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Eigene Aufsätze zur französischen Literatur der Gegenwart

Four novels about the comical: Karine Tuil, Camille Bordas, Fabio Viscogliosi, David Foenkinos

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 acquired craft—almost passed down through the family—that remains bound, however, to external frameworks (brotherly bonds, dramaturgy, the logic of production) and is completely suspended at the moment of amnesia; Karine Tuil radicalizes this ambivalence by staging the comic in "Quand j’étais drôle" (2005), she portrays 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 affect); Finally, in *Des inconnus à qui parler* (2025), transfers the comic into an explicit discursive space, where 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 times, practice without theory (Viscogliosi); at other times, theory in the mode of self-contradiction (Tuil); at still other times, the negative counterpoint to an affective economy (Foenkinos); and at yet other times, 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 diagnosed "double vision“ makes visible 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?“ to "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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From Mediana to Saint-Sulpice: Conversion and Interreligiousity as Narrative Principles in Étienne de Montety

Étienne de Montety's novel "Il y a une autre rive" (There is another shore) (2026) tells the story of Rahman, the Parisian-born son of Algerian immigrants, who travels to Algeria after his father's death and undergoes a religious crisis that ultimately leads him to convert to Christianity. The novel thus realizes an interreligious poetics that does not pit Islam and Christianity against each other hierarchically, but juxtaposes them with ethnographic accuracy in their ritual, symbolic, and ethical dimensions – from the symmetrical depiction of death rites and baptism to the subterranean intertwining of prayer practices in a single space. The essay examines how Montety realizes this plural narrative through several interlocking techniques: through personal focalization on Rahman's changing perspective, through the spatial structure between Médéa and Paris, through the constellation of characters from Ibrahim to Jean-Marie Bazin, through concrete scenes of religious confrontation, and finally through an imagery of light, water, and crossing that depicts conversion not as a break, but as a translation. The central question is how a novel contradicts a disembodied digital modernity through the radical reclamation of love – "Je l'ai fait par amour" (I did it out of love) – and what it means that, as the title suggests, there is still "another shore.".

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The Development of the Past: Photography, Memory, Desire in Sébastien Berlendis

Sébastien Berlendis' "Lungomare" superimposes two Ligurian summers like two exposures on the same negative: the summer of 1971, in which the narrator's parents pose young and sun-tanned on the San Remo coast, and the current summer in Roccabianca, where the narrator, Rolleiflex around his neck, photographs his lover Annabella in front of blue cabin doors. Between crumbling Art Nouveau villas, white buoys, and the scent of lukewarm sparkling wine, a prose unfolds that understands memory as a photographic development process – blurry, overexposed, never quite fixable. This intermedial poetics, which consistently trains sentence structure on camera, film, and darkroom, permeates Berlendis' further work: in "L'autre pays," a first-person narrator, in silent dialogue with an absent lover, travels through a summer Italy, deciphering postcards from a great-grandfather who emigrated along the way; in "Maures," the same gaze returns to the ancestral campsites in Provence, where four yellowed photographs from 1972 frame the slow farewell to his grandparents. The interpretation reads these books as variations on a single procedure, in which light, celluloid, and sentences together try to capture the ephemeral for a moment, without ever fully possessing it.

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Loot and Devotion: Nature Representation in Franck Maubert

