Kai Nonnenmacher founded the German-French platform in 2022. He teaches Romance Culture and Literature in Bamberg and publishes reviews of new French releases on his blog.“
Sigrid Brinkmann on July 6, 2026 in Deutschlandfunk, Book market.
This post is written in German at https://rentree.de, and automatic translations exist in English and French: English, French.
Despite the diversity of their narrative forms, the four novels paint a shared panorama of the comic as a paradoxical dispositif situated between production, loss, and reflection: In Fabio Viscogliosi’s *Harpo* (2020) as a physically learned craft, almost passed down through the family, which nevertheless remains bound to external frameworks (brotherly bonds, dramaturgy, the logic of production) and is completely suspended in the moment of amnesia; Karine Tuil radicalizes this ambivalence by staging the comic in *Quand j’étais drôle* (2005), she presents the comic as both a compulsion and an inescapable linguistic form, so that the narrative voice articulates its own failure in the mode of a punchline, thereby performatively subverting the thesis of “lost humor“; David Foenkinos reverses the initial premise in „Je suis drôle“ (2026) by showing that it is not comedy, but rather its absence—more precisely, a presence that can be read as „“tragic“—generates social and artistic success, thereby exposing the comic as a false promise without abandoning the underlying logic (being loved through the production of emotion); Finally, Camille Bordas, in „Des inconnus à qui parler“ (2025), Camille Bordas transforms the comic into an explicit discursive space in which it appears as a process that can be taught and analyzed, yet whose methodological dissection (deconstruction, variation, theorization) stands in tension with its effect. This essay does not rank these four models hierarchically but reads them as complementary “theories in narrative form“: Comedy is, at one point, practice without theory (Viscogliosi); at another, theory in the mode of self-contradiction (Tuil); at yet another, the negative foil of an affective economy (Foenkinos); and at still another, an explicitly epistemological system (Bordas). The argument reveals recurring structures—such as the link between the comic and biographical deficits or its dependence on institutional contexts—and interweaves these with overarching models (Bergson’s mechanics, Girard’s equilibrium, Le Breton’s corporeality, Flandrin’s sociology), so that the individual analyses do not remain additive but illuminate one another. This becomes particularly evident in the key scenes: Harpo’s loss of his comic identity reveals the comic as an effect of framing; Sandre’s diagnosis of “double vision” reveals the inner split that both enables and destroys comedy; Gustave’s rejection as “not drôle” marks the turning point of an entire value system; Dorothy’s reflection on the question as a tool presents the comic as an independent form of knowledge. Overall, the essay follows a clear line of argument: It shifts the question ““What is the comic?” toward “Under what conditions does it arise, function, and fail?”—and derives its analytical precision precisely from this, because the comic appears not as a stable property but as a fragile relationship between body, language, audience, and institution.
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Étienne de Montety’s novel „Il y a une autre rive“ (2026) tells the story of Rahman, the Paris-born son of Algerian immigrants, who travels to Algeria after his father’s death and undergoes a religious crisis there that ultimately leads him to convert to Christianity. The novel thus embodies an interreligious poetics that does not pit Islam and Christianity against each other hierarchically, but rather juxtaposes them with ethnographic precision in their ritual, symbolic, and ethical dimensions —from the symmetrical depiction of funeral rites and baptism to the subterranean intertwining of prayer practices within a single space. This essay examines how Montety achieves this plural narrative style through several interlocking techniques: through the first-person narration from Rahman’s shifting perspective, through the spatial structure linking Mediana and Paris, through the constellation of characters ranging from Ibrahim to Jean-Marie Bazin, through specific scenes of religious confrontation, and finally through a visual language of light, water, and crossing that portrays conversion not as a rupture but as a translation. At the center is the question of how a novel of a disembodied digital modernity, through the radical reclamation of love—““Je l’ai fait par amour“”; and what it means that, as the title suggests, there is still “another shore.”.
