Fiction France n°11 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Twenty new French ďŹ ction titlesÂ to be read and translated

foreword

Twice a year, Fiction France presents 20 excerpts in both English and French from novels and stories that are at the forefront of the contemporary literary scene in France. So far more than 200 authors have been represented since the first edition. More than simply encouraging foreign rights sales, this review has enabled publishers, authors and translators to meet, to interact, and to forge long-lasting links. From now on, we will provide a few lines highlighting the top reasons to discover each featured novel. As always, on page 108 you will find all the titles presented in previous editions of Fiction France and which have obtained foreign publishing rights.

How can you take part in Fiction FRANCE ?

Do not hesitate to get in touch with the rights managers of each publishing house; you can find their contact details in the summary and on the introductory page for each text.

A selection of 16 to 20 titles is compiled in cooperation with the Institut français, the staff in the foreign rights departments of the French publishing houses and the staff of the book offices in London, New York and Berlin—French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. What are the selection criteria? • The book must be French-language fiction (novel, short story, narration). • Recent or forthcoming publication (maximum of 6 months before the publication of Fiction France). How should work be submitted? • The publishers should submit the book/draft/ manuscript. They will themselves have selected an extract of 10,000 characters. • Every entry should be accompanied by a commentary, a biographical note and the bibliography of the author (maximum of 1,500 characters). • Two printed examples of every proposed work will be sent to the Institut français. Next deadline for submitting texts: 10th December 2012 Next publication date of Fiction France: 20th March 2013

The Institut français is France’s international agency for cultural policy affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Fiction France is disseminated free of charge through the French cultural network to its partners and to book industry professionals around the world. Fiction France is also available online at www.institutfrancais.com.

contents

p. 8

p. 13

Olivier Adam

Gwenaëlle Aubry

On the Fringes

Partages

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Florence Giry

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

fgiry@flammarion.fr

Isabelle Gallimard isabelle.gallimard@mercure.fr Number of Pages: 186 p. Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Number of Pages: 464 p. Translation: Sue Rose

suerosepoet@gmail.com

p. 18

p. 23

Alain Blottière

François Bon

Dreamers

Autobiography of Objets

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: September 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Number of Pages: 176 p. Translation: Ursula Meany Scott ursulameanyscott@gmail.com

mheissat@seuil.com Number of Pages: 256 p. Translation: Jonathan Kaplansky

jkaplansky@videotron.ca

p. 29

p. 34

p. 39

Lucile Bordes

Serge Bramly

Jean Cagnard

I am the Marquise of Carabas

Either Orchid

Jack’s Stairs

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin

Publisher: Gaïa Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

s.mouches@lianalevi.fr Number of Pages: 144 p. Translation: Youna Kwak yokwak@gmail.com

ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Number of Pages: 288 p. Translation: Tegan Raleigh teganraleigh@gmail.com

Evelyne Lagrange evelyne.lagrange@gaia-editions.com Number of Pages: 288 p. Translation: Lucy Lyall Grant lucylyallgrant@orange.fr

p. 44

p. 49

p. 54

Claro

Maryse Condé

François Cusset

In the Sky with Diamonds

My Life Unvarnished Shelter from a World in Decline

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Number of Pages: 252 p. Translation: Brian Evenson brian_evenson@brown.edu

ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Number of Pages: 336 p. Translation: Richard Philcox mc363@columbia.edu

Number of Pages: 248 p. Translation: Jane Teresa Kuntz

madsen@pol-editeur.fr kuntz@illinois.edu

p. 59

p. 64

p. 69

Julia Deck

Nathalie Démoulin

Disiz

Viviane Élisabeth Fauville

The Big Blue

René

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: September 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Irène Lindon

Publisher: Le Rouergue Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Denoël Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Number of Pages: 160 p. Translation: Michael Lucey mlucey@berkeley.edu

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Number of Pages: 208 p. Translation: Jeanine Herman jeanine_herman@yahoo.com

Judith Becqueriaux judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr Number of Pages: 272 p. Translation: Rachael A. Small rachael-small@uiowa.edu

p. 74

p. 79

p. 84

Félicité Herzog

Thierry Hesse

Tierno Monénembo

A Hero

Unconsciousness

The Black Terrorist

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Violaine Faucon

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

hwarneke@grasset.fr Number of Pages: 304 p. Translation: Hester Velmans hestervelmans@gmail.com

vfaucon@editionsdelolivier.fr Number of Pages: 336 p. Translation: Louis Cancelmi

mheissat@seuil.com Number of Pages: 228 p. Translation: C. Dickson c.dickson@wanadoo.fr

cancelmi@gmail.com

p. 89

p. 93

Yassaman Montazami

Jérôme Noirez

The Best of the Days 120 Days Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel

jguitton@swediteur.com Number of Pages: 148 p. Translation: Tanyika Carey info@tanyikacarey.com

proussel@calmann-levy.fr Number of Pages: 464 p. Translation: Edward Gauvin animula.vagula@gmail.com

p. 98

p. 103

Gilles Pétel

Colombe Schneck

Under the Channel

Reparation

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke

Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Number of Pages: 272 p. Translation: Susan Pickford susan.pickford@gmail.com

hwarneke@grasset.fr Number of Pages: 224 p. Translation: Madeleine Velguth velguth@sbcglobal.net

Olivier Adam

On the Fringes

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Florence Giry fgiry@flammarion.fr Number of Pages: 464 p.

Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@gmail.com

Deeply personal and politically engaged, this important book is without a doubt his best. Adam has been very successful: his last three novels have sold 70,000 copies apiece. Biography

Olivier Adam was born in 1974 and grew up in the Parisian suburbs. After living in Paris, he moved to Saint-Malo. He has written many novels and children’s books and is also a screenwriter, having collaborated with directors such as Philippe Lioret—who worked with him on the adaptation of his first novel, Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas (2006, the film received a César Award in 2007)—and Jalil Lespert, who brought Des vents contraires to the screen in 2011. Publications His most recent novels, published by Éditions de l’Olivier, include: Le Cœur régulier, 2010; Des vents contraires, 2009 (rtl/Lire Prize, 2009); À l’abri de rien, 2007 (France Télévisions Prize 2007, and the Jean-Amila-Meckert Prize 2008). These titles are all available in paperback from Éditions Points.

Paul Steiner, a novelist and screenwriter, is feeling increasingly alienated from his own life. As the novel begins, he has just dropped his two children off at the house he shared until recently with his ex-wife, Sarah, whom he still loves. He is about to leave Brittany for the Parisian suburbs to look after his father while his mother is in the hospital. He is dreading going back to V., where he spent his childhood; his father, a former laborer who is about to vote for the National Front, greets him, as always, rather coolly.

During the next few weeks, Paul will try to understand why he always feels on the fringes of his own life, never at the center. These feelings are echoed in the chance encounters he has with former classmates, a sales clerk at a Simply supermarket, a janitor and a psychiatric nurse, who tell him about the trials and tribulations of their difficult, dead-end lives. As well as painting a portrait of the marginalized people living in a forgotten France, Les Lisières tells the story of a man embarking on a journey of self-discovery, hoping to regain his rightful place in the world.

I parked on the opposite sidewalk and glanced in the rear-view mirror. On the back seat, Manon was getting her stuff together, her face hidden behind a long curtain of black hair. Beside her, Clément was slowly surfacing from sleep. It had been six months and I still wasn’t used to it. This stop/start life: the stolen alternate weekends, the Sunday evenings, the twelve-day wait before I could see them again. Twelve days of emptiness which could not be filled by phone calls and emails. How could this have happened? How had we come to this? I held out my hand to my daughter, who gave it a squeeze and kissed it. “Are you going to be okay, Dad?” I shrugged and gave her one of those half smiles that don’t fool anyone. She climbed out of the car, followed by her brother. I got their backpacks out of the trunk and trailed after them. Sarah’s house, on the other side of the street, was no longer my home; and yet nothing, or virtually nothing, had changed. All I’d taken were my clothes, my computer and a few books. Every Sunday, when I brought the kids back, it felt crazy to be leaving again. I couldn’t understand how my life no longer existed there. I felt as though I’d been evicted from myself. For six months, I’d been nothing more than a ghost, a shapeless skin, an empty husk. And something kept nagging at me, insisting that part of me was still living in that house, without my knowledge. Everything in the garden was coming back to life. A carpet of delicate pink flowers spread out around the trunk of the cherry tree. Daffodils and tulips added splashes of color to the flowerbeds. The lawn had been mowed a few hours earlier and the fragrance of cut grass filled the air, which was still mild. It was hard to imagine Sarah doing

chores like that. Our neighbor had probably offered to help. It was his job, after all. I looked at his house and couldn’t help resenting him. It didn’t make sense, because I actually liked the guy. He was a nice man, overwhelmed by more than his fair share of problems. One of his kids was autistic or something, and his wife had had a series of operations; most of the time you’d see her on crutches, with her right leg in a cast. But the closely-mown grass made me think to myself that he must be part of the invisible mob responsible for taking my life away from me over the past six months. Sarah was standing in the doorway, smiling, with a glass of wine in her hand. When I kissed her, I had to stop myself from pressing my lips against hers, sticking my tongue inside her mouth and holding her tight. That was another thing I couldn’t get used to. We were standing there, face to face, we hadn’t changed, she still had the same body, the same mouth. Why wasn’t I allowed to let my hand wander over her ass, caress her breasts or slip my finger inside her? What had changed? “Everything, Paul. Everything has changed,” was what she usually replied when, after a few glasses of wine, I couldn’t bring myself to walk out of the living room and I tried to kiss her. We kissed hello on each cheek, the stupid way you greet colleagues and people you hardly know. “You look well,” I said tentatively, and I meant it. Since we’d separated, Sarah had bloomed. It was as if a weight had been lifted from her, and I had to accept that this weight was me. It wasn’t hard to understand. I hadn’t exactly given her an easy ride over the years. I could be a real pain, everybody said so. I don’t know why they all thought that, but they all agreed and you couldn’t argue with a unanimous opinion: clearly it was common knowledge that I was impossible to live with. “You don’t,” said Sarah, with that unfamiliar lightness in her eyes. She led me into the living room and we sat down. She offered me a whisky, which felt like pure provocation: she knew I’d given it up ages ago and was now sticking to wine, and in what I felt were sensible quantities. Manon went up to her room and Clément curled up against me. He was holding a comic book and was flipping through it absentmindedly. I kissed his hair. I missed his smell, and the feel of my fingers on the back of his neck more than anything. Sarah asked me how long I was planning to be gone. I didn’t know, it all depended on how things were there. On when my mother was likely to be released from the hospital, and what condition she would be in. My father had seemed so lost when I’d spoken to him on the phone. He’d started talking again about selling the house and moving into one of those old people’s homes that he’d always hated. He’d always said he’d rather die than end up in a place like that. “Not all of them are terrible. And, anyway, how can they stay in such a big house, when your Mom can’t get up the stairs any more, your Dad has never

done a day’s housework in his life and doesn’t even know how to use the washing machine or the stove?” I nodded. She was right, of course, but, actually, I didn’t really care. All I could think about right then was how long I’d have to be there. Sarah knew that. Every time we had to go there, once a year at most, and never for more than a half-day, just so the children could see their grandparents, see what they were like, know they existed—I would be in a lousy mood for the two weeks before we went. Once we were there, it wasn’t all that bad, but all I wanted to do was to leave, even though we were only staying a few hours. I waited for that moment the way you anticipate your release after months of imprisonment. “You’ll tell them I’m thinking about them, won’t you?” I nodded, even though it seemed like a crazy thing to say. Sarah had kicked me out of my own life and had confiscated my children, who were the only thing, apart from her and my writing, that had ever kept me going, and now she wanted me to give my parents her love. I watched her pour herself another glass of white wine, a smoky little number from Southwestern France, which we used to enjoy with oysters and sautéed shrimp on Sunday evenings. I’d tried my hardest to hate her, but I’d never managed. She’d dragged my name through the dirt to keep the children. She’d given the judge chapter and verse on my employment record, the quantities of alcohol I used to knock back, the countless prescription drugs I’d been taking for years, even the content of my books, which clearly showed my fragile state of mind, the pile of neuroses I’d been fighting since I was a kid. She’d also told the court about my frequent trips for work, my dealings with people in the film and music business, performers who had to be alcoholics or cokeheads or God knows what. She really went to town, but it hadn’t worked, I’d loved her too much to be able to hate her.