Franck Maubert's prose band "Histoires naturelles" (Mercure de France, 2022) brings together path, forest, river, and garden in seventeen texts, whose language itself becomes the object of contemplation: short, often subjectless series of sentences imitate breathless walking, cathedral and architectural vocabulary transforms treetops into naves, and a recurring oxymoron – the dead tree that continues to grow, the „humble sovereignty“ of oaks – captures decay and beauty in the same phrasing, without resolving them. An essay on this volume shows how this artful, image-rich prose can be combined with a literary-scientific analysis of genre, narrative perspective, and metaphor: The text stands in the tradition of nature writing, yet, in a tension characteristic of the genre, it combines the prose poem with the natural science non-fiction book and hunting literature, thus keeping two contradictory ways of accessing nature open simultaneously – tender devotion to the living and the unflustered report of its consumption. Semantic fields of water, flesh, and stone permeate the entire volume, condensing into an image of nature as a vulnerable, yet persistently living body, while the narrator himself, in his dissolution in the forest or by the river, repeatedly dissolves the boundary between observer and observed – that close interweaving of precise nature observation and autobiographical memory that distinguishes nature writing from pure natural science. Thus, Maubert's book reads simultaneously as a sensual experience of nature and as a reflected poetics of writing, demonstrating to the reader that precise nature observation and literary form do not exclude each other, but rather condition each other.

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Max Jacob von Modigliani, um 1916–1917.

Max Jacob Between Transfiguration and Official Report: Philippe Douroux and Olivier Rasimi

Max Jacob (1876–1944) was a poet, painter, and one of the central figures of the Parisian Bohemian scene in Montmartre, where, in existential poverty and spiritual proximity to Picasso, he revolutionized the prose poem and developed a poetics of dreams, chance, and mystical vision between Judaism and his Catholic conversion with works like *Le Cornet à dés*. The review contrasts two books from 2026 that begin from the same historical point – Max Jacob's arrest and death in the Drancy internment camp – but unfold radically divergent modes of representation: Olivier Rasimi's *Saint Max*, in an achronologically structured, stream-of-consciousness narrative, crafts a hagiographically grounded internal perspective that interprets Jacob's life and death as a mystically charged crucifixion. In contrast, Philippe Douroux's *Max Jacob et le jeune SS*, as a documentary double biography, intertwines the poet's life with that of a later SS volunteer, formulating a historical-political indictment through archival research, found letters, and administrative traces. The review systematically elaborates this opposition, arguing that both texts answer the same fundamental question – how a death between religious meaning-making and industrial mass murder can be narrated – with opposing means. Rasimi's aesthetic transfiguration tends to spiritualize violence, while Douroux's file-based reconstruction, conversely, transforms experience into evidence, so that only in their contrasting juxtaposition do their respective blind spots become visible: here, the danger of theologizing historical violence; there, the reduction of existential dimensions to documentary factuality. The review's strength thus lies in the precise narratological and epistemological mediation of this difference, through which literary form itself becomes comprehensible as an epistemic instrument.

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Palace That Walks Itself: Ars Memoriae in Léa Cuenin's Work

A flooded Baltic coast, a peaty plateau in Silesia, an abandoned rocket between rusting antennas and nesting seagulls: In Léa Cuenin's debut novel "Memory Palace" (Rivages, 2026), four women and a watchful artificial intelligence encode the last archives of a dying humanity onto plant DNA, preparing to launch them into space in ten, later eleven, metal capsules. Between the countdown and flashbacks, between a tooth, a bone fragment, and a blood-soaked feather, unfolds a book that tells of loss, tenderness, and the question of whom to entrust your memory to when no one is left to read it. This essay reads the novel as what its title literally promises: a memory palace. It tracks how the ancient method of loci—linking knowledge to concrete, walkable places—travels through all the scales of the novel: from the base as architecture, to the metal capsule, to the nanodisk chain, to the brain implant, and, 3.5 million years later, into the body of an alien being. The character constellations and gender orders, narrative perspective and forms of communication, temporal structure, metaphors, and the autopoietological self-reference of a machine bearing the same name as the book it inhabits are examined. In doing so, the novel clearly enters into dialogue with literary role models: with the speculative prose of Céline Minard and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as, through the framed dedication quotes, with Sappho's fragments and the pathos of loss in "Blade Runner.".