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Sébastien Berlendis’ *Lungomare* superimposes two Ligurian summers like two exposures on the same negative: the summer of 1971, when the narrator’s parents, young and sun-tanned, pose on the coast of San Remo, and the present-day summer in Roccabianca, where the narrator, with his Rolleiflex slung around his neck, photographs his lover Annabella in front of blue cabin doors. Amid crumbling Art Nouveau villas, white buoys, and the scent of lukewarm sparkling wine, a prose unfolds that conceives of memory as a photographic development process—blurred, overexposed, never quite fixable. This intermedial poetics, which consistently models its syntax on the camera, film, and darkroom, permeates Berlendis’s‘ other works: In „L’autre pays“, a first-person narrator, in a silent dialogue with an absent lover, traverses summertime Italy and, along the way, deciphers the postcards of an emigrated great-grandfather; In *Maures*, the same gaze returns to the familiar campsites of Provence, where four yellowed photographs from 1972 frame the slow farewell to the grandparents. This interpretation reads these books as variations on a single process in which light, celluloid, and typesetting jointly attempt to capture the ephemeral for a moment, without ever fully possessing it.
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In his poetry collection *Histoires naturelles* (Mercure de France, 2022) brings together paths, forests, rivers, and gardens in seventeen texts in which language itself becomes the subject of contemplation: short, often subjectless sequences of sentences mimic breathless walking, cathedral and architectural vocabulary transforms treetops into church naves, and a recurring oxymoron —the dead tree that continues to grow, the „humble sovereignty“ of the oaks—captures decay and beauty in the same phrase without resolving them. An essay accompanying this volume demonstrates how this artful, vivid prose can be combined with a literary analysis of genre, narrative perspective, and imagery: The text stands in the tradition of nature writing, yet within that tradition—in a tension characteristic of the genre—it combines the prose poem with natural history nonfiction and hunting literature, thereby keeping open two contradictory approaches to nature at the same time —tender reverence for living things and the dispassionate account of their consumption. Semantic fields of water, flesh, and stone permeate the entire volume and coalesce into an image of nature as a vulnerable, yet tenaciously living body, while the narrator himself, as he dissolves into the forest or by the river, repeatedly blurs the boundary between observer and the observed—that close intertwining of precise nature observation and autobiographical memory that distinguishes nature writing from pure natural history. Thus, Maubert’s book reads both as a sensory experience of nature and as a reflective poetics of writing, demonstrating to the reader that precise observation of nature and literary form do not exclude one another, but rather are mutually dependent.
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Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a poet, painter, and one of the central figures of the Parisian bohemian scene in Montmartre, where—living in abject poverty yet in close intellectual proximity to Picasso—he revolutionized the prose poem and, through works such as *Le Cornet à dés*, developed a poetics of dreams, chance, and mystical vision that straddled Judaism and Catholic conversion. This review compares two books from the year 2026 that share the same historical starting point—the arrest and death of Max Jacob at the Drancy transit camp—yet unfold radically divergent modes of representation: Olivier Rasimis’s *Saint Max* uses an achronological, stream-of-consciousness narrative to create a hagiographically grounded inner perspective that interprets Jacob’s life and death as a mystically charged journey of the cross, while Philippe Douroux’s „Max Jacob et le jeune SS“, as a documentary dual biography, intertwines the poet’s biography with that of a later SS volunteer and, through archival research, discovered letters, and administrative records, formulates a historical-political indictment; this review systematically explores this opposition and argues that both texts answer the same fundamental question—how a death can be narrated between religious meaning-making and industrial mass murder—using opposing methods, whereby Rasimi’s aesthetic transfiguration tends to spiritualize the violence, whereas Douroux’s document-based reconstruction, on the other hand, transforms experience into evidence, so that it is only in their contrastive juxtaposition that their respective blind spots become visible: here, the danger of theologizing historical violence; there, the reduction of existential dimensions to documentary fact; the strength of the review therefore lies in its precise narratological and epistemological articulation of this difference, through which the literary form itself becomes comprehensible as an epistemic instrument.
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A flooded Baltic Sea coast, a peaty high plateau in Silesia, an abandoned rocket amid rusting antennas and nesting seagulls: In Léa Cuenin’s debut novel „Memory Palace“ (Rivages, 2026), four women and a vigilant artificial intelligence encode the last archives of a vanishing humanity onto plant DNA, in order to launch them into space in ten—later eleven—metal capsules. Between countdown and flashback, between a tooth, a bone splinter, and a blood-soaked feather, a book unfolds that tells of loss, tenderness, and the question of whom to entrust one’s memory to when there is no one left to read it. This essay reads the novel as what its title literally promises: a palace of memory. It traces how the ancient technique of loci —linking knowledge to concrete, walkable places—permeates every level of the novel: from its architectural foundation, through the metal capsule and the nanodisk, to the brain implant and, 3.5 million years later, into the body of an alien being. The essay examines the constellation of characters and gender dynamics, narrative perspective and forms of communication, temporal structure, imagery, and the autopoietic self-referentiality of a machine that bears the same name as the book in which it exists. In doing so, the novel enters into a recognizable dialogue with literary models: with the speculative prose of Céline Minard and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as—through the framed dedicatory quotations—with Sappho’s fragments and the pathos of loss from „Blade Runner“.