Olivier Adam

On the Fringes

I stood up and went to find Manon. On the way to her room, I glimpsed the bed where I had slept only six months ago. There was a pile of books on the bedside table that I could have read. Sarah and I had always liked the same novels, the same films, the same cds and the same photos. We were best friends. That’s what she told me one day. In her mind, that’s what we’d become: friends living under the same roof. I didn’t agree, of course. As far as I was concerned, this was no better than the crap you might read in a stupid magazine, and I didn’t understand how such an intelligent woman could generalize about people and feelings like that when it was something she regularly criticized me for. But there was no point arguing about it, she just didn’t love me anymore. She needed room to breathe, she needed to be free, she’d had enough of carrying me after all these years. She had her hands full with her young patients at the hospital. They really were ill. They really needed looking after. They had something to complain about, while I was just a spoiled child who didn’t know what happiness or contentment was. I was someone who’d been handed everything

on a plate, who had wonderful children who loved him and an easy life devoted to writing, and who’d never been man enough to make the most of what he had. Manon was sitting at her desk. The stereo was playing In the Dark Places, a track from PJ Harvey’s latest album. I’d always been blown away by that kid, the stuff she read, her music, the films she liked. It showed she was already a free spirit, not brainwashed by what she saw on tv or by popular trends. She wasn’t afraid to be different. When I thought about it, I was nothing like that at her age. All I had to do was to picture my room when I was eleven, with its posters of cheesy singers on the walls, to acknowledge that. “What are you doing?” “My homework. I’ve got to finish my essay.” I sighed. I couldn’t stand her French teacher. His finicky corrections revealed a man so stubborn and close-minded about literature that I’d actually toyed with the idea of sending him a letter, or asking if I could go in and see him. Manon had persuaded me against it for a while. I couldn’t really blame her. Since primary school, I’d had one argument after another with her teachers, putting her in impossible situations which took weeks to sort out, until the next time I lost my temper. “When are we going to see you next? Mom said you might not be able to take us for two weeks.” “She said that, did she? Well, I’m not sure yet. It all depends. It depends on how your grandmother’s doing and how well your grandfather can manage without her. I’ll try to come back to spend the weekend with you.” I kissed her and she snuggled up against me for a while. Her eyes brimmed with tears the way they did every time and I began choking up. “Chin up, sweetheart, I’ll see you soon.” I went back down to the living room. Clément had gone. He’d run off to his friend Romain’s house, three doors down. They’d been friends since primary school and were still inseparable. His father worked at the port. I often bumped into him at night on the beach at the end of the street, sitting on the cold sand smoking a joint. Sometimes we’d exchange a few words, mostly about the beauty of the sky, the quality of the light, or the color of the water. “Shit! He could have waited for me to say goodbye.” “Come off it, you’ve been joined at the hip for the past forty-eight hours …” This time she managed it. For a fraction of a second, I really hated her.

Gwenaëlle Aubry

Partages

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Isabelle Gallimard isabelle.gallimard@mercure.fr Number of Pages: 186 p.

Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

The latest novel by the author of “No One” (Femina Prize, 2009), already translated in 7 languages.

Gwenaëlle Aubry is a philosopher and novelist. She has published four novels. Publications Her most recent novels include No One (Tin House, 2012, original version Personne, Mercure de France, 2009, winner of the Prix Femina 2009, new edition Gallimard “Folio” series, 2011); Notre vie s’use en transfigurations, Actes Sud “Un endroit où aller” series, 2007; L’Isolement, Stock, 2003. Biography

It is 2002, year of the second Intifada. Sarah is Jewish, born and raised in New York in a family of Polish origin, now living in Israel where she moved with her mother following the 9/11 attacks. Leila is Palestinian, born and raised in a refugee camp. Both are 17. Initially, the alternating voices of Leila and Sarah describe everyday situations: a walk through Jerusalem, daydreaming at a window, a change of season. Then each separately recounts her history and memories. In the final part, the voices appear on alternate pages,

as in a mirror. Two girls with no obvious reason to meet, they advance toward each other and the same, tragic destiny. Partages, which has the sense of both ‘sharing’ and ‘divisions,’ is a novel about things that simultaneously unite and divide: land, fear, memory and the dead. Leila and Sarah are both heirs to the nightmare of memory, but they are driven by opposing desires, Leila’s for escape, Sarah’s for roots. They are at once identical and sisters at war, like two Antigones following their fateful paths.

Jerusalem, Bab al-Silsila At first I didn’t go beyond the Wall. Didn’t go near it. I’d look down on it from the little square on Misgav Ladach, dazzled by stone and light, the inhuman brilliance of a limestone canyon, or a desert, bouncing off the white arches and starry flags, the gold of the Dome of the Rock. The Wall absorbs everything—the dazzling light and the shadows of the faithful, tears, holy names, and the paper prayers slipped into its crevices. You’re not supposed to, I know, but shortly after we arrived I went there on my own, without telling my mother. There were crowds of people there that day. Two chubby boys, gawky and proud, were celebrating their Bar Mitzvahs. On the other side of the barrier mothers, sisters, and aunts were taking turns to climb on chairs and watch. I sat down with them on the women’s side, surprised at accepting it all, and yet I wasn’t like them, or the others sitting close together on the benches in scarves and long skirts, with babies on their laps or in strollers, looking at the Wall and waiting, patiently, quietly, held captive by a scene in which nothing was happening apart from waiting and more waiting but me, I thought as I watched them, I’m not waiting, I’m too young for all this, I’m seventeen, I want it all now, kingdom, justice, forgiveness, tsedek, mehila, words I’d never have spoken in my own language flowed through me, I’m in this country up to my ears my mouth I thought, I’d better go join the tourists behind their cameras, laugh at it all, my brother told me it was here that he’d asked Yael to marry him but how did they do it, were they on either side of the barrier, with her perched on

a chair—when suddenly I noticed a girl standing behind a folded parasol. She was younger than me, dressed in a blouse and black skirt over white woolen stockings and old sneakers. Hidden behind the parasol, far from the Wall but facing it, she was praying, eyes closed, swaying gently from side to side, her face buried in the Tehilim like tears in a hand. Under her scarf you could see strands of blonde hair, a high, pale forehead, the light complexion of girls from the East—perhaps she was Polish, like Perla, and the grandmother I never knew whose name I bear but who left me her sallow skin and black hair (you’ll have no problems in Jerusalem, said David and Yael to tease me, you could pass for an Arab). So I don’t know why but I got up, I went up to the Wall, and pressed myself against it with my eyes closed, hands on the warm stones grown over with weeds. For a moment I had the feeling it was holding me up like a piece of earth. I couldn’t hear anything, I was somewhere else and at the same time I’d arrived. I remembered what my grandfather used to say when I was a child: God is everywhere Sarah, like the sea that fills a cave and remains undiminished, look at yourself in this mirror (with his arms round my shoulders he steered me to the big mirror on the dressing table in the dark bedroom of his Brooklyn apartment), and now in this one (he handed me Perla’s little hand mirror)—that’s you there, see, not much bigger than a nut and as big as you already are, so if little Sarah can be in two mirrors at once, just think what God can do. I was remembering that the other day, sitting on the bench in Misgav Ladach Square, eyes closed behind my dark glasses, enjoying the sun that was still so hot when New York would already be all gray and rainy, when I was startled by a voice. A boy was standing there about my age. He was wearing a dusty t-shirt and torn canvas trousers and he was carrying a sack of rubble. He didn’t look threatening, but he was speaking Arabic and the square was empty, so I got scared and stood up. I crossed the square and found myself on Bab al-Silsila. It was the first time I’d stepped outside the Jewish quarter, my mother and David told me I shouldn’t. The day after we arrived we’d gone for a walk on the Cardo and had lunch in Hurva Square. It was all so big, and clean and luxurious, my mother was in raptures, stopping to gaze into shop windows full of jewelry and antiques, in fact she nearly bought a painting of paratroopers in their red berets linking arms and weeping by the reconquered Wall. But I was surprised, and a bit disappointed too, we might as well have gone to Borough Park where at least there were cars and buses, delis and children, why change countries. But later, on my own, I discovered the little streets going down to the Wall, motionless olive trees growing in silent squares, broken roofs and arches, flights of steps ending in empty space, white facades with barred windows overlooked by streetlights, opaque, milky globes soaking up the light, composite streets made of snatches of shtetl and Middle East, fragments of a dream symbolized by banners struck with the star of David, walking through there I thought of

Gwenaëlle Aubry

Partages

Aron, my grandfather, who all his life had drawn dreams of another kind, vast esplanades and straight streets, glass towers standing out against the sky, suspension bridges so high that their steel cables were interwoven with airplane trails, transparent cities where nothing and no one was hidden, cities without shadows or secrets, but in the streets I was walking through the pale stones had no history, the blind walls no memory, they were simply a studio set that had grown up around the people who lived there, people from very far away from very long ago, projected onto the white walls like characters in a silent film projected onto a screen, and though was I looking at them, they all filed by without seeing me, passing so close I could have touched them yet still separate, men dressed in heavy black and tattered coats, children who were too quiet wearing kippahs clinging to taciturn mothers in cloche hats, their arms laden with shopping baskets, hurrying, footsteps muffled as by invisible snow. When I was a child, when someone died I was told they’d gone to Israel. Eretz Israel was the land of the dead, in other words the land where they lived their real lives, surrounded by deserts of abundance, rivers of milk and honey, under skies tiered like veils. Seeing these shadows gliding over the white walls, I thought of Perla, Sarah, and the other David, for a moment I was sure these silhouettes had known them, could have told me about them. But that day I turned the corner of Misgav Ladach and found myself in Bab al-Silsila: and suddenly it was as though the city had been turned upside down, as though someone had made it all face the other way, the set rotates and the blind facades become caves filled with strangely glinting treasure, the empty sky framed by roof terraces is hidden behind tarpaulins and platforms, I was like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, hurled into a colorful, threatening world, I walked quickly, didn’t respond to the street vendors calling out to me in bad English, clearly I still looked like an American and yet I no longer felt like one, those confident, carefree girls haggling over coral necklaces, a little farther on a huge man in a crocheted kippah was buying spices so I too stopped to look at boxes made of olive wood. The vendor came over, he was around thirty, his keffieh black and white like the chessboards he was selling with strangely pale eyes that slid over my legs. He spoke to me in Hebrew, I don’t know why. I put the box down and turned on my heel. I felt like everyone was looking at me, the orange juice sellers and the children sitting on doorsteps, groups of youths smoking, leaning against the wall, one knee bent like big, wary birds, schoolgirls dragging their satchels, and even haughty women with proud, made-up eyes. I was about to turn into Misgav Ladach, but then I remembered that my mother, who thinks she’s still in New York and worries about drafts, had put a scarf in my bag, a triangle of blue-gray cloth that makes me look like an old lady and that I’ve never been willing to wear. On the right hand side of the street mirrors in mosaic frames were hanging from a shop front. I stopped at one and tied the scarf over my hair. And in it I saw myself twice. Another face appeared

