explicitly stating it, a power structure that the essay identifies as the true center of the plot. Meanwhile, Lisa, the hotel director's daughter, reads Corneille's complete works chronologically by the pool—one tragedy per day—and her quotations comment on the events like a classical chorus: "Qui vit haï de tous ne saurait longtemps vivre" (from Cinna). "Qui se laisse outrager mérite qu'on l'outrage" (from Heraclius). Sentences that circle Corneille's central theme, namely the question of whether man can ever reconcile what he wants with what he is allowed to do, and which in the novel serve to make the act of murder appear morally predetermined, not as an exception, but as a consequence. The boss is found beheaded, later a second character as well; Georges confesses to both murders—the first out of honor, the second out of jealousy—and the essay reads this double murder as evidence that Besson is not introducing Corneille into the thriller genre, but rather showing that the thriller possesses the same moral architecture as classical theater: guilt arises where the will to gain satisfaction is stronger than reason, which urges moderation, and Lisa, who at the end cuts Corneille off—"Oui: trop de sang." —thus performing the gesture that marks the core of the novel: literature can comment on violence, but it cannot stop it.
Beauty, corruption, and literary genealogy: Capote's guilt, Aragon's farewell, Simon Liberati, and Taïné's death
Simon Liberati's "New York City Inferno" (Stock, 2026) concludes a trilogy of novels that began with "Les Démons" (2020) in late 1960s Paris and leads via 1970s Rome ("La Hyène du Capitole", 2024) to 1974-75 Manhattan – a New York at the turning point between pop and punk, between the last glamour of post-war culture and the first dark premonition of an epidemic that has not yet been named. At the center are the Russian-born siblings Tcherepakine: Taïné, androgynous, drug-addicted, proto-punk avant la lettre, who dies on the schooner Elseneur in Palma de Mallorca, and Alexis, the vagabond would-be writer who ultimately takes Capote's money and begins writing the book that is already the first volume of the trilogy—a Möbius strip in which genesis and work are inextricably intertwined. The essay interprets the trilogy as a circular structure: The book that Alexis announces at the end of the third volume bears the same title as "Les Démons," and this circularity is a poetics statement—literature does not arise from emptiness, but from survival, from the material of the dead. Truman Capote, who appears in the novel as a living corpse and gives the student the apostolic mission, is the key figure: Liberati accomplishes what Capote could not with "Answered Prayers" because the social victory had made writing impossible – he writes the American Proust as a French one, with the same social chronicle, the same betrayal, the same conviction that gossip is a literary form, but with the affective charge that Capote's clinical irony lacks. In this constellation, Louis Aragon's brief, hallucinatorily beautiful appearance also gains its full weight: The old communist, who looks through a fogged windowpane at a Balthus tableau and hums Nerval verses, is not only an intertextual gesture, but the witness of the end – the last representative of a European literature of engagement, who bids farewell to Bérénice (the name of the main character in Aragon's "Aurélien"), who, unlike in Aragon's work, is not a historical martyr in Liberati's version, but a purely aesthetic vision of youth, which the old man sees through glass and cannot touch before he disappears down the sandy path, taking an era with him.
The Unreachable City: Sanctity, History, and Violence in the French Jerusalem Novel
What place does Jerusalem occupy in contemporary French literature—and what does this place reveal about literature itself? This essay examines eleven novels and short stories, ranging from André Schwarz-Bart to Nathan Devers, from Valérie Zenatti to Justine Augier, from Élie Wiesel to Mathias Énard, and demonstrates that Jerusalem is never merely a backdrop in these works, but rather a structuring principle: a city that disorients the characters, brings repressed memories back to the surface, imposes affiliations, and shatters established forms. Three functional types emerge from the comparison—Jerusalem as an eschatological space, as a political focal point, and as an existential mirror—which are distributed and overlap throughout the texts without ever converging. A specifically French perspective proves constitutive: Republican secularism, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the experience of the Shoah as part of its own history—all of this colors the perception of a city equally sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and whose threefold sanctity has for centuries produced wars as well as longings. Arab and Muslim authors such as Karim Kattan, Amin Maalouf, and Adania Shibli add their own distinctive emphasis, describing Jerusalem not as the destination of a long-held yearning, but as the starting point of forced exile—and using French as a strategically chosen medium to inscribe Palestinian concepts and experiences into a Western discourse that otherwise does not recognize them. What unites the works examined, beyond all differences, is the awareness that Jerusalem eludes the sovereign narrative gaze: None of these texts triumphs over its subject; all bear the marks of the place where they have failed.

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