Robert Merle – Rentrée littéraire: contemporary French literature

France's Contamination 2036: Robert Merle and Emmanuel Ruben

20.02.2619.08.25

Emmanuel Ruben's novel "Malville" (Stock, 2024) fits into a long line of apocalyptic literature, ranging from biblical prophecies to Robert Merle's "Malevil" (1972, English translation 1975), whose title is deliberately invoked here as an intertextual reference: On the level of social critique, "Malville" is a reckoning with French nuclear policy since the 1970s. Today, Ruben meticulously traces how political decisions—from Macron's revival of the nuclear program to the rise of the far right and the dissolution of the European Union—led to catastrophe. Robert Merle's "Malevil" is narrated from the first-person perspective of the farmer Emmanuel Comte, who, after a sudden nuclear strike, survives in the isolated castle of Malevil along with a small group of friends and neighbors. Even before the actual plot begins, it becomes clear that Rubens' "Malville" is intended to be read as an intertextual dialogue with Merle – a continuation, variation and at the same time a critical reversal of his apocalyptic novel.

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Between myth and mass murder: German-French novels under the shadow of the Third Reich
Michel Tournier's "Le Roi des Aulnes" (1970) and Jonathan Littell's "Les Bienveillantes" (2006), despite the 36-year gap and two fundamentally different literary temperaments, are both Franco-German novels in the most precise sense: Tournier sends his Parisian garage owner Abel Tiffauges as a prisoner of war to East Prussia, where he experiences Germany as a mythological mirror land – herds of deer like heraldic animals, Göring's hunting lodge as a "palais sur rails", the Napola castle Kaltenborn as the fulfillment of an Erlking obsession – until the Jewish child Ephraïm inverts all his symbols at the end and transforms himself into the Star of David in the last sentence; Littell equips his first-person narrator, Max Aue, an SS officer and mass murderer, with Alsatian origins, a French mother, a Sciences Po education, and Parisian collaborators, so that Franco-German hybridity appears not as a humanizing bridge, but as a prerequisite for complicity—whoever knows Racine and Hölderlin equally well simply writes about mass murder in better French. The present contrasting interpretation argues that both novels share precisely this commonality: They reject the comforting narrative that National Socialism was something culturally alien, imposed from the outside on the Franco-German heritage, and instead force their protagonists—the fascinated Frenchman as well as the hybrid perpetrator—to recognize their own education, fascination, and language skills as a gateway to the Nazi regime. The review sharply distinguishes between Tournier's mythological alienation – the crime is sublimated into archaic patterns (Erlkönig, Christopher, inversion of signs) in order to become visible – and Littell's hyperrealistic immanence, which denies any mythological shield and draws the reader into a complicity through Aue's cultivated narrative tone, from which he cannot escape; the review suggests that this difference is not only aesthetically but also historically explainable: in 1970 Auschwitz was still indescribable, it was sublimated – in 2006 it was academicized and museumified, and Littell insisted on its unprocessability. As Franco-German texts, both novels are also examined in terms of their language policy: the German, which Tournier leaves in the novel as reverently untranslated foreign material (Napola, Reichsjägermeister, Jungmann), and the French, which Littell chooses as the written language for the German mass murder – a literary sacrilege that turns the "clarté française" against itself and thus illustrates the thesis of the review that the Franco-German cultural community cannot close the black hole in its history, but can only circle around it.