behind me, already veiled in gray. I caught the reflection of its eyes, thinking I was seeing myself, and then it vanished. I turned around to see a silhouette in a long coat of midnight blue walking away. * * * Yesterday my mother and I went to Al-Quds. I’d been waiting to go for months. When the call to prayer sounded I was already awake. I don’t think I’d slept at all. I heard Youssef come in late at night and my father get up for work a little later. I dressed in silence. I’d got everything ready: my mother had lent me her dark blue abaya, underneath I had the white blouse Youssef thinks is indecent, I put on my gray scarf and fixed it in place with grandmother’s clip with the mother of pearl beads (she used to put it in her hair, which she’d stopped cutting and came down to her feet). The living room was filled with a lovely smell of coffee and cardamom and the sun was making big, dusty palm fronds on the rugs. We ate our bread and za’atar in silence, so as not to wake Youssef. I think that like me my mother was afraid he would stop us from going. She smiled at me, close as a sister. It was months since I’d seen her like that. Suddenly Amir appeared in his Mickey Mouse pajamas. The same ones I used to wear, Raed and Youssef too, they’re so worn there’s nothing left but patches of red, yellow and black. He climbed onto my lap, still warm and heavy with sleep, his face buried in my neck. His hair was full of the scent of his little boy’s dreams, hot bread, dry stone, fennel and lupine. When we are alone he stops playing the martyr, the hero, he gives up the war. Then he remembered he was going to spend the day at Ibrahim’s and jumped up like a gazelle to go get dressed. We dropped him off, made him promise to be good, not to leave the camp, and we started out.

Gwenaëlle Aubry

Partages

Alain Blottière

Dreamers

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: September 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Number of Pages: 176 p.

Translation: Ursula Meany Scott ursulameanyscott@gmail.com

Do we each have a double of ourselves, somewhere on earth, leading a life parallel to our own? Nathan, a pampered French teenager, dreams of escaping his life; Goma, an Egyptian youth experiencing the Arab Spring dreams of a better life. From the wealthy suburbs of Paris to the poor streets of Cairo, Dreamers tells of the vague insecurity of adolescence. Biography

Novelist, essayist and author of travel books, Alain Blottière was born in 1954. Fascinated by ancient Egypt, he lives between France and the Siwa Oasis in Egypt. His first novel, Saad, was published in 1980 (Gallimard, “Le Chemin” collection). Since then he has written a dozen works including novels, short stories and illustrated books. Publications Some of his most recent works include: Le Tombeau de Tommy, Gallimard, 2009 (republished in the Folio collection, 2011); Fils de roi – Portraits d’ Égypte with photos by Denis Dailleux, Gallimard, 2008; Un voyage en Égypte au temps des derniers rois, Flammarion, 2003.

Nathan, who is sixteen, lives with his father in a wealthy suburb in the west of Paris. He is rather spoiled, blasé and lost. Girls find him attractive, as do boys. But he is bored. He derives his real pleasure from playing the famous and dangerous fainting game, which consists of strangling yourself for a few moments with a scarf in order to experience strange visions, glimpsed fragments borrowed from a hidden universe. In another world—Dar es Salam, one of Cairo’s poorer districts—another sixteen year old named Goma is experiencing the first hours of the anti-Mubarak uprising. He is wary of the police henchmen who cordon off the district, reserving a particularly cruel fate for the young impoverished rioters who fall into their hands.

Like Nathan, Goma is happiest when dreaming of being far away, in a country with neither hunger nor violence. Do we all have a double of ourselves, bustling about somewhere on earth, leading a life parallel to our own? Alain Blottière sets these two young protagonists on alternate paths of a plot, during the course of which they will face one another, but never know each other. But sometimes parallels do meet. During a short holiday in Egypt, Nathan goes for a swim in the Nile at the same time and place as Goma. Nathan has the blinding sensation of having met his double, a magical moment that can only herald his death. Then the author separates their fates once more, sending the characters back to their solitude, to their fantasies.

The dizziness and euphoria suddenly brought the “Indian Dream” variation to mind. Nathan had never played it alone. You needed someone to stop the dreamer from falling, and more importantly, to make sure he came to. But Nico wasn’t there, and at that moment there was nobody to replace him. So he would let the wind take him then, nobody would catch him, nobody would make sure he came around, it would be a new experience and that excited him quite a bit. For this solo attempt though, he would settle for the first stage of the game, no strangling. Even hidden behind the hedge where he, Nico and the others usually played, he couldn’t picture strangling himself in broad daylight, especially on a Wednesday, a day when the park was full of children. Behind the hedge, he looked for a patch of grass where he wouldn’t hurt himself when he passed out and fell. Then he crouched down, scanned the area to make sure nobody was approaching, started the stopwatch on his smartphone, which he had already disconnected from the network, and began to hyperventilate. Thirty seconds, faster and faster. He stood up quickly, held his breath, and in the kind of bluish light you see in the small hours, he saw his mother sitting in a wicker chair, from the garden of the house at Savigny, and on hearing her speak he felt an intense pleasure, not because of what she was saying, which he wasn’t listening to, but because he recognized her voice, he recalled it with certainty even though he thought he had forgotten it a long time ago. When she fell silent, he began talking to her, or rather he began letting sentences slip from his lips in a continual stream without having to search for the words, without having anything particular to say, the speech went on and on, the question

arose of the bath she wanted to give him even though he considered himself to be big enough to take a bath by himself and thought she could settle for washing his hair and scrubbing his back, because he always loved letting her tickle him, and she could dry him too because he always loved her rubbing him, but he knew that there was no more eau de Cologne 4711 in the bathroom, and his mother started laughing, and at that instant he opened his eyes in the glaring daylight, smelled the lawn grass, felt the weight of his body and a slight pain in his right leg which was bent underneath him. He stretched it out cautiously and remained sitting long enough to get his balance back while he searched for his cell phone, to find out how long the dream had lasted: according to his calculation, certainly no longer than five seconds. It was the first time that level 1 of the Indian Dream had taken him inside an entire film. He remembered it in detail, including his mother’s voice and laugh, which were still echoing in his ear. But he wondered if they were the real ones, the ones you could hear on the few videos he had watched hundreds of times when he was ten but never since. He would have to check, he certainly thought so. On the other hand, the tickling of his back and that bottle of eau de Cologne 4711 he had seen in all its detail recalled nothing to him. He would ask his father that very evening and if he confirmed it, then it meant that level 1 of the Indian Dream was strong enough to bring back images and sensations tucked away in a secret recess of time. Besides the fascinating power of the Dream to condense into three seconds images, sounds and feelings that would take at least three minutes to experience in real life, this would also make it a kind of magic formula, an open sesame allowing him to enter the blessed kingdom of lost treasures. And yet, even if this spell could bring back entire days, Nathan, who wasn’t especially interested in memories and time past, couldn’t help preferring the phantasmagoria of level 2, after strangulation, which propelled him onto an untethered flying carpet in a completely unfamiliar sky. Wanting to ask Nico and possibly Justine if level 1 had brought them this far before, he reconnected his cell phone. Two new texts appeared instantly. The first was from Manon, wanting to know what he was doing, since they usually met up at this time, same as every Wednesday. The second was Raph saying he would like to meet up somewhere, ‘at your place or mine maybe.’ He didn’t reply to them. He called Nico, whose tone was curt, as no doubt Imane had come over. No, during an Indian Dream he had never felt anything beyond a feeling of weightlessness, as though he were breathing underwater. Another time he had seen a flash of blue light and had heard a string of incomprehensible words. He found it useless now—it was a kids’ game and he wouldn’t be doing it anymore. After that he called Justine who also told him she planned on giving it up, having heard people say it was dangerous. She jeeringly asked him if he was doing an investigation for the school newspaper, then answered that she had only experienced a sensation of well-being, but had never seen or heard anything.

So everyone’s mind responded in its own way. His was filled with a wealth of treasures upon which he could draw. His real life was there, on the far side of the illusion of these trees, these bushes trimmed to form a maze, this blue sky, this smell of grass and these children’s cries, familiar for so long now they were faded, had lost all depth and almost all reality. He headed off towards Manon’s house. He was thinking that from now on, in all likelihood, none of his friends would do the Dream with him any longer. He would continue alone, telling nobody, especially not Manon. She opened the door and seemed pleased to see him. She pulled him into her room, reproaching him the whole way for not having replied to her text, and wanted to make love straight away. She was prepared for it, wearing absolutely nothing under her blue linen buttoned dress besides Jardin sur le Nil, her perfume, which he sometimes borrowed after his shower. He wondered that day what was really so Egyptian about it, what were those sweetly scented Nilotic flowers emanating from Manon’s diaphanous body and, as their faint mango fragrance followed the delicate lines mapped on her skin, if he would really see them there, in Egypt

Alain Blottière

Dreamers

following the course of the river like the water hyacinths, as far as the sea, Goma had always dreamed of doing that, at least every time he saw them being carried along by the current. The longing was particular to summer, when the heat emboldened him to wash among the Nile flowers rather than at the prayer hall or under the broken pipe of a derelict building. With Ragab and many others he would go beyond the limit of the railway line, cross the corniche, searching for a section of riverbank free from reeds, to approach the cool water and bathe. On days when he had no soap, Goma begged it from someone more fortunate. Sometimes, when he wanted a change of scene, he would walk north as far as the old aqueduct, the Sour Magra Al-Oyoune, which, at one time, used to carry the river water all the way to the Saladin Citadel. At its foot an old stone quay was still standing, and the boys would dive off it before climbing back up a partially collapsed stairway. The young swimmers came here from all the surrounding poor districts. There were kids from Sayyeda Zeinab, even the Copts from Mar Girgis, and sometimes there were dozens of them piled up on the quay, lathering themselves, lathering a younger brother or someone else’s back, washing their clothes. For several years though, this Hammam had lost many of its bathers as the river police, who would appear suddenly in motor boats, had received orders to nab a few of them as examples: not in order to prevent the drowning of poor children—which they would have been rather pleased about—but to spare the spectacle of this misery from the tourists who came to photograph the recently restored aqueduct. On this day of war, Goma saw the water hyacinths sailing peacefully right past him, towards the sea, buffeted by tiny wavelets stirred up by the wind. He could only just hear the turmoil from the ledge now, the slogans chanted in

unison by thousands of protesters. A few minutes earlier, the boy in the black tee shirt with the cell phone had wanted to sit down on the parapet beside his friend, and Goma had had to move up a bit to make space for him. The boy had sat down and then, looking disgusted, examined him from head to toe. Goma, who had just put his sweatshirt back on, realised that the boy was searching for the source of the smell. He had got up immediately, walked for a short while along the parapet looking for a way down to the river and had gone down as far as the water. Two meters from the rioting, the Nile flowed on, impassive, always the same, as if nothing had changed. That was the feeling Goma had seeing the water hyacinths glide past, and suddenly he was afraid that nothing would ever change on the banks of the Nile, that there would always be marginalized poor people who smelled bad. It was a fleeting thought, quickly blown away in the cold air as he scrubbed his sweatshirt in the river water, dipping it in then wringing it out several times until the lingering odor of feathers was completely replaced by the more acceptable smell, at once earthy and slightly acidic, of the silt in which his feet were buried. He was putting his damp sweatshirt back on when, above the din of the shouted slogans, he thought he heard a voice calling him from the corniche. He couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe it, but it really was Yacine, Goma recognised his voice, then soon afterwards his silhouette and his fair hair, and saw that Yacine was waving madly at him. This kind of thing happened from time to time in Gomaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, moments when exactly what he wanted seemed to fall from the sky, or unexpected treasures that changed his life for a few daysâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a thrown-away blanket on a winter night, an intact piece of food tossed away accidentally, or a large tip from an old lady whose shopping he had carried. And if at first he was simply delighted, enough at times to shout or dance for joy, several moments later, as he languorously drew out the pleasure of this gift from heaven, he would tell himself that perhaps he ought to believe in God. The following day, a shower of misfortune would remind him that the sky, at the end of the day, was not so generous.