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The overview of Camille de Toledo’s work—under the guiding concept of “Vertige”—unfolds a diagnosis of the present that is as literary as it is epistemological, which the review characterizes as a genuinely ecological figure of thought: Starting from the sensually perceptible reality of recurring heat waves, ““vertigo” is interpreted not as mere subjective uncertainty, but as a symptom of a destabilized Earth whose geophysical and semantic foundations are eroding simultaneously. The review’s argument follows a dual movement that it identifies as defining the structure of Toledo’s entire body of work: on the one hand, the introspective-poetic reflection on language as an uncertain foundation (particularly in „L’inquiétude d’être au monde“ and „Une histoire du vertige“), and on the other hand, the institutional translation of this crisis into legal and political forms (primarily in „*Le fleuve qui voulait écrire* and *L’internationale des rivières*). The review interprets these two strands not as progress, but as a pendulum swing: “Vertige” functions simultaneously as a poetological category (the instability of signs, “pharmakon” of language) and as an ethical-political imperative that demands new forms of recognition for nonhuman actors. Particularly striking is the thesis that Toledo does not narratively domesticate the ecological crisis, but rather formally reproduces it: The hybridity of genres, the shift from monological speech to polyphonic listening, and finally to speculative „fiction instituante“ appear as aesthetic counterparts to a state of the world in which “the ground is slipping away.” The review interprets this formal dynamic as a conscious rejection of any “consolation” and thus as an alternative to apocalyptic or technicist climate narratives; instead, a “poetics of endurance” that does not resolve the vertigo but renders it productive—whether in the literary self-questioning of the “homo narrans” or in the vision of a justice that grants rivers a voice and the power to act. Overall, the argument is compelling due to its close interweaving of textual analysis, genre theory, and ecological hermeneutics: it demonstrates that Toledo’s work not only deals with climate change but also enacts its epistemic demands at the levels of form, language, and institution.
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Patrick Grainville’s novel *Les Yeux de Milos* (Seuil, 2021) makes the act of seeing itself the subject of the narrative: Its protagonist, whose unusually blue eyes have made him the target of strangers’ stares since childhood, grows up in the shadow of two painters from the Côte d’Azur—Pablo Picasso and Nicolas de Staël—whose biographies the novel weaves into the love story in an essayistic manner, until a jealous lover destroys one of his eyes with a razor blade. This article reads the novel as a reflection on the price of extraordinary beauty and the impossibility of innocent vision: It examines how the text blurs genre boundaries between the Bildungsroman, the artist’s essay, and mythological narrative; how, through naming, ekphrasis, and a dense intertextual network to lay a mythological architecture—drawn from the Abduction of Europa and the Minotaur myth—underneath the individual biography, and how it reverses the classical constellation of the male gaze and the female object of the gaze for its protagonist, without turning this into a simple narrative of liberation. At the heart of the analysis is the thesis that the novel answers its own initial question—what remains of seeing when the eye is injured—not conceptually, but formally: through the shift from the immediate gaze to the collectively narrated image, explicitly marked as partially fictional, with which the novel itself concludes.