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The Earth's Vertigo: Camille de Toledo

The overview of Camille de Toledo’s work—under the guiding concept of "Vertige"—unfolds a diagnosis of the present that is as much literary as it is epistemological, and which the review characterizes as a genuinely ecological figure of thought: Taking as its starting point the sensually perceptible reality of recurring heat waves, "vertigo" is interpreted not as merely subjective unease, but as a symptom of a destabilized Earth whose geophysical and semantic foundations are eroding simultaneously. The review’s argument follows a dual trajectory, which it identifies as structuring Toledo’s entire body of work: on the one hand, the introspective-poetic reflection on language as an unstable 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, the "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" emerges that does not dispel 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 level of form, language, and institution.

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An Eye That Sees Too Much: Patrick Grainville

Patrick Grainville's novel "Les Yeux de Milos" (Seuil, 2021) makes seeing itself the subject of the narrative: its protagonist, whose unusually blue eyes have made him the target of others' gazes 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 essayistically weaves into the love story, until a jealous lover destroys one of his eyes with a razor blade. The present article reads.

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Autofiction, Time Warp, and the Origin of Writing: Christian Garcin

The review interprets Christian Garcin's "Portrait of the Young Man as a Spiritualist" (Actes Sud, 2026) as a multi-layered autofictional work that transforms a seemingly occult experience – séances with his deceased father – into a poetological origin story of his own writing. The focus is less on the reality of the supernatural and more on the self-reflective questioning of an author who traces his literary calling back to an ambivalent experience, oscillating between belief and skepticism. The complex temporal structure (1980s, writing in 2001, publication in 2025), the dialogical interview format, and the interweaving of memory, essay writing, and intertextual references create a dual movement of distancing and self-assurance. Here, spiritualism appears as a metaphor for mediality in a broader sense: as a model for how writing emerges from the mediation between the absent and the present. Ultimately, the review reads the text as literary mourning work, in which the figures of father and mother become poetological threshold figures, and openness to the „unexplained“ is asserted not as an epistemological deficit but as a productive condition of literature.

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Cosmogony and the Summer Solstice in the Supermarket Parking Lot: Célestin de Meeûs

In Célestin de Meeûs's "Mythologie du .12" (2024), two worlds that normally never intersect collide on a single summer solstice evening in the Belgian countryside: Théo, who has just come of age and finished his final exams, passes the time with his friend Max in the parking lot of a shopping area, between beer, joints, and the memory 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 fatherhood have already broken down. When Théo and Max venture into the recently acquired tract of forest that borders Rombouts's property that evening, he registers voices and light from his terrace, mistakes the two for burglars, and shoots Théo with his .12 gauge shotgun – an act of fear that the novel portrays not as a sudden outburst, but as the endpoint of a long-prepared descent into possessiveness, damaged masculinity, and the intergenerational transmission of violence. The essay reads this narrative as an engagement with the myth announced in the title: shortly before the shot, Théo recalls the ancient succession myth of Uranus and his son Cronus, in which the son castrates the overpowering father to unleash a new order – but the novel inverts this pattern, as here a father figure kills a stranger’s son to defend his own status, transforming liberating separation into sterile repetition. Property, ideals of masculinity, and colonial heritage coalesce, as the text demonstrates, into a self-made mythology in the spirit of Roland Barthes, which makes a killing appear as self-defense, while the novel's form and syntax – the endless sentences barely interrupted by periods, the parallel narration of settings, the recurring image of 'nowhere' – enact this refusal of meaning on the level of language itself.

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The Mother, Language, Madness: Antonin Artaud at Justine Lévy's

Justine Lévy's novel "Son fils" (Stock, 2021) tells the life of Antonin Artaud from the perspective of his mother, Euphrasie, and, in the form of a fictional diary, creates a haunting portrait of a woman who loves and possesses her son, and precisely because of this, never truly understands him. Instead of a work-centered artist biography, the novel focuses on the experience of illness, alienation, and loss, allowing Artaud's thought to emerge only indirectly, as if an echo in his mother's perception. This review shows how Lévy combines historical facts and literary fiction into a biofiction whose narrative power arises precisely from the tension between the narrator's limited viewpoint and the reader's knowledge. The analysis focuses on the question of what image of Artaud emerges from this radically subjective perspective, as well as the literary techniques the novel uses to incorporate 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, it examines how form, language, and perspective make the maternal claim of ownership visible, as well as its progressive failure, thus making the novel a reflection on the limits of biographical understanding.