François Bon

Autobiography of Objects

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com Number of Pages: 256 p.

Translation: Jonathan Kaplansky jkaplansky@videotron.ca

68 texts each describing an object.  In these pages, François Bon explores the geography of his personal territories. Biography

Born in 1953, François Bon has built over the past twenty-five years a strong and coherent literary body of work. He has published close to a dozen books including Sortie d’usine (1982), Mécanique (2001) and Daewoo (2004, Wepler Prize). He has a blog (www.tierslivre.net) and founded the online publishing house www.publie.net as well as the online journal www.remue.net. Publications His most recent work includes: Après le livre, Seuil, 2011; L’Incendie du Hilton, Albin Michel, 2009; Rock’n roll, un portrait de Led Zeppelin, Albin Michel, 2008 (paperback ed., Le Livre de Poche, 2011); Bob Dylan, une biographie, Albin Michel, 2007 (paperback ed., Le Livre de Poche, 2009); Tumulte, Fayard, 2006.

François Bon grew up very close to the ocean. Two opposing worlds, at either extremity of the Marais Poitevin: the paternal grandparents and the family garage, and the maternal grandparents, former teachers, through whom came the books. From the mid 1950s to the early 1980s, a considerable mutation took place, from an essentially rural society to a world of technology and consumption. François Bon follows the successive traces of this world´s appearance through the prism of objects: things desired from childhood (a pocket mirror,

a nylon cord), or useful things (a baby carrier, a soldering iron), indispensable objects (cars, typewriters, computers) or ones that are bearers of dreams (books in first place of course, but also guitars). Seminal objects that are handed down (grandfather’s vice), those of a trade (slide rule), and so many others whose value is described clearly and thoughtfully. The life of these objects ends up creating a simple and touching mosaic portrait of the author that also tells us, amongst other things, about modest France.

mirror I don’t believe I am particularly fascinated with my image. The most difficult thing, on the contrary, is probably accepting it. Strange, the curiosity we can have with those cameras that let you store self-portraits so easily, but I erase them just as quickly: what you mostly see is the ageing. We lived far from cities. Luçon had use value, but there was the bookstore, the librairie Messe, where we went for our textbooks, where I got a taste for books and dreamed in front of a globe—that they ended up giving me. La Rochelle was larger, complex and magical. The city has deteriorated, taken over by this vague abandonment of the provinces, the centre of which was sucked up as if by a straw in the repetitive shopping areas of the outskirts, but there is still the Prisunic store with its two stories. In the village, we did not know what it was to have stories: a land of wind. But there, the upstairs resembled the Paris department stores, inside the store. The village and Luçon sufficed for buying necessities; going to La Rochelle once a year was both an expectation and a reward. We entered Prisunic; my mother had things to do there. My father, meanwhile, would go to Fumuleau, to La-Ville-en-Bois, the turner who repaired winches and boat engines for the mussel breeding customers of L’Aiguillon-sur-Mer. My brother and I had been entitled to one request, provided it was feasible economically. Within the allocated budget, there was a small rectangular mirror surrounded by a round plastic frame, with a cardboard back. In the car, appropriating the purchase was out of the question: mine, as was my brother’s, in individual paper pouches—I’ve no idea if this is a memory for him as well.

In the rented house where we lived, in Saint-Michel-en-l’Herm, there was of course a mirror in the bathroom, but hence used only during the rituals relating to it. There were also rear view mirrors in cars: I don’t remember any other mirrors. I have a precise memory of the many uses I at first made of the mirror with the cardboard back and round plastic frame brought back from La Rochelle. I must say that the memory of the two cities that symmetrically surrounded us, Les Sables-d’Olonne to the north and La Rochelle to the south, is connected for me to the optic clarity of the glasses with which I’d just been provided: the village did not suppose short-sightedness required correcting. I used the mirror in the house, following my path on the ceiling. It was fantastic and marvelous. To go from one room to the other abysses had to be crossed. All I remember about this mirror was holding it up to watch the ceiling while I walked. Outside it was even more disturbing: it was the sky that would suddenly appear beneath you. In the clarity of this recollection, one thing is obvious to me: the optic relationship to the world, making suddenly appear in it by turning it over, through a frame, an unfinished dimension, has remained a fixed principle of life. I see again vaguely, in later periods, the mirror surrounded by its plastic in a wooden box in the laundry room where my brother and I stored our old treasures (I still see a plastic sword, likewise dreamed of, likewise abandoned).

François Bon

Autobiography of Objets

[…] postcards Received a postcard this week—it’s become such a rare thing. They used to be technical feats, wondrous to receive; those cats with golden eyes, and when you pressed on the bulge in the middle of the card it squealed. Or the postcards with grooved surfaces; depending on the angle you had one image or the other of the same city and you looked at it for a long time, trying to find the point where you could make out both images at the same time. They were far too precious to just be hung up on a bedroom or kitchen cupboard wall, or the way people now put little magnets on the refrigerator. Bistros took great pride in them: their customers on vacation remained their customers; they always had this spot above the cash register with postcards sent by their regulars. Same thing at the factory or the office—but not at home. They were stored in shoeboxes: shoes were not a minor expense, and the box and tissue paper inside were part of the transaction—shoeboxes once were precious merchandise. So it was in the shoebox that letters were sorted by year with an elastic band, the stamps carefully steamed off for collectors. If the text took precedence, the postcard would be kept with the letters, but besides,

stored vertically in the shoebox, were the others: at the risk of sounding naïve I can state that we looked at them to learn. What they showed us, we hadn’t seen. The geographical map became—with gaps—a gigantic puzzle to be put together. We knew Nice and the mountains, Italy and the Eiffel Tower. They also seemed to be an eternally perennial element. When we were old enough to go to cities alone, who among us wouldn’t take a couple of hours on the last day of the journey to subject ourselves to the writing of postcards? In fact, how many postcards were mailed immediately upon returning, but our honor was saved. There is the archetypal text—which Perec hijacked so well, and the archetypal image: but we didn’t know these images beforehand and, above all, they proved to the addressee that the sender forever possessed the experience itself. The person who sent you the card had intimate knowledge of Venice. Has the era of the postcard definitely come to a close? We bought as new postcards reproductions of historical views, and in museums we went to look for (people still do) slim reproductions of artworks (you never find the one you are looking for, even at moma) that seem to attest to the originality of our own gaze. Those are not bought to be mailed, but for ourselves. We also took pleasure despite ourselves, in flea markets, in leafing through those second hand cards, classified according to department and district, searching for what the places that make up our present looked like before. Looking up from the work table, they are close by: this one of Kafka with Ottla—for how many years has it loomed over the desk? The images we store on hard drives do not have the symbolic validation of the commercial gesture, of the transaction carried out in the very place the image was taken. A few friends persist in its usage: how can you hold it against them, even if you do not reply? And what if, from the crisscrossed city, from the museum where we’re stopping, we risk sending a brief phone message that includes an image, what survives of the postcard in this instance? Those who grew up in the age of the postcard are themselves, in their inner geography, like some sort of album (they used to sell postcard albums the way they sold stamp albums, but the difference in size—and thus of the selection of samples included—never bestowed the former with the prestige, even the magic of the latter). In what I carry with me of cities, of names, of eras, how many associated postcards, thumbtacks never removed, even though I haven’t used regular mail in a long time? […]

sparks in the Night What other toy could create such a sense of wonder, of otherworldliness even —of our own, at the very least. In fact, as a bit of the fuzziness surrounding it very slowly comes into focus, I associate it with that trip to Paris in 1961, the dark city (the streets were truly dark at the time, much more so than now, and shrill with the roar of gasoline engines, while the vibration of the subway shook the sidewalks—a Paris I have never stopped searching for and have never found again). Probably because we’d visited a department store the way we’d visited the other monuments, and my brother and I had been allowed to choose a souvenir. I was thus the owner of it, but it was to be used only when alone. A two-sided metallic wheel, as wide as the palm of a hand and painted a dark red. The first side fixed and lined with fine emery fabric; the second side mobile, equipped with two thin spikes. Riveted to the immobile wheel, a spring with a release mechanism caused, between the thumb and two fingers, a rotation of the wheel. The rubbing of spikes on the emery, with the sputtering of a Moped, sent off sparks that when you looked at the device from the side were white and clear like all sparks. But on the wheel’s mobile side small windows had been cut out, sealed off with sheets of red, blue or green plastic. And when you ran at night lifting the little wheel high, continuously pushing the spring, there flashed for possible spectators an arc of brilliant colors in proportion to the induced crackle. And you could just as well use it for yourself alone at night, hidden beneath the sheets. We didn’t even have a name for our wheels of light, although rare are the objects that remain nameless. They could perhaps be found in a toy wholesaler’s catalogue. They are still being made: I believe I even bought one once for one of my own children. But it was made out of a thin, bendable sheet of metal, the sparks weren’t much, and it came from China. We experienced the same kind of wonder for those kaleidoscopes that we inevitably inherited each Christmas. But in the locked mirrored dresser at my grandparents’ there was a far older one, cylindrical, also made of hard cardboard, but with Bakelite deadlights so you could contemplate the wonders within. In our kaleidoscopes, three sides of cardboard were lined on the inside with aluminium and enclosed at the very end, between two thin circular strips of glass, colored mica nuggets suspended in liquid. We would shake it; specks of mica formed slow multicolor arrangements that the triple mirror, providing it was favorably directed toward the light, multiplied into geometric figures. Fascination arose from this purely geometric multiplication. I remember dismantling at least one of them to make use its main elements, but, like for one of those old alarm clocks we’d also take apart without ever being able to reassemble it, the main elements taken all together did not contain the magic attached to the device itself.

François Bon

Autobiography of Objets

From each toy we can extract something magical and transitional since that is what our imagination imparts it with; and because the imaginary is what we attempt to decipher when we describe it. But in the little wheel of light and the cardboard kaleidoscope, the secret sign of the mutation that was slowly taking shape could be detected: before MayÂ 1968, the world was monochromatic as much as it was silent; such objects were needed to get an inkling of something different. It was with the car radio, the electrification of trains, Sputniks and Gagarin, even the atomic bomb proudly launched into the clouds of Algeria and later in the atolls of the Pacific in all of our names that the toppling over began.