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Lou Lootgieter’s collection *Les Dessous lesbiens de la littérature* (2026) draws on 29 Francophone texts dating from the 19th century to present a deliberately subjective, non-chronological cartography of lesbian writing styles, combining journalistic research, interviews, and close readings. The focus is on recurring strategies that female authors use to articulate lesbian desire under conditions of censorship and invisibility: For example, Lootgieter reads Rachilde’s „Monsieur Vénus“ (1884) as an early figuration of „monstrosity“—a cipher for a desire that is as yet without words—while in Monique Wittig’s „L’Opoponax“ (1964), she interprets the grammatical neutralization of gender as a literary „Trojan horse.“ Using examples such as Amélie Nothomb’s „Stupeur et tremblements“ (1999)—whose homoerotic tension was ignored by contemporary critics—or Violette Leduc’s censored boarding school narrative „Thérèse et Isabelle“ the volume demonstrates how significantly reception and publication history contribute to rendering these works invisible. At the same time, the perspective shifts over the course of the four chapters from techniques of concealment to open political positions, as in Constance Debré’s „Love Me Tender“ (2020), which explicitly rejects heterosexuality as a social regime. Theoretical points of reference—ranging from Judith Butler to Monique Wittig to Paul B. Preciado—remain deliberately fragmentary and are used more as a space for resonance than as a systematic framework. In addition, the relationship to male homosexuality, internal feminist lines of conflict, and questions of trans inclusion and exclusion are also selectively addressed in this context. The review highlights these tensions between the wealth of material and the lack of methodological synthesis, as well as the book’s value as a repository of previously marginalized texts, reception documents, and perspectives for further work in literary studies.
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The review describes Christian Garcin’s *Portrait du jeune homme en spirite* (Actes Sud, 2026) as a multi-layered autofictional work that transforms a seemingly occult experience—spiritualist séances with his deceased father—into a poetological origin story of his own writing. The focus is less on the question of the reality of the supernatural than on the reflective self-examination of an author who traces his literary calling back to an ambivalent experience that oscillates between belief and skepticism. The complex temporal structure (the 1980s, written in 2001, published in 2025), the dialogic interview format, and the interweaving of memory, essayistic elements, and intertextual references create a dual movement of distancing and self-affirmation. In this context, spiritualism appears as a metaphor for mediality in the broader sense: as a model for how writing emerges from the mediation between the absent and the present. Ultimately, the review interprets the text as a literary work of mourning, in which the figures of the father and mother become poetological threshold instances, and openness to the „unexplained“ is asserted not as an epistemic deficit but as a productive condition of literature.
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In Célestin de Meeûs’s *Mythologie du .12″* (2024), on a single summer solstice evening in the Belgian countryside, two worlds that would otherwise never intersect collide: Théo, who has just come of age and finished his final exams, is passing the time with his friend Max in the parking lot of a shopping center, between beer, joints, and memories of a failed relationship, while Chief Physician Rombouts returns to his villa on the edge of the forest after a long day at work, where his marriage and role as a father have already fallen apart. When Théo and Max venture into the very same recently acquired wooded area that borders Rombouts„ property that evening, Rombouts hears voices and sees a glimmer of light from his terrace; mistaking the two for burglars, he shoots Théo with his .12—an act born of fear that the novel portrays not as a sudden outburst, but as the culmination of a long-standing downward spiral fueled by possessiveness, wounded masculinity, and the familial transmission of violence. This essay interprets this narrative as an engagement with the myth foreshadowed in the title: Shortly before the shot is fired, Théo recalls the ancient myth of succession involving Uranus and his son Cronus, in which the son castrates his overpowering father to usher in a new order—yet the novel reverses this pattern, for here a father figure kills a young stranger to defend his own status, turning liberating replacement into sterile repetition. As the text shows, property, the ideal of masculinity, and colonial legacy coalesce into a self-made mythology in the sense described by Roland Barthes‘, which makes a killing appear to be self-defense, while the novel’s form and syntax—the endless sentences, scarcely interrupted by periods; the parallel progression of settings; the recurring image of “nowhere“ —carry out this denial of meaning on the level of language itself.
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The review analyzes the center-right presidential candidate for 2027, Édouard Philippe, who, together with Gilles Boyer, wrote a retrospective on his time in government titled „Impressions et lignes claires“ (2021), in conjunction with her earlier political thriller „Dans l’ombre“ (2011) and the later novel „Ils ont tué Édouard Philippe“ (2025)—and uses them to develop a multifaceted portrait of political self-interpretation and literary reflection on power. While „Impressions et lignes claires“ reconstructs the 1,145 days at Matignon in fourteen loosely connected, intertextually titled chapters as a series of impressionistic observations that only coalesce into a contour of political action when considered together, the book simultaneously presents a decidedly non--charismatic understanding of politics as a learnable craft, shaped by reading, institutional loyalty, and personal ties. This stands in contrast to her earlier thriller „Dans l’ombre“ serves as an earlier, fictional trial run that depicts power—in a cynical exaggeration—as a manipulable system and theoretically anticipates the distinction between a visible political figure and a strategist operating behind the scenes. The dystopian novel „Ils ont tué Édouard Philippe“ by a certain „Max B.“ radicalizes this perspective by weaving real political figures into a conspiracy-laden assassination narrative, thereby systematically blurring the line between fiction and documentary claims. The review highlights that across these three texts, a field of tension opens up between literary imagination and political self-presentation: from the cryptic roman à clef to the collectively authored government report, and on to the paranoid dystopia that fictionalizes real political figures without any distance. In this constellation, Philippe appears simultaneously as an author, a character, and a projection surface for a literary-political discourse in which individual career, institutional reflection, and social imagination overlap and mutually structure one another.