Between completion and silence: Antoine Compagnon
Antoine Compagnon's "La Vie derrière soi: Fins de la littérature" (2021) brings together the developed lectures from his final Collège de France cycle into a wide-ranging, essayistic reflection on the "ends" of literature—understood simultaneously as conclusion, goal, limit, and dissolution. Starting from the opposing poles of Roland Barthes (non-writing) and Marcel Proust (writing until the very end), Compagnon unfolds a poetics of late style that intertwines literary, art-historical, and philosophical discourses. Using a European canon—from Nicolas Poussin and Rembrandt to François-René de Chateaubriand and Samuel Beckett—the book examines figures of late-life work, of silence, of swan songs, and of last words, without reducing these phenomena to a single, unified theory. His central thesis, more demonstrated than explicitly formulated, is that literature is essentially a practice of finitude: it gains its meaning precisely in dealing with its own end. With the concept of the "aevum," Compagnon describes literature as a temporal form situated between individual transience and cultural duration, in which mortality and tradition intertwine. Thus, the end of literature appears not as its disappearance, but as its privileged enactment—as an art of taking leave that finds its form in the writing itself.
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.
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."
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.
Resurrection: Ecstasy, Delusion and Revelation in the Works of Cécile Delacoudre
Cécile Delacoudre's novel "La Baptiste" (2026) tells the story of a Parisian techno producer who experiences a radical, boundary-pushing encounter at the intersection of artistic self-empowerment, social downfall, and religious ecstasy: Anastasie Hirsch, bipolar and anti-medication, increasingly interprets her life as a messianic mission, in which music becomes liturgy, the techno scene a sacred space, and baptism the central—simultaneously saving and destructive—pattern of action. The narrative arc leads from an excessive birthday night in the shadow of the Notre-Dame fire in Paris, through a series of social losses (custody, relationships, artistic autonomy), to the final catastrophe in the mud of a techno festival, where vision, self-dissolution, and an ambivalent moment of possible "resurrection" merge. The essay reads this narrative not as a linear pathography, but as a deliberately open constellation of three equally valid interpretive frameworks: an ethnographic study of the techno-culture milieu, a phenomenologically precise inner view of a manic-psychotic episode, and a serious, i.e., unironic, religious narrative. The argument emphasizes that the text systematically suspends the distinction between madness and wisdom (in the Pauline sense): the unreliable first-person narrator provides no corrective external perspective, but rather compels the reader to consider clinical diagnosis, mystical experience, and poetic imagination simultaneously. It is precisely in this epistemic undecidability, according to the implicit thesis of the interpretation, that the novel possesses an aesthetic and ethical radicalism: it rejects both reduction to illness and transfiguration into prophecy, instead revealing the feedback loop in which every social defeat intensifies religious excess and every ecstasy generates new destruction. Thus, the final scene – rising from the mud holding another's hand – appears less as a redemption than as a minimal, fragile counter-figure to the failed grand narratives of art, religion, and therapy: a remnant of possibility that keeps the question of "resurrection" open without answering it.
The flower as text, body and danger: three novels by Colette Fellous, Célia Houdart and Constance Guisset
What connects three very different contemporary French novels—Colette Fellous's "Quelques fleurs" (Gallimard, 2024), Célia Houdart's "Les Fleurs sauvages" (POL, 2024), and Constance Guisset's "Fleur de peau" (Flammarion, 2026)? At first glance, only the botanical nature of their titles; but on closer reading, a shared and multifaceted literary project emerges: the questioning, displacement, and in some cases, radical destruction of that symbolist tradition which, since Mallarmé, has encoded the flower as a sublime, incorporeal sign—as "l'absente de tous bouquets," absent from every real bouquet, ascending into pure idea. This comparative review shows how the three authors inherit and disrupt this legacy in their own unique ways, reclaiming the plant-like and bringing it back into the corporeal, the ecological, and the pharmacological. Fellous, whose autofictional essay operates within the formal framework of the lyrical narrative, cultivates the flower as a mnemonic device and a poetics of self-portraiture: her flowers are silent witnesses to lived experience, condensations of childhood, mother, Tunis, and Paris, and the book she is writing is literally “en ces fleurs caché”—hidden within the flowers, awaiting the act of writing that will liberate them. Houdart, on the other hand, strips the flower of any subjective claim: in the laconic polyphonic narration of her Provençal characters, wildflowers are ecological symbols of a nature indifferent to humankind and—in the case of the hallucinogenic datura, which poisons two characters—even prepared to harm them, unintentionally and without message; botanical knowledge here becomes an ethical and epistemic necessity. Finally, Guisset turns the romantic floral aesthetic on its head with a gesture of critical commentary on the system: Her florist Ava has spent thirteen years arranging the beauty of flowers, accumulating an invisible poison through pesticides in her skin – the flower, chosen as a counter-world to the financial world, turns out to be its accomplice, and the woman's body a barometer of a global commodity economy that bases beauty on toxic substances. The essay reads these three very different text projects along a common dimension of analysis: the function of the flower as a temporal figure, as a bodily figure, and as a linguistic figure. It argues that contemporary French literature uses the flower motif to span a scale ranging from mnemonic cultivation to ecological sobriety and pharmacological paradox – culminating in Ismaël Jude's concurrently published novel "Une vie de jasmin," which is used as a fourth comparative text, in a linguistically skeptical ontology of pure emanation that consistently takes Mallarmé's idealization to its logical conclusion using the means of the body and biology.