Lucile Bordes

I am the Marquise of Carabas

Publisher: Liana Levi Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Sylvie Mouchès s.mouches@lianalevi.fr Number of Pages: 144 p.

Translation: Youna Kwak yokwak@gmail.com

Discovering a family secret, a young woman travels back in time, and decides to recount the journey of the dynasty of puppeteers of which she is a descendant. An adventure story that the author recreates by alternating two different voices: one which recounts a family saga and the other, a more personal, contemporary, narrative. Biography

Lucile Bordes was born in 1971 in the Var region of France and lives in La Seyne-sur-Mer. She is a lecturer in French and stylistics at the University of Nice, and also leads writing workshops in the region. I Am the Marquise of Carabas, her first novel, is inspired by the fascinating memories of her grandfather, who embodies a definitive break in the family history: “All entertainers before me— afterwards, all teachers!”

One afternoon, a young woman begins asking her grandfather questions and, listening to him, unearths her family’s unsuspected past: they are descendants of the Pitous, a famous dynasty of puppeteers who crisscrossed France with a surprisingly modern theater company. As the inheritor of this unusual story, the narrator imagines the halycon days of their journeys as traveling entertainers: the founding of the theater by Auguste, who leaves his job as a grocery boy in 1850 to follow the puppeteers; their success at the turn of the century, brought about by Émile, a gifted director who

incorporates the technological innovations of the era into the theater; and their final transformation as the family settles down in the Loire and makes the transition into film. As a counterpoint to this history, the narrator sketches a sensitive portrait of her grandfather, of his last days, and perhaps of his regrets … Emphasizing the art of elliptical storytelling over historical precision, Lucile Bordes achieves a narrative tour de force of poetic fantasy, sharing with us a century in the life of an extraordinary family—her own.

After Chok’s death, they resume the circuit he was fond of. From Saint-Etienne they reach Normandy, the greater Paris area, then return toward the Loire, performing in Montargis, Nevers, Moulins, wherever a village hall or other premises are available. Further south in Roquevaire, in the Aix-en-Provence area, they show little Emile the square where he was born. They find the midwife—of course she remembers!—it isn’t every day that she has to work in a trailer. Everywhere people inquire after Chok, peace be with him, a good man. In the fall they return north. They are always welcome: inexpensive, quality entertainment is rare. Also, the theater is respectable, modern, heated and gas-lit, while most houses and public buildings are not. The bourgeois sit in chairs, the office workers on second-tier benches. For the lower classes there is standing room behind the barrier, where it is very crowded—Josephine will accept vegetables or a sausage that the poor devils, badly dressed, place on the counter, wrapped in newspaper, in exchange for a standing-room ticket. Emile grows up on the road. He loves the departures best of all, when his father wakes him at two or three in the morning so they can make the trip in a day. The drivers accompanying them to the next town urge their animals on with dry clicks of the tongue like the cries of birds, telling jokes in lowered voices to give themselves courage. They ask him if he’s not afraid of the wolf. Of the wolf, no. But perhaps of the few bandits met in dark forests, even if they seem more interested in the drivers’ horses than in their trunks. And also a little of the hurried horsemen who pass the convoy, swearing. Most often though, there is no one. The road and the night are theirs.

They advance by starlight and sometimes the moon is so beautiful that one can imagine living on it. Every road has its odor, and his father also recognizes them by ear: the obstinate silence of the grazing road, the rustling sound of the poplar road, waves of sound caught at the tops of the larches, the rumblings of the rocks on the mountain passes. Upon arrival the men unhitch the horses, take their money, then push the horses away while Auguste busies himself around the shipwrecked wagons. They put up the theater for a few days, sometimes a month if the take is good. They avoid the popular places where there are too many itinerant theaters and where audiences are not always guaranteed to be quiet. In the Beaujolais region, for example, the constabulary must regularly intervene to soothe spirits … and fists. Once it got so rowdy you could no longer hear the actors! The local newspaper had a field day covering the tumultuous antics at the Pitou theater, obliging Auguste to demand space in the paper for a rebuttal. It’s the kind of attention they don’t need. In each village they register Emile for school. The teacher, usually sullen, silently curses these bohemians who are too respectable for him to reject their son outright. Besides, his school records are all in order, and the identity of the child is duly indicated on the papers provided by the mayor, or by the chief of police. He places the child at the back of the room. Month after month Emile receives more or less the same hostile reception, and recess is often too long. One day the teacher accuses him of having spilled ink on the page of an open Bible. His seatmate lowers his eyes. Emile is expelled. When he arrives at the caravans, he is surprised to find that the theater is being dismantled—news travels fast—but his expulsion is the least of their worries: the parish priest has complained that their encampment is blocking the path of his flock’s Easter procession. This despite the fact that a religious play, The Prodigal Child, for which his father has a particular fondness, is on the program. But the priest won’t forgive the subtitle on the poster, Or Crasmagne at the Academy, which, indignant, he refuses to say out loud, careful not to dirty his mouth. And in response to the denials of Josephine, who comes to straighten out the misunderstanding, he delivers the mortal blow—blasphemy! Does she truly believe, moreover, that he doesn’t know that in the local patois, acting the villain is called “being a crasmagne”? That’s the price you pay for fame. Auguste shrugs, reassures his son—don’t worry about it, Emile, let the jealous talk. And as the child does not appear convinced, and searches out his mother with his eyes, he adds, Crasmagne doesn’t blush. Crasmagne is a star, you know, he plays the starring roles, it’s him people come to see. They’ve had it up to here with religious plays, kid. They come to have a good laugh! As a matter of fact, do you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to rewrite the poster!

Lucile Bordes

I am the Marquise of Carabas

With a lead pencil, Auguste and Emile cross out the title and rewrite the name of the star in big black letters. Priest or no, from now on they will perform Crasmagne at the Academy, a fairy-tale-parody in four acts and eleven tableaux. The mayor will authorize without a second thought this Comedic Evening Including Transformations and Metamorphoses in the Fifth Tableau, ticket prices as usual. They will even add to the finale, for their troubles, an entertainment where the whole gymnastics troupe will bound around to the sounds of the orchestra. * * * In Haute-Loire, in the Rhône region, the town halls are opened for them in memory of Chok. In Lyon, where hand puppets are in fashion, they face off against the Guignol marionettes. One evening they attend a performance in a café-theater on the banks of the Saône. The place is so humid they feel like their feet are in the water, and the air is so smoky their eyes sting. On stage, Guignol and Madelon exchange salacious comments. Auguste laughs: “It’s a good thing we didn’t bring your mother.” “What language are they speaking?” asks Emile. “What do you mean what are they speaking? French, of course!” But not all of them, after all … they also speak a worker’s slang and a patois because here, see, there are only two kinds of men: silk makers and porters. The latter are regulars! The harbor is right nearby; they don’t have enough for wine, but for bad beer, yes. “And the show?” “It’s the owner of the café who pays for the show. It has to last long enough so that these poor folks have enough time to empty their pockets.” “No, I mean, where is the show?” Auguste, laughing, lifts his son a little to show him the puppet theater, set up at the far end of the room. The child pouts. The rudimentary movements of the Guignols disappoint him a little. The props are too big—otherwise the puppets would not be able to hold them, explains his father. Emile is almost ashamed. He would like to go home, and even wishes he had never come. Guignol pains him—so untalented, obliged to perform in this sordid place, having to respond to the jeers of the drunks hanging out in front of the theater. He pities the idiots applauding such a pathetic show. For that matter, he can tell that they are only pretending to laugh. His father can argue all he wants that it feels good to poke fun when you have nothing, that the puppet says out loud what can’t be said in a whisper, Emile remains unmoved. Guignol is not a show, it’s a mess. He’s outraged that Auguste is not more shocked. No, really, the only puppet of any value is the marionette, which is more noble because it is more complex to manipulate, and whose movements are more natural. His father lets him go on and Emile gets annoyed—what’s the point of talking about art if it’s within the reach of just anyone? Handling a marionette is so much more than just

lifting your arms above a hanging sheet! Auguste discovers that his son is a kind of fanatic, which gives him pause: for him, giving life to puppets is not art. It remains magic, a gift of joy at the fingertips, and he sees no reason to argue the point. To Josephine, who is surprised at the exasperated sighs of her son after the show, Auguste explains knowingly that there is nothing worse than the anger of a child, if not the anger of a rational child. Emile would cross his arms and refuse to eat until he is taken seriously. He’d like to have the last word, declaring that he finds it obscene to stick your hand in a glove and jam your index finger into the hollowed-out head of a puppet, but in the presence of his mother he doesn’t dare, saying only: anyway, I don’t like Lyon.

Lucile Bordes

I am the Marquise of Carabas

It’s in the region of Saint-Etienne that the Pitous are best known. They continue to have their posters and pamphlets printed there, they have their carpenter and their wheelwright there too, it’s their home base. The region is strategically located for traveling north and south. And then the mines bring crowds who need distraction. The papers publicize the theater, sending their employees to get free seats by pointing out the announcements for each new show in their columns. From notables to sales clerks, from landowners to miners, all go to see the Pitous. It’s a lot less expensive than the municipal theater, the auditorium is comfortable, the show polished. The artists are appreciated for their talent, and the generosity of the director earns him every certificate of good character—a keen diplomat, he regularly gives the ticket proceeds to the poor in the parish where they are performing. It is not only the wooden figures who are appreciated. Auguste’s spirit remains undimmed. The roads have not worn him down. Twenty years after leaving Normandy, he is still the eloquent young man who seduced Josephine and Chok with his sales pitch. Kids accost him in the street. He is often flanked by a horde of vagrants, to whom he explains one day that it was falling out of a boxing ring that caused his lameness; another day, it was the wet nurse to whom he had been entrusted, very young, who dropped him; and on yet another day, it is because he spent so much time with puppers that he started walking like them. He is an easy talker with a loquacious smile, a pleasing mustache. He sings with the right amount of cheeky distinction and mischievousness. Latecomers ask at the ticket booth if Pitou has sung. If so, they prefer to come back the next day, so as not to miss anything.

Serge Bramly

Either Orchid

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Number of Pages: 288 p.

Translation: Tegan Raleigh teganraleigh@gmail.com

A fascinating novel that proceeds like a real investigation, making the underappreciated French artist Marcel Duchamp accessible to a general readership. His previous novel, “Le Premier principe, le second principe” (“The First Principle, the Second Principle”) was awarded the Prix Interallié in 2008. “‘Either Orchid’, with elements of charm and mystery that are not soon forgotten, is truly a success.” Livres Hebdo Biography

Born in Tunis in 1949, Serge Bramly is a jack-of-all-trades with a healthy case of Wanderlust. He is the author of several novels: The Madman’s Itinerary (L’Itinéraire du fou, prix Del Duca), The Dance of the Wolf (La Danse du loup, Prix des libraires 1983), and Gossip, and has also written essays on China, art and photography. He has worked successively as a French teacher abroad, a special correspondent for Partir, an art critic for Vogue, Vogue Homme, and Paris-Match, a journalist for Globe, and a food critic for Cuisine et vins de France. Publications His most recent works include: Léonard de Vinci, Éditions JC Lattès, 2012 (new edition, prix Vasari); Le Premier Principe, Le Second Principe, JC Lattès, 2008 (prix Interallié) (republished by Le Livre de Poche, 2010); Le Voyage de Shanghai, Grasset, 2005 (republished by Le Livre de Poche, 2010).