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A Whole Life Every Day: Dictation and Poetry in Timothée de Fombelle

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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Marine Le Pen as a Book Character: Revealing, Interpreting, Imagining

This overview of literature on Marine Le Pen is cast in the immediate shadow of an ongoing legal proceeding: 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 loss of eligibility to hold public office, with immediate effect —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 suspension 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 a particular sense of 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 distill 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 converge: 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 they could readjust the balance of power between nationalist-populist and integration-oriented projects.

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Missed Calls, Found Language - Nassera Tamer

The present text reads Nassera Tamer's "Allô la Place" (Verdier, 2025) as an auto-fictional, formally hybrid novel that elevates the telephone call – concisely framed by Jacques Derrida's dictum on the „spectral“ nature of voice – to a guiding metaphor for diasporic existence: it recounts a first-person narrator living in Paris who, in attempting to relearn her parents„ Darija, processes less a linguistic deficiency than an existential one, namely the damaged relationship to her origins and parents, disrupted by migration, social mobility, and shame, whose unanswered call forms the actual dramatic core. Instead of a linear plot, the novel unfolds a montage structure of short sequences, documentary digressions, and inventory-like display window lists, which condense into a poetics of the fragment and “connection in rupture„: the language tandem with Mer, living in Casablanca, functions as a mirror constellation in which questions of gender, mobility, and inequality converge, while public payphones mark themselves as heterotopic threshold spaces, charting a topography of the in-between. The analysis highlights that Tamer stages technical communication forms – from audio cassettes to apps – not as a narrative of progress, but as an archaeology of failed closeness, 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 metaphorical fields (water, wound, signal, repair) and intertextual references as elements of an autopoetological reflection that understands writing itself as a precarious act threatened by disappearance. Overall, the argument consistently focuses on the guiding metaphor of the interrupted connection and its unfolding in form, motif, and media reflection.

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Between Manure and Glamour: Nature as an Imposition in Antoine Charbonneau-Demers

Antoine Charbonneau-Demers’ novel "Nature Boy" (Flammarion, 2026) unfolds a multi-layered narrative of illness, social determinism, and the violence of the promise of upward mobility against the backdrop of a contaminated Quebec rural milieu. At its center is the Torchaud family, whose members—primarily Lyne and her nephew Karl—are crushed between ecological contamination, physical decay, and imaginary escapes to a supposedly better life. The plot first follows Lyne's youth, shaped by illness and fantasies of upward mobility, and later shifts to Karl, who follows in his aunt's footsteps to the USA, where—not least through his encounter with a grotesquely exaggerated Thoreau figure—he falls into a natural and freedom promise that is as violent as it is illusory. Both narrative threads culminate in a coma, where failed life plans transform into a final, hallucinatory fantasy of triumph. The novel intertwines social satire, body horror, magical realism, and bildungsroman into a radical aesthetic of the abject, in which nature appears not as a place of regeneration, but as a zone of disgust, 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.“ The analysis of narrative structure, spatial and temporal regimes, and central motifs such as contamination, escape, and appropriation reveals the novel as a ruthless diagnosis of social conditions, whose only way out lies in the paradoxical triumph of the coma—a final, hallucinatory form of freedom.

