Sébastien Berlendis

This review reads Sébastien Berlendis's new novel, "24 fois l'Amérique" (Actes Sud, 2026, cited in FA), in conjunction with two earlier books ("Revenir à Palerme," 2018, and "Seize lacs et une seule mer," 2021), as part of a cohesive poetic constellation. All three texts explore a common narrative motif: a first-person narrator follows the trail of a missing woman, traversing landscapes steeped in history, memory, and melancholy. While the first novel unfolds an almost claustrophobic search for the lost lover, Délia, in a decaying Palermo, staging photography as a medium of remembrance, the second relocates this search to the summer lakes of Berlin, where Super 8 films of a mysterious woman become the starting point for a leisurely reconstruction of the past. FA now expands this movement into a road movie through the American Rust Belt: The narrator travels from New York to Lake Michigan to find Marianne, who has been present for years only through drawn postcards. The novel unfolds a visually structured journey through motels, industrial wastelands, and lake landscapes, in which photographic equipment, overexposed images, and cinematic shots become central metaphors for the unreliability of memory. Marianne appears less as a real figure than as a "presence through absence," whose trace the narrator follows in a landscape of fragmented memories. – The article argues that these three novels can be read as an intermedial variation on the Orpheus myth. Berlendis's narrator constantly moves in a paradoxical motion between memory and the present: Like Orpheus, he tries to retrieve a lost Eurydice, but the search does not lead to the recovery of his beloved, but rather to an aesthetic transformation of the loss. The analysis reveals that this poetics is strongly influenced by visual media. Photography, film, and Polaroid images not only structure the characters' perceptions but also the formal organization of the texts—particularly in the most recent novel, whose twenty-four episodes resemble cinematic shots from a melancholic road movie. Simultaneously, the article interprets this latest novel as an indirect political novel about contemporary America: The journey through the Rust Belt leads through deindustrialized cities, religiously charged landscapes, and migrant-dominated urban spaces, resulting in a multifaceted portrait of a socially fractured country. The interpretation argues that Berlendis does not formulate this political dimension programmatically but rather allows it to emerge from a poetics of observation in which personal memory, media perception, and historical landscapes are intertwined.