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Justine Lévy’s novel *Son fils* (Stock, 2021) recounts the life of Antonin Artaud from the perspective of his mother, Euphrasie, and, in the form of a fictional diary, paints a vivid portrait of a woman who loves and possesses her son—and precisely because of this, never truly understands him. Rather than a work-centered artist biography, the novel focuses on the experience of illness, alienation, and loss, allowing Artaud’s thoughts to emerge only indirectly—as it were, as an echo in his mother’s perception. This review demonstrates how Lévy combines historical facts and literary fiction into a form of biofiction whose narrative power arises precisely from the tension between the narrator’s limited perspective and the reader’s knowledge. The analysis centers on the question of what image of Artaud emerges from this radically subjective perspective, as well as the literary techniques through which the novel incorporates motifs from his work—such as the „body without organs,“ the rejection of biological origin, or the Theater of Cruelty—without explicitly explaining them. At the same time, the study examines how form, language, and perspective make the mother’s claim to ownership just as visible as its progressive failure, thereby transforming the novel into a reflection on the limits of biographical understanding.
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In Timothée de Fombelle's „La vie entière“ (Gallimard, 2026, German edition by dtv in October 2026), nineteen-year-old Claire waits one night in her attic room in occupied Paris for Blanche, the leader of her Resistance network, whom she has fallen in love with without ever telling him. When he overshoots the agreed deadline, she stays sitting at her typewriter, against her own safety rule, and begins to write herself a whole, unlived life—children, a seaside vacation hotel, a shared old age—interwoven with real memories of her underground work, of the courier boy Émile, the forger Rosine, the suspicious neighbor, and the arrests of the summer, until finally footsteps are heard on the stairs, leaving it open whether she herself is arrested, while the text instead jumps to a distant future where an aged Blanche finds and reads her hidden pages. The essay on this slim novel by Timothée de Fombelle unfolds its thesis from this construction: that historical facts and subjective, unverifiable experiences claim the same degree of reality as soon as both are written in the same sentences and tenses. It pursues this idea through genre classification, character constellation, forms of communication, narrative perspective, plot, space and time structure, imagery, gender order, poetics, autopoetological reflection, and intertextual reference to Etty Hillesum, ultimately showing in a comparison of the beginning and end that the novel does not replace reality with fiction, but assigns equal permanence to both beyond the uncertain outcome of the night.