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The farmer as a seismograph of catastrophe: France profonde in Serge Joncour

"Nature humaine" (2020) and "Chaleur humaine" (2023) form a cohesive novelistic 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 summer drought of 1976 to the hurricanes of 1999, tracing Alexandre's development from the heir of a family farm, through his politicization in the anti-nuclear movement, to the sabotage of a highway project, while simultaneously unfolding the decline of traditional agriculture, the dissolution of family ties, and his relationship with the German environmental activist Constanze. "Chaleur humaine" picks up twenty years later, immediately before the first COVID-19 lockdown, depicting the same farm under the conditions of climate change, species extinction, and pandemic, as the family comes together again and Alexandre seeks ways to reconcile agriculture, environmental protection, and family reconciliation. The interpretation argues that Serge Joncour designs both novels not as ecological thesis novels, but as a literary „poetics of delay and echo“: major historical events such as Chernobyl, globalization, storms, or pandemics are consistently interwoven with the unassuming changes in the landscape, wildlife, and rural everyday life, so that the global climate crisis can only be recognized in local, physically perceptible signs. From this combination of family novel, historical novel, and "terroir novel," Joncour develops a narrative style that makes the rural space of "deep France" visible as a sensitive seismograph of social and ecological upheavals, elevating the long, often barely perceptible, changes in nature to the actual subject of the narrative.

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The Delayed Crossing: Olivier Bleys

The novel "Nous, les vivants" by Olivier Bleys (Albin Michel, 2018) tells the story of helicopter pilot Jonas Muñoz, who is trapped in a mountain hut in the Andes after a snowstorm and undertakes a seemingly real journey along the Argentine-Chilean border with the mysterious border guard Jésus. Only at the end does it become clear that Jonas died in the helicopter crash and that the entire plot represents his delayed transition from life to death. The interpretation argues that Bleys prepares this transition not through a surprising ending, but through numerous subtle hints: from then on, reality slips away in inconspicuous signs: the clock is wrong, hours pass between two sentences, the alcohol in the bottle does not decrease, and Jésus, whose footprints in the snow are impossibly light, speaks in future tenses about Jonas's whereabouts. Time and space lose their order, the border becomes a metaphor for the separation of life and death, and the fading of memories and photographs symbolizes the letting go of one's own existence. To justify this, the interpretation refers to motifs, narrative technique, character constellation, and linguistic design. Thus, it focuses on the allegorical interpretation of the novel. With his novel, Bleys literarily shapes less death itself than the difficult process of saying goodbye and self-surrender.

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An apartment building in Alsace and ghosts of history: Michèle Audin

This article presents Michèle Audin’s novel *La Maison hantée* (2025) as a striking example of a "roman croisé," in which documentary research, narrative imagination, and multiple temporal levels intertwine: Beginning with her move into a Strasbourg apartment building in 1992, a first-person narrator follows in the footsteps of former residents and, drawing on archival materials, chance discoveries, and careful reconstructions, a web of life stories that focuses particularly on the Caron-Fischbach family from 1930 to 1946; against the backdrop of the Nazi annexation of Alsace, questions of belonging, language coercion, and administrative violence—with the Jewish residents of the building and their gradual disappearance from the records standing out as an oppressive void that can be neither narratively resolved nor historically fully elucidated. The narrative movement resembles a tentative traversal of spaces and times—stairwells, apartments, archives—in which voices overlap and contrasts are not resolved but kept visible. Against this backdrop, the essay argues that Audin develops a poetics of evidence-gathering that does not level the coexistence of fact and fiction but rather highlights it: First, the historical novel is identified as a construct through the narrator’s consistent self-reflexivity, in which imaginative additions are explicitly marked and thus become epistemologically transparent; second, Alsace appears as a paradigmatic space of intersecting identities, in which national attributions—particularly under the conditions of Nazi language policy—are forcibly imposed and at the same time experienced in all their fragility; third, the silence of the sources—for example, in the case of the erased Jewish lives—proves not to be a mere deficit, but rather a central vehicle of meaning that marks the limits of historical knowledge and calls for an ethically reflective form of remembrance. Thus, the essay makes a plausible case that "La Maison hantée" conceives of history not as a linear narrative, but as a polyphonic structure riddled with ruptures, in which the past reveals itself only through a process of approximation and intersection.