“I started this book a little over twenty years ago … I was obsessed with the idea of writing something about Marcel Duchamp, but for a long time I didn’t know what form it should take … My notes would have kept on accumulating endlessly if I hadn’t come up with the idea one day of introducing personal, quasiautobiographical elements, which I’d always refrained from doing in my novels. My point of departure was a letter the artist had written to his friend Henri-Pierre Roché on May 27, 1942, from a transit camp in Aïn Sebaa, just outside of Casablanca. […] My project started to take shape once I added a narrator, who is

the great-granddaughter of the owners of the bathroom where Duchamp had taken refuge, and an academic whose research has led him to follow in the artist’s footsteps. The former lives in Tel Aviv, where her parents had immigrated to, and the latter, a French expatriate, teaches at the University of Colorado: it’s up to Duchamp to bring them together. Either Orchid (a play on words derived from “orchidée fixe,” a pun that appears in the artist’s notes) is thus the story of a double encounter, of a dual passion, and of places and eras that intersect over an ongoing sequence of cause and effect.” S. B.

Mirage He was headed for America, en route from Marseille. On May 21, 1942, he landed in Casablanca for a stopover that would last for a little less than three weeks. It was a Thursday—you can check for yourself. The boat was called the Maréchal Lyautey and it sailed under the colors of a parcel shipping company called the c.n.p., the Compagnie de navigation Paquet. There were three hundred and ninety-three passengers aboard. Duchamp had a second-class ticket. There’s a photo taken of him on the afternoon of his departure that shows him on the front of the ship. Clouds are coming from the smokestacks, and it seems like the last whistle signals have sounded. He’s looking towards the dock from the bow of the vessel, standing like a figurehead, and he’s waving goodbye. I’m not certain, but I think André Gomès took the picture. The Gomèses, Henriette and André, had had lunch with him on a terrace in the old port a few hours earlier. Victor Brauner and Jacques Hérold had met up with them and, not convinced that this would be the last time they’d seen each other, they’d exchanged a few small souvenirs. Duchamp had offered one of his miniature sculptures to Hérold. His friends then accompanied him to the wharf. They were sorry to see him leave and wanted to give him a hand with his bags. The trip from Marseille to Casablanca was uneventful. The sea was flat and calm, the sky clear. The ocean liner sailed along the edge of Spain’s territorial waters without any fear of submarines.

The mercury was rising and the smiles were returning with some surprise as the scene of war grew more distant. People lounged on the deck chairs and women compared their tans. It was hard not to imagine that they were on a cruise ship like in the old days. The days stretched on and the feeling of drifting that comes with long trips turned into indolence. At the hottest times of the day as the sun beat down, Duchamp would lay sprawled on his bunk, his head empty, in a kind of satisfying stupor. On the night of the 19th, with the lights of Gibraltar glittering on the horizon, the commander organized a little dance party. The food was what it was in these times of rations, but there was plenty of wine and liquor on board. He attended in his own way, from a distance. What I mean is that he kept himself removed. I don’t think that he made friends with anybody during the trip. He wasn’t in that frame of mind. The other person in his cabin, who was studying in Montpellier to become a pharmacist, took him for a salesman nearing the end of his career (as for my grandfather and my great-grandfather Zafrani, they initially thought he sold toys). Duchamp didn’t make an effort to disabuse them (nor did he enlighten my family the first time they met) and they limited themselves to just hellos and good evenings. He seemed so weak at that time that his friends were worried about him, as evidenced in their letters. He was fifty-five years old and looked like he was at the end of his rope, both physically and in terms of morale. He didn’t do very much. He’d grown terribly thin. He coughed. His eyes played tricks on him and he seemed so distant that people wondered if he wasn’t suffering from hearing loss. The Maréchal Lyautey dropped anchor in Casablanca’s port two days later on Thursday 21 May, 1942, early in the morning. It was chaos. The sun beat down, and the city’s famous white facades shimmered like a mirage on the other side of the docks. The gangway eventually lowered and a squad of mobile guards flooded the deck, machine guns at their sides. Whistle blows arranged the passengers into distinct lines, depending on their status. Not everybody enjoyed the same treatment. The government officials coming back for work just had to show their assignment orders to get back on land again, where they were swarmed by Arabs eager to carry their luggage. The next to pass, with a minimum of hassle, were French nationals who lived in Morocco—demobilized military personnel, businessmen—in short, all of those for whom Morocco was a the final destination. Most of them were expected, and the parents and friends bustling behind the gates next to the tricolor-topped customs building seemed to have won the authorities’ favor in advance on their behalf. There were more than one hundred other passengers, and they were just in transit and would continue on to New York, Rio de Janeiro, or Buenos Aires on

an ocean liner flying a neutral flag, since there were no longer any direct lines to these destinations from France. This was their sole reason for stopping over in Casablanca. However, those other passengers who just had one-way tickets were subject to suspicion. Runaways, outsiders, cowards, slackers, traitors. The first-class lounge had been converted into a courtroom. Everyone would go when their name was called and stand alone before a trio of grand inquisitors in khaki shorts. The papers, visas, and tickets were examined ten times over with the presupposition that they were fake. The questioning process was a barrage of nonsensical and deliberately insulting questions. They had to explain how they got the nerve to abandon their country and justify their desertion, their going over to the enemy. Le Maréchal Pétain had served as an example by giving himself to his country and you, just like rats … Imagine what was said when they would call up a Madame Pawlikowska, who was born in a Polish backwater with an unpronounceable name. It was understood why France had surrendered so quickly and why it hadn’t had too much trouble adjusting. The Vichy mystique, with its promises of redemption, was in full force: Providence gave us defeat in order to purify us, purge the country, and eradicate the spirit of pleasure in order to launch the national revolution so that virtue and respect for family and work will triumph anew in accordance with the sacred precepts of the Church, etc. Sobbing could be heard in the corridors. An elderly gentleman fainted at Duchamp’s feet. The hot weather only made things worse. Are there any travelers who feel like they’ve got everything straight? These weren’t ordinary travelers, my grandfather said, and then added: I know what I’m talking about. There must have been rings, gold coins, and large bills sown into the linings of their clothes. You don’t wear an overcoat when it’s 91 degrees in the shade for no good reason. Why did that guy over there forbid his little girl from playing with the doll wearing a nurse outfit whose Red Cross wedge cap was sticking out of a tote bag? Stop, you’re going to draw attention to us, keep quiet … My family became familiar with these tricks and concerns as well when they had to leave North Africa years later. Nobody was searched, however. Neither were any bags or suitcases, as if guilt were so obvious that there was no need to establish proof of it. Slumped in the club armchairs marked with the Paquet company logo, the three officers with bare knees and elbows contented themselves with inflicting humiliation: their diatribes consisted of both indictment and chastisement. The steward had placed a carafe and some glasses on a side table. They would take a sip of water, look at each other, tap their belt buckles or fan themselves with their képis, and then proceed to sneer intently with as much listlessness as contempt. In the middle of the afternoon, when the army rabble had thoroughly exhausted its frustration, the whistles blew again and everyone disembarked to be taken to a warehouse at the other end of the harbor where the remains

Serge Bramly

Either Orchid

of sardines were in the final stages of decomposition. Only one couple, who seemed to be on honeymoon, was arrested. They passed in front of their fellow travelers, handcuffed, their eyes looking downwards, as befit the circumstances. Their exit was quite surreal. The young woman’s face was sprinkled with freckles and her thick, luminous hair was cut into a pageboy. What had they done wrong? Had someone turned them in? Nobody wanted to know. They’d turn their heads, contemplate the tips of their shoes, and shift their weight from one foot to the other in silence, as if after such a long time out at sea they were thrown off-balance without the rolling of the ship. Gaullists, I believe. Finally, an hour later, a first group, comprised of passengers with the means to pay for a hotel, was released. God knows how, but they’d pre-booked a room in this city that was overcrowded from the war, where it was impossible to just find a bed even at three times the normal price, and they made off in carriages without looking back towards the Excelsior or the Impérial. There were still ninety-seven people who hadn’t made any arrangements for their accommodations apart from trusting in the management of the steamship companies to help. After another wait, they piled into old coaches, their bags fastened onto the roof and, turning their backs to Casablanca, the beacon city, the El Dorado, the pearl of North Africa, they took the road for Aïn Sebaa amidst the sputtering of nausea-inducing fumes.

Jean Cagnard

Jack’s Stairs

Publisher: Gaïa Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Evelyne Lagrange evelyne.lagrange@gaia-editions.com Number of Pages: 288 p.

Translation: Lucy Lyall Grant lucylyallgrant@orange.fr

“L’Escalier de Jack” takes us on the road. There are chance meetings, girls and odd jobs; there’s playing the guitar even when it’s only got two strings left. And then there’s reading - Steinbeck, Hemingway and Buzzati, not to mention Jack, William and Allen. This is a book about books, a great burst of laughter in the sun. Biography

Born in 1955 in Normandy, France, Jean Cagnard grew up between the sea and the metalworks factory. Later, he did masonry work on construction sites, interspersed with interludes of writing. He moved to the Alès area, and now earns his living writing and directing. He works with several companies as a playwright, writing for clowns, street theater and puppet shows. Since 1990, Jean Cagnard has published novels, poetry and plays. Publications Among his most recent works are Le voyageur liquide, Gaïa, 2011; La distance qui nous sépare du prochain poème, Éditions Espaces 34, 2011 and Le Menhir, Éditions Théâtrales, 2010.

“And what about you? What did you want to be when you were little?” You’re five years old and selling plaster models for the parish priest. At eight, you’re pulling a trailer full of junk metal for the local scrap dealer. Then the 1970’s happen and you’re on the road, guitar slung over your shoulder, doing a series of odd jobs. Your view of the world is a mix of tenderness and derision. You think you’ll become a builder but then you

encounter literature. The girl gives you the book, and it’s nothing short of an epiphany. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac. You’re sitting on a half-built stone staircase—since you’re a builder too—and you’re reading Allen describing how Jack, his mind made up to go and see what life’s like elsewhere, tears down the stairs saying goodbye to each step. “Your thirty-sixth job will be writing poetry.”

Admiration Your very first job consists of dragging a plaster mold kit out of the back of the closet, pouring plaster into rubber molds, turning the figures out a few hours later, then painting them so you can go sell them at the market on Saturday to raise money for third world countries on behalf of the parish. You work fervently, praying enough in a few weeks to last a whole lifetime. You stash the money away in a cookie jar and then give every penny to the priest, who rewards you with a sign of the cross and an appreciative whistle. You’re about eight or nine.

Little Clear-water River Your second job consists of getting your bike and riding a few miles to a little river, shallow and clear, where you turn over stones to collect the kind of grubs that fish go mad for, the ones that build their cocoons with tiny twigs and slivers of stones. Then you get back on your bike for a few more miles to the town fishing store where you sell your precious harvest to the owner who spills it into a perfectly-oxygenated aquarium, whistling with admiration. You’ve earned enough for your fishing permit—maybe not quite, but near enough. One more trip will do it. You’ve got another fortnight before the season starts. You’re ten or eleven. The following year, you do it again, but for some incomprehensible reason you get to the fishing store a week after the season starts and the owner

scornfully rejects your harvest. He glares at you, wondering where the boy is who was so punctual the previous year. He wonders what kind of mutt you’ve become in the time it’s taken the Earth to travel once around the sun.