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This overview of literature on Marine Le Pen is cast in the immediate shadow of an ongoing court case: On July 7, 2026, the Paris Cour d’appel will announce its ruling in the trial involving the assistants to National Rally (FN) Members of the European Parliament, in which Marine Le Pen was sentenced in the first instance to a five-year disqualification from holding public office, to be enforced immediately —a decision whose confirmation would exclude her from the 2027 presidential election and pave the way for Jordan Bardella as the Rassemblement National’s replacement candidate, while a reduction or lifting of the immediate enforcement would keep her candidacy open; since the verdict is still pending at the time of writing, the following overview takes on particular urgency. – The review follows a two-pronged structure: on the one hand, a genre-based logic; on the other, an argumentative progression from the visible to the structural. The first section is devoted to several investigative journalism books that, through meticulous research, expose networks, finances, and internal party strategies. Here, the review demonstrates in detail how these texts employ recurring dramatic devices: They open with striking scenes—such as campaign appearances or moments of internal crisis—and then, step by step, unfold a counter-image to the public performance. The political figure thus appears as a strategically controlled construct, whose „normalization“ is described as a deliberate operation. The review highlights that these books derive their impact less from new facts than from their narrative framing: they organize the material according to a logic of revelation that consistently aims to expose a discrepancy between surface and depth. – A second section is devoted to discourse-analytical and ideology-critical studies. Here, the focus shifts: instead of biographical details, the emphasis is on language patterns, shifts in terminology, and rhetorical strategies. The review reconstructs the lines of argumentation in these works: They show, for example, how terms such as „people,“ „sovereignty,“ or „security“ are semantically recoded, how ambivalent formulations simultaneously cater to different audiences, and how older far-right discourses continue in a more moderate form. Particular emphasis is placed on the methodological rigor of these studies, which employ corpus analyses, discourse comparisons, and historical contextualization. Le Pen no longer appears here as an active agent, but rather as the effect of a discourse that extends beyond her. – This is followed by a section on biographical accounts that take a more narrative and psychological approach. The review demonstrates how these books condense central themes—family conflicts, the relationship with her father, and the generational shift within the party—into a coherent life story. It highlights that these biographies frequently employ literary devices: they rely on dramatic climaxes, character development, and symbolic key scenes. The political figure gains depth and definition here, yet is simultaneously embedded in familiar narrative patterns that make her political role understandable and narratable. – Another section of the review is devoted to programmatic writings and political essays, either by Le Pen herself or from her inner circle. Here, the review analyzes the internal structure of these texts: the construction of a collective subject („the people“), the juxtaposition of threat and protection, and the presentation of political clarity through seemingly simple solutions. The argument demonstrates that these writings do not so much develop concrete policy proposals as they offer a coherent worldview in which the author appears as a necessary representative. – Finally, the review examines forecasts, election studies, and fictional texts that anticipate a possible presidency. Particularly instructive here is the observation that statistical models and literary imaginings are converging: both transform the political figure into a figure of the future, whose possibility is already conceived as reality. The review shows how these texts run through scenarios, sketch out governmental constellations, and anticipate political decisions—thereby shifting the boundaries of the imaginable. – The review’s line of argument boils down to viewing these different text types not in isolation, but as part of a shared cultural production process. Taken together, they present „Marine Le Pen“ as a multifaceted figure who, depending on the perspective, is revealed, analyzed, narrated, programmed, or imagined. It is precisely this layering that constitutes her political effectiveness. – Against this backdrop, the pending ruling takes on a significance that extends far beyond the specific legal issue at hand: Its consequences affect not only French domestic politics and the landscape of the 2027 presidential election, but also extend into Franco-German relations—for example, in matters of economic and European policy coordination—and touch upon the political architecture of Europe as a whole, insofar as it could readjust the balance of power between nationalist-populist and integration-oriented projects.
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This text interprets Nassera Tamer’s *Allô la Place* (Verdier, 2025) as an autofictional, formally hybrid novel that elevates the telephone call—concise framed by Jacques Derrida’s dictum on the „spectral“ nature of the voice—to the central metaphor of a diasporic existence: The story is told by a first-person narrator living in Paris who, in her attempt to relearn her parents„ lost Darija, is grappling not so much with a linguistic deficit as with an existential one—namely, the relationship with her origins and her parents, damaged by migration, social advancement, and shame—a relationship with her origins and her parents, whose failure to call forms the novel’s true dramatic core. Instead of a linear plot, the novel unfolds a collage-like structure composed of short sequences, documentary digressions, and inventory-style shop window lists, which coalesce into a poetics of the fragment and of “connection in the process of breaking off„: The linguistic partnership with Mer, who lives in Casablanca, functions as a mirror constellation in which questions of gender, mobility, and inequality converge, while pay phones, as heterotopic threshold spaces, mark a topography of the in-between. The analysis reveals that Tamer stages technical forms of communication—from the audio cassette to the app—not as a narrative of progress, but as an archaeology of failed intimacy, in which the “appel en absence” becomes the signature of a subject suspended between languages and places; at the same time, it interprets the dense fields of metaphor (water, wound, signal, repair) and the intertextual references as elements of an autopoietic reflection that conceives of writing itself as a precarious gesture threatened by disappearance. Overall, the argument consistently focuses on the central metaphor of the interrupted connection and its unfolding in form, motifs, and media reflection.