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Im Schatten der Helden: Marc Biancarellis Antwort auf den korsischen Nationalmythos

Marc Biancarellis "Roman national" (Actes Sud, 2026) entwirft im Gewand des historischen Romans ein komplexes Bild Korsikas als „doppelte Insel“, die zugleich durch äußere Herrschaft unterworfen und durch innere kulturelle Ressourcen behauptet wird: Vor dem Hintergrund des Aufstands Sampieru Corsos im Jahr 1564 verfolgt der Text die Lebenswege Fioravantes und Catalinas, die zwei gegensätzliche Antworten auf eine Gesellschaft ohne stabile politische Institutionen verkörpern – Bindung an lokale Loyalitäten und Rachelogiken einerseits, radikale Ablösung und Selbstentwurf andererseits; in drei erzählerischen Bögen (Kindheit, Kriegsgeschehen, Nachklang) verbindet Biancarelli dokumentierte Ereignisse mit subjektiven Perspektiven und unterläuft dabei systematisch die Erwartung eines heroischen Nationalepos, indem er zeigt, dass der vermeintliche Befreiungskampf weniger von kollektiven Idealen als von privaten Motiven getragen wird und letztlich an innerer Zerrissenheit scheitert; die Argumentation des Romans zielt damit auf eine Dekonstruktion des „roman national“ als Gattung, indem nationale Identität als nachträgliche, selektive Konstruktion sichtbar wird, die insbesondere die Gewalt an Frauen ausblendet – ein blinder Fleck, den die zentrale Figur Catalinas explizit macht –, während zugleich die Sprache, konkret das Korsische, als eigentlicher Träger von Kontinuität und Widerstand herausgestellt wird, der sich staatlicher Kontrolle entzieht; formal entspricht dieser These eine polyphone Erzählstruktur ohne privilegierte Instanz, die Geschichte als Feld konkurrierender Stimmen präsentiert, während inhaltlich eine Anthropologie der Gewalt entfaltet wird, die diese nicht als Ausnahme, sondern als zirkulierendes Prinzip sozialer Ordnung begreift; in dieser Perspektive erscheint Catalinas Bewegung der Ablösung als einzige nicht destruktive Handlungsform, sodass der Roman insgesamt als paradoxer Nationalroman lesbar wird, der die Bedingungen kollektiver Identitätsbildung freilegt, indem er sie zugleich erzählerisch unterläuft.

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Ferocity, Class, Body: The Female Gaze in Caroline Laurent, Benoîte Groult, Éric Holder, and D. H. Lawrence

The article examines four love stories in which women desire men from significantly lower social classes or backgrounds, making a precise shift visible: women look at men. The focus is on the novels by Caroline Laurent (2026), Benoîte Groult, D. H. Lawrence, and Éric Holder, with a side glance at Annie Ernaux. However, their desire is never abstract but always tied to the body: to arms, hands, backs, to skin, work, movement. While Lawrence still stylizes the gamekeeper's body as an almost mythical source of vitality and redemption, and Groult embeds it in a long, ultimately unbridgeable class difference, Holder shows it in its quiet materiality—as a marked, working body that scarcely has words for itself. Laurent's novel goes further: here, the male body is observed with a precision that neither glorifies nor excuses, but simultaneously desires and analyzes. This is precisely the argumentative point of the article: the „female gaze“ is not a simple inversion of the traditional gaze regime, but a contradictory practice in which desire, social conditioning, and self-reflection overlap. Although love crosses the boundary between classes, it does not abolish it; rather, it makes it visible on the body itself. In the end, the focus shifts once more: what is decisive is not the fulfillment of the relationship, but the writing about it—as an act that captures the experience, sharpens it, and gives the female gaze its own sovereign form.

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