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?
The 35 categories of the French literary landscape: 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 genuine achievement of the volume (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).
Where the trauma begins: Camille de Toledo
Camille de Toledo's "Thésée, sa vie nouvelle" (Verdier, 2020) develops a multifaceted literary investigation from a shocking moment—the discovery of her brother's hanged body in Paris in 2005—intertwining mourning, family chronicle, essay, and poetic evocation. The novel follows its narrator, Thésée, over the course of years in a dual movement: into the present of a traumatized body and simultaneously backward into the genealogical depths of a family marked by loss, silence, and concealed Jewish heritage. Starting with three boxes containing photographs, letters, and the manuscript of her great-great-grandfather, a "poem-inquiry" unfolds, revealing how historical violence, suicides, and repressed memory are inscribed not only narratively but also physically in the bodies of descendants. The review interprets this formally hybrid work as a performative poetics of the transgenerational: the non-linear temporal structure, the synchronicities of the dates, the shifting pronouns, and the incorporation of documentary voices realize precisely the entanglement of past and present that the text asserts. At its core lies the reinterpretation of the Theseus myth: the labyrinth is no longer an external place, but rather the interior of the family history, the "Ariadne's thread" a fragile web of archival material that only emerges in the act of writing. By returning at the end—in a radical inversion of chronology—to the great-great-grandfather's suicide in 1939, the novel marks the origin of the wound and reveals that knowledge is only possible through return: through arriving at the place from which everything originated. The essay emphasizes that Toledo thus provides neither a psychological nor a sociological explanation of suicide, but rather establishes a literary form of knowledge that gives voice to the memory sedimented in matter. Literature appears here as a place of “revival” – not as a resolution of trauma, but as a reconnection with the dead, as a careful mending of a broken thread that makes a “vie nouvelle” conceivable in the first place.
Proliferating bodies, silent flowers: the aesthetics of emanation in Ismaël Jude
The review of Ismaël Jude's "Une vie de jasmin" (éditions verticales, 2026) interprets the novel as a fundamental questioning of human identity, language, and civilization. At its heart is the character Jasmine, whose body, through a process of "dermaculture," produces plants, thus dissolving the boundary between humans and vegetation. Against the backdrop of a repressive, technocratic order—embodied by the allergic, authoritarian father and a world shaped by concrete and pesticides—the text develops a counter-aesthetic of proliferation, of "Émanation," and of a "sexuality without language," in which flowers appear not as symbols but as independent, untranslatable forms of life. The review demonstrates how this poetics intertwines with a traumatic family and colonial history: The name Jasmine proves to be an "acte manqué," a bloody trace of the Algerian War that does not create identity but rather undermines it. By combining ecological critique, queer physicality and language-skeptical poetics, the review ultimately interprets the novel as a plea for an unfixable life that spreads – like a pioneer plant – in the cracks of civilization and asserts itself beyond symbolic orders.
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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