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The review examines Gabriel Attal’s *En homme libre* (2026) as a paradigmatic example of the French „book candidacy“ and examines how a political biography—from entry into local politics to the sphere of the presidential campaign—is presented both as a self-interpretation and a programmatic blueprint. Starting with the dramatically staged turning point of the 2024 dissolution of Parliament, the book unfolds—in a nonlinear narrative—stories of origin, rise, and identity —from familial influences ranging from a Jewish-atheist to an Orthodox heritage, through his institutional career across various ministries, to his brief tenure as prime minister—and transforms these into a political credo that mobilizes individual experience to legitimize a „new republican“ project. The analysis examines how Attal intertwines intimate confessions (such as those regarding his same-sex partnership, on religion, and biographical ruptures) with strategic self-positioning, how distance and continuity vis-à-vis Macronism are rhetorically balanced, and how a programmatic core emerges that combines economically liberal, socially progressive, and regulatory-authoritarian elements. At the same time, Attal’s self-concept is examined against the backdrop of an already highly diverse field of candidates—ranging from centrist rivals like Édouard Philippe to representatives of the radical left such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and on to dominant figures of the far right like Jordan Bardella —which makes the book appear not only as an individual self-portrait but also as a strategic positioning within an increasingly polarized election campaign. The focus is thus on the dual nature of the text: as a literaryized life story that claims authenticity, and as an implicit electoral platform that narratively prepares and politically justifies the bid for the presidency.
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Antoine Charbonneau-Demers’ novel *Nature Boy* (Flammarion, 2026) unfolds against the backdrop of a contaminated rural community in Quebec, weaving a multi-layered narrative about illness, social determinism, and the violence inherent in the promise of social mobility: At the center is the Torchaud family, whose members—above all Lyne and her nephew Karl—are torn apart by environmental contamination, physical decline, and imaginary escapes into a supposedly better life. The plot initially follows Lyne’s youth, marked by illness and fantasies of social advancement, and later shifts to Karl, who follows in his aunt’s footsteps to the U.S., where—not least through his encounter with a grotesquely exaggerated Thoreau-like figure — finds himself caught up in a promise of nature and freedom that is as violent as it is illusory. Both narrative strands culminate in a coma, in which failing life plans transform into a final, hallucinatory fantasy of triumph. The novel intertwines social satire, body horror, magical realism, and the coming-of-age novel into a radical aesthetic of the abject, in which nature appears not as a place of regeneration but as a zone of revulsion, infection, and exploitation. The review argues that „Nature Boy“ uses this poetics to expose the construction of beauty, authenticity, and freedom as privileges of the wealthy, while the underprivileged remain trapped in the “filth of reality.” Through an analysis of narrative structure, spatial and temporal regimes, and central motifs such as contamination, escape, and appropriation, the novel emerges as a ruthless diagnosis of social conditions whose only escape lies in the paradoxical triumph of the coma—a final, hallucinatory form of freedom.
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„Nature humaine“ (2020) and „Chaleur humaine“ (2023) form a cohesive novel diptych centered on the farmer Alexandre Fabrier and the farm „Les Bertranges“ in the Lot department. „Nature humaine“ tells the story, in a sweeping flashback, of the period from the drought of the summer of 1976 to the hurricanes of 1999, tracing Alexandre’s journey from heir to a family farm through his politicization in the context of the anti-nuclearmovement to his sabotage of a highway project, while simultaneously depicting the decline of traditional agriculture, the dissolution of family ties, and his relationship with the German environmentalist Constanze. „Chaleur humaine“ begins twenty years later, just before the first COVID-19 lockdown, and depicts the same farm under the conditions of climate change, species extinction, and a pandemic, as the family reunites and Alexandre seeks ways to reconcile agriculture, nature conservation, and family reconciliation. This interpretation argues that Serge Joncour conceives both novels not as ecological treatises, but as a literary „poetics of delay and resonance“: Major historical events such as Chernobyl, globalization, storms, or pandemics are consistently interwoven with the subtle changes in the landscape, wildlife, and everyday farm life, so that the global climate crisis becomes recognizable only through local, physically perceptible signs. From this blend of family novel, historical novel, and “roman du terroir,” Joncour develops a narrative style that reveals the rural landscape of “France profonde” as a sensitive seismograph of social and ecological upheavals and elevates the long, often barely perceptible transformation of nature to the very subject of the narrative.
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