One Afternoon Jean Cagnard

Your third job consists of tying a hook and a jute sack on your bike, hopping on and riding the ten miles or so to a field of potatoes you know of. There are no potatoes left after the harvest, and what remains is a large expanse of overturned earth. You go into the field on several successive afternoons and manage to bring back almost half a ton of tubers forgotten by the harvester to your parents’ basement, tying over a hundred pounds of them onto the luggage rack with a bungee cord. Your parents, somewhat dazzled, as much by your abilities to bring home the bacon as your talent as an acrobatic cyclist, pay you the ‘seconds’ rate for the harvest. There’s enough to see you through the winter. You’re about thirteen. One afternoon, a boy around your age comes into the field and heads towards you, yelling and gesticulating the way you would if you wanted to scare off the crows. He stops a few feet away from you and you realize he wants you to empty out your sack and beat it. The potatoes belong to his father, and his father has a shotgun and might just shoot you in the ass if you keep looting his property. He looks more afraid than you do. You don’t move, so he goes away, still scaring the nonexistent crows along the way and you realize that his job is maybe to try and get his head straight. Some time afterwards, you learn that he turned the shotgun on himself - the very same gun he was going to use on you - and blew his brains out because his father’s a real asshole who wouldn’t leave him alone.

Jack’s Stairs

Rather Than Filing Her Nails Your fourth job consists of borrowing your mother’s two-wheeled cart—which she uses twice a year to go get grass for the chickens—and cramming in whatever kind of old metal scrap you can lay your hands on. You start under your old man’s workbench, an unbelievable jumble of things as useless as chains, ball bearings and outboard propellers. This fills the bottom of your cart and you stop by the bike shed at the other end of the garden and grab an old frame that was hanging there, a box full of sprockets that’ll never be used and more chains. Then you go visit the neighbors, who are pretty pleased to get rid of their junk (“great little guy,” they say). Junk such as tangles of copper and aluminum, raising the level nearly to the top, and then, seeing as you don’t know

who to turn to next, you have another look around your old man’s workshop, helping yourself from the rack of more recent bits of metal, and, in the end, from his latest acquisitions, among which are some mysterious chains. Then you manage to travel the couple of miles separating you from the scrap dealer, dragging your cart with the treacherously rickety wheels. You work up quite a sweat down the long final descent that almost drags you down into chaos with every turn of the wheel. You end up at the feet of the scrap dealer who is just crossing his yard, carrying a track from the railroad on his shoulder. It must be the first time he’s seen a child so wet anywhere other than just out of the swimming pool. He looks at the wheels of your cart and lets out a small whistle of admiration. He picks up a couple of pieces from your load, the ones that come straight from a do-it-yourself store, and puts them carefully to one side. He sorts the copper, the aluminum, the base metals, and it all goes on a scale that is a lot bigger than you. In the end, you’re paid for your bounty and all of a sudden, you’ve become a rich kid. The sweat has now dried on your young body, and a whole investment plan forms with each step as you climb back up the long slope leading to your home, eating two ice creams at once with your free hand. The scrap dealer’s home is at one end of the yard adjoining the shed and when you get there, a girl about your age is standing on the doorstep playing with what looks to you like a shower hose. It’s the first time you’ve seen a girl playing with something other than what she’s supposed to. But maybe her father has a shotgun somewhere, and for her, it’s a lot less hassle to spend her time with a piece of scrap metal than filing her nails and ending up with buckshot somewhere. The scrapheap in the middle of the yard is about twentyfive feet high, it must be one of the biggest toy boxes in the world. At the same time she juggles her shower hose, the girl is carefully examining what you’ve brought. She seems to have a special talent for imagining all kinds of adventures in a discarded sheep trough or with rusted old bike chains. The following week, you get the cart again and fill up its tires. The southern end of the scrap dealer’s shed is home to piles of old newspapers stacked right up to the roof, and, with nothing else on the immediate horizon metal-wise— your suppliers will need years to turn manufactured goods into junk—you settle for paper. You go down into the basement and dig out your mother’s old knitting magazines along with two or three years’ worth of tv guides that line the bottom of the cart, and then you check out the bike shed and there, it’s a stack of union flyers covered in dust that you bring out into the daylight. Next, it’s the turn of the neighbors, who, once again, think you’re heaven-sent and your load is soon twice as high as the last one. You have to tie down all this literature with a totally new arrangement of bungees. The great descent is hell and you arrive at the scrap dealer’s in a trance, as though washed ashore there by the sea itself. But your profit calculations are firmly fixed in your head and you watch your cargo on the scales with serene

confidence, thinking about what kind of motorized vehicle would be best for your future deliveries. A few minutes later, you find yourself with two meager coins in the palm of your hand, having learned that the going rate for paper is more or less zero compared with metal, and you’ll be lucky to have enough to buy even a stick on the way back, let alone the ice cream to go with it. You’re this far from leaving the cart there to save yourself the trouble. On the climb back towards home, you begin to understand the notion of relativity, realizing with each step that an empty vehicle can be infinitely heavier than an overloaded one. When you arrive in the yard with your stack of paper, about to lose it, the owner’s daughter is sitting on the steps, playing with an old, broken umbrella. She could be playing at putting on lipstick in front of a little plastic pink mirror, but she prefers to spend her time opening and closing an old umbrella mechanism that’s seen better days, tapping its tip on a crate of bolts at her feet. While her old man is putting your cargo on the scales and your private cash drawer fantasy is still warming up deliciously, she gets up, and without giving you a glance, disappears into the house, taking the umbrella with her. Perhaps at the end of her bed, where a record player and a pile of 45’s ought to be, there’s a whole series of crates of bolts waiting for her to tap them with the tip of an old umbrella and, of course, this really cannot wait.

Jean Cagnard

Jack’s Stairs

Claro

In the Sky with Diamonds

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Number of Pages: 252 p.

Translation: Brian Evenson brian_evenson@brown.edu

Passing through several characters immersed in the epoch of LSD and the cold war, a breathtaking fictionalization of the madness of the world and its exploitation by politics against a backdrop of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. A reading experience of extraordinary and deeply moving intensity. Biography

Born in 1962, Claro is the author of around fifteen works of fiction as well as a collection of essays, Le Clavier Cannibale [Cannibal Keyboard] (Inculte, 2010). Also a translator from the American English (he has translated nearly one hundred works: Vollmann, Gass, Gaddis, Rushdie …), Claro codirects, along with Arnaud Hofmarcher, the “Lot 49” series at the publisher Le Cherche-Midi, and he is a member of the “Inculte” collective. He has a literary blog: “Le Clavier Cannibale” (http://towardgrace. blogspot.com). Claro lives in Paris with his wife, film director Marion Laine, and their four children. Publications Among his more recent works are: Plonger les mains dans l’acide [Plunge Hands in Acid], Inculte, 2011; CosmoZ, Actes Sud, 2010; Madman Bovary, Verticales, 2008 (republished by Actes Sud in the “Babel” series, 2011).

Tumbling into the epoch of LSD and the cold war after having eaten a piece of “cursed bread” during the summer of 1951 at Pont-SaintEsprit, young Antoine begins an improbable and convulsive journey at the end of which, after various stops from the Toulon harbor to the Algerian desert, haunted by dreams of the Madonna, he runs aground in Paris, in 1969, in a sex-shop run by Lucy Diamon, an American ex-junkie. Moving from provincial France to post-revolutionary Paris by way of the Californian “summer of love”, the novel unveils,

against a backdrop of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll and at the moment when men finally walk on the moon, the hidden face of the psychedelic utopia and the role the CIA played in it. Claro examines the distortions of the psyche as manipulations to which politics doesn’t hesitate to subject even our very minds. Simultaneously he creates, with Antoine’s character, an impressive avatar of the great figures of “the mad”, the visionaries and others of the possessed who have always haunted literature.

The first victim is the night. The light of day can try as it may to fade, the narrow streets of Pont-Saint-Esprit to sink into darkness, sleep will no longer come, and from here on out drowning within yourself is denied, eyes water but no longer take shelter within the skull. There’s still fatigue, of course, and sometimes thoughts detach themselves from the common shaft of vigilance, but at no moment does the shift, the awaited strappado, the snooze come. The body is no longer anything but awake. First of all there are anxieties, twinges of sadness, the impression of being bled dry, then comes dizziness, the shifting of the axis, some people vomit, others feel their sweat crackle on their very skin, sweatiness possesses them in mid-gesture, there’s an abrupt pallor that they scrutinize in the bathroom mirror and in which some detect a peeled off mask, and behind this mask, another, unstable one. At first, their inebriated gait surprises them, but the euphoria quickly sweeps away the feeling of no longer exactly being the knot that recalls the existence of a thread stretched between the self and others. Then the beasts surge forth, all sorts of beasts, ferocious, insatiable—tigers most of the time, but retaining only the striped appearance and bad breath of those big cats, whose roars shake the walls of the rooms. Pushing back their assaults requires a willpower that they feel, alas, is veiled by insomnia. Ideas form and clash in their minds, similar to anxious pains from the prospect of deserting a tooth.

They get lost endlessly in their gestures, ready to seize the shadow of a fruit forgotten on the kitchen table or the circle left by a mouth in mid-air; they run the length of the river while searching their memories for a pebble that they threw into another life and which, inevitably, will fall again in no time, less heavy, more precious; they turn on the tv set and let the stories of explorations and coronations form a single and scintillating poem in which men hungry for hymens and glaciers climb up cathedrals made out of flesh and lace. They see the bones’ outline in the folded arm the son raises between his cheek and the slap they are hesitating to give, now that consequences defy the causes. A centipede instructs them at times, party to the tingling that they suppose to be a premonition of a never torn off limb. The curtains seem like marble, and in the cemeteries astonishing lights sing at the top of their lungs. No one will ever go to the Moon, they know, up there where the craters lie nevertheless in wait, purely in wait. And all of a sudden they see something other than the skin on the milk, than condensation on the pane, than sweat on the forehead, suddenly they see what they hear, to the point of being able to describe, in shapes and colors, the silhouettes of the sounds that flock in from all around, festive, pulsating, semi-boreal. Their heart changes into a whirligig whose revolutions they encourage. One opens his mouth, to speak or to sputter, and out of it escapes rivers of taupecolored hair; another gets fired up and swims across the floor tiles, pursued by forks of blood. Snakes accompany them and mock them, disguised with faces that they judge to be temporary, much too smooth. The bedsprings never cease to stretch forces that are ripped from the recumbent effigy, and the latter douse themselves with water to better deceive the mirrors, those enemies. Dozens of Spiripontians come out of themselves like this, pacing through the night to palpate its crazy flesh. And in the night they all discover holes, through which to momentarily take leave without tearing anything up. They betray time. Swindle space. Don’t sleep anymore, burst out laughing at any moment, pedal around the town square with eyes closed, applauded by their own hands, abused by their cycle, or remain prone under their bed, in dust and dread. Albert the grocer counts and recounts the beads of the curtain that a hand—his, not his?—pulls back for no reason in an endless calculation that goes from one to infinity then from infinity to one, passing, halfway through the arduous inventory, through the port of call of zero, extraordinary mouth from which you must nonetheless come back out again, dazed, different. The widow Moustier feels the ceiling lower, the walls getting closer, and tells herself that God will recognize his own, since now she is a lamprey, then a turtle, then nothing. Little Maxence is surprised that his shadow no longer has wings and devours his notebooks with a powerful appetite. The hours suddenly have the density of those flagstones that you chew after jumping off the roof. They all sweat, stammer, cross the considerable distance

that separates chair from table and desire from act. Their bowels empty, and the reconstructed delicacies adorn themselves with a thousand appendages and run off to dance a jig in the hallway. Freed from yesterday, the intoxicated of PontSaint-Esprit yield to all sorts of convulsions that they baptize and praise. The animals, those that ate Roch’s bread, let their instinct rot in a shadow that is no longer their own. Madame Moulin’s cat, the large tabby, after a long stop in front of its bowl where the crusts lap up the milk, searches by butting its head for a crack in the wall that its narrowed eyes thought they saw, but the stone doesn’t yield, and it smashes its bones down to the very last one without even meowing, its rag of a body almost burning hot when its mistress picks it up, with a disbelieving palm. Outside, in the yard, the ducks march past, beaks gaping, wings beating on the downbeat, terrified by their own cries. One goes into the house and glues itself to the side of the stove, from which nothing can remove it, finally serene in the scorching madness of its feathers. Elsewhere, in another farmyard but under the same sun, the Robier’s dog comes to a standstill in mid-leap, bites particles of dust, then seizes up a pebble and breaks his fangs on it. The thick blood which dribbles from his chops has a calming effect on him. He drinks it, already dead. All the poisoned children are cold, a cold which could be a story if its denouement wasn’t entirely made up of fire. Rugs, paintings, panes of glass, posters, manhole covers, signs, unfolded newspapers, treated tablecloths, faces hung on the living room walls, all are awakened from within by unknown insects and pulse with intentions incommensurable with their nature. Little Simone throws her hoop far away, suddenly knowing herself to be made out of wood, then, skeptical, dashes into the hearth where the coals deliver their judgment. Saliva turns lips gray, pupils overlook everything, a black horse sweeps a sky crackling with bees with its white tail. The linens, too long applied to damp skin, smell of mouse droppings. Up on a ladder, a very old man in overalls continues to climb endlessly up the last rung, younger and younger in his impending fall. At nighttime, gatherings form, a combination of all ages, some want to talk and yet hum, some jump in place, then, believing they hear the ground drop a notch, freeze and conceal their fingers in a mouth that they hope is joyful. Confined to bed day and night, a housewife extends her arms, all her arms, so many arms that she no longer manages to tame them, while her sweat falls from the ceiling, solemn, muscled, familiar. A whirlwind composed of bicycle guts goes down the main street, herded by a municipal employee who immediately dedicates to it an ode composed exclusively of arithmetic problems. The Lampin brothers draw in the dust the exact diagram of a viaduct meant to direct the Mistral toward other lands, they redo it a hundred times, erasing drawing erasing, under a streetlight that won’t stop growing. Men, women, children, all walk for hours, without a journey ever being born from their footsteps, all climb steps that they immediately come back

Claro

In the Sky with Diamonds

down again, at once alarmed and reassured not to feel a notable difference between the effort of climbing and the joy of coming down. They recognize each other for the hundredth time in an hour, and proceed once again with a courteous exchange of views and sensations, of laughter, of a smattering of words, some bump into each other greedily, there are so many things to describe, to comment on, a snag in a doily which travels from day to day, never in the same place, never the same size, a door which opens inward in the morning and outward in the evening, and whose handle, full of echoes, begs to be palpated, a dog whose bark it is absolutely necessary to mend. Everything is argued, compared, swapped. One night, at four in the morning, aÂ little group decides to empty a sideboard completely, and here they go questioning such and such a chip, such and such a pattern, here they go applying their palms to the glassesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; circumferences so as to admire the circle left on their skin, melodious. They find photographs in which new friends never cease to appear, improbable relatives. A white tablecloth, rolled in a ball and put into a corner of the living room, gives some of them the idea of making snow, immediately they get out basins full of water, which they carry to the other end of the city, barefoot, while listing all the names of countries that they have read in the books they will perhaps write when their new fingers sprout. Alerted, the health services force the bakeries of Pont-Saint-Esprit to close. Zwieback then experiences its hour of glory. Then the first deaths occur, the crises escalate, and summer is nothing but an eruption.

Maryse Condé

My Life Unvarnished

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Number of Pages: 336 p.

Translation: Richard Philcox mc363@columbia.edu

“A moving autobiographical account by Maryse Conde: a powerful, poignant book which casts new light on her entire work.” “One of our major writers, Conde has decided it is time to make a full confession. She has given us a book, both personal and universal, in which on no account does she seek to justify herself or take center stage.” Livres Hebdo An episode of the documentary series ‘Empreintes’ on France 5 TV has been devoted to Maryse Conde who was also a guest of the Quai Branly Museum in its ‘Major Figures of Our Time’ series in May 2012. Biography

Born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, Maryse Condé has received numerous awards for her many novels which include Segu, Tree of Life, Crossing the Mangrove, I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. After having taught for many years at Columbia University, she now divides her time between New York and Paris. Publications Her most recent publications include En attendant la montée des eaux, Éditions JC Lattès, 2010; Les Belles Ténébreuses, Mercure de France, 2008 (Folio, 2009); Histoire de la femme cannibale, Mercure de France , 2003 (Folio, 2005) (The Story of the Cannibal Woman, Atria Books, Simon and Schuster, 2007).

“La Vie sans fards (My Life Unvarnished) should be considered an attempt to speak the truth and throw out myths as well as flattering and facile idealizations. It is also an attempt to describe how the mysterious vocation of a writer is born. La Vie sans fards (My Life Unvarnished) is perhaps the most universal of my books (…) Despite a very specific context and local references, it is not just the autobiography of a Guadeloupean woman endeavoring to discover her identity in Africa or the long and painful gestation of a writer’s vocation in someone who

was apparently totally unprepared to become one. It is first and foremost the portrait of a woman looking for happiness, seeking the ideal companion and confronting the difficulties of life: that fundamental and still topical decision whether to be a mother or face life alone. (…) La Vie sans fards (My Life Unvarnished) is above all the reflection of a woman seeking to live her life to the fullest. My first novel was titled Heremakhonon: Looking for Happiness; this book assures us it will eventually happen.” M. C.

Why is it that any attempt to write about one’s life ends up as a jumble of halftruths? Why is it that any autobiography or memoir all too often becomes a construction of fantasies where the simple truth fades then disappears altogether? Why is it that we are so anxious to depict a life so different from what we have lived? For instance, I read in the press releases written by my press agents on the basis of information I provided them with: “In 1958 she married Mamadou Condé, an actor from Guinea, whom she saw perform at the Odeon Theater in Les Nègres, a play by Jean Genêt, directed by Roger Blin, and left with him for Guinea, the only African country that said ‘No’ to General de Gaulle’s referendum.” This conjures an appealing picture of love enlightened by political activism. And yet it contains in and of itself numerous falsifications. I never saw Condé perform in Les Nègres. While I was with him in Paris, he only acted in small parts in obscure theaters where he played ‘the nigger’ as he used to joke. It was only in 1959 that he played Archibald at the Odeon, when, our marriage far from being a success story, we were living the first of our separations. I was teaching at Bingerville in the Ivory Coast where Sylvie Anne, our first daughter, was born. To paraphrase Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions I declare today that “I want to show my fellow human beings a woman as Nature made her and this woman shall be myself.” […]

I did not become a writer at an early age, scribbling extraordinary texts at the age of sixteen. My first novel was published when I was forty-two, when others begin to put away their pens and paper, and was received very badly, which I stoically believed to be a premonition of my future literary career. The main reason for my waiting so late to write was that I was so occupied with the tribulations of life that I had no time for anything else. In fact, I only began to write once my life got less problematic and I was able to trade my real life dramas for paper ones. I have described in detail the background I came from in Tales from the Heart and especially in Victoire, My Mother’s Mother. Euzhan Palcy’s hit film Sugar Cane Alley popularized a certain image of the French Antilles. No! Not all of us are the wretched of the earth, working ourselves to death amidst the sting of the sugar cane. My parents belonged to the embryo of a middle class and called themselves presumptuously ‘Les Grands Nègres’. It must be said in their defense that their childhood had been terrible and that they wanted to protect their children at all costs. Jeanne Quidal, my mother, was the illegitimate daughter of an illiterate mulatto woman who couldn’t speak a word of French. Her mother worked for hire for a family of white Creoles, the Wachters, and experienced very early on her share of shame and humiliation. Auguste Boucolon, my father, he too an illegitimate child, was orphaned when his poor mother was burned alive when her shack went up in flames. Nevertheless, we can safely say that these painful circumstances had relatively positive results. The Wachters authorized my mother to take advantage of their son’s private tutor, which allowed my mother, ‘abnormally’ educated given her color, to become one of her generation’s first black elementary school teachers. My father, a ward of the local authorities, pursued his education, unusual for the time, with the help of scholarships and ended up founding a small local bank, the ‘Caisse Coopérative de Prêts’, for government officials. Once they were married, Jeanne and Auguste were the first black couple to own a car, a Citroën C4, to build a two-story house in Pointe-à-Pitre and spend their vacations in their ‘change of scenery’ house on the banks of the Sarcelles river in Goyave. Steeped in their own success, they considered nothing to be good enough for them and raised us, my seven brothers, my sisters as well as myself, in contempt and ignorance of the society that surrounded us. As the last of seven siblings, I was particularly spoilt. Everybody agreed that I would have an exceptional career, and I believed them. At the age of sixteen, when I left for university in Paris, I could not speak a word of Creole. Never having attended a ‘lewoz’ dance I had no knowledge of the traditional gwoka rhythms. Even the cuisine from the French Antilles, I judged to be crude and unrefined.

Maryse Condé

My Life Unvarnished

In the pages that follow, I shall not talk about my present life, devoid of drama, save for the insidious approach of old age followed by illness. Rather, I shall try to define the considerable place Africa has occupied in my life and my imagination. What was I searching for there? I still don’t know for sure. At the end of the day, I wonder whether the words of Marcel Proust’s hero in Un amour de Swann are not appropriate for my time in Africa: “To think that I ruined years of my life, that I wanted to die, that the love of my life was for a woman who was neither to my taste nor to my liking.”

1 Better to marry badly than to remain single Guadeloupean Proverb I met Mamadou Condé in 1958 at the Hostel for West African students, a dilapidated building situated on the boulevard Poniatowski in Paris. I had two girlfriends, two sisters, Fulanis from Guinea, Ramatoulaye and Binetou, whom I met at a political meeting at the Sociétés Savantes, which no longer exists, on the rue Danton. They came from Labbé and made me dream of Africa by showing me the sepia photos of their venerable parents, dressed in rich damask boubous and seated in front of their round, straw roofed huts. The student hostel was extremely drafty, badly heated and freezing. To beat the cold, Ramatoulaye, Binetou and myself used to drink cup after cup of mint tea in the entrance hall where a miniscule coal stove burnt. One afternoon a group of Guineans came and joined us there. They all called Condé ‘Le Vieux’ (old man) which, I later learned, was a mark of respect, but also because his graying hair made him seem older than the average student. He also spoke with the sententious voice of a wise man pronouncing undeniable truths. His birth certificate, however, stated he was born around 1930, contradicting both his appearance and behavior. Extremely sensitive to the cold, he wore a heavy hand-knitted scarf wrapped around his neck and under his thick, mud-colored coat, two or three pullovers. I was surprised when the introductions were made. An actor enrolled in classes at the Conservatoire on the rue Blanche? His diction left much to be desired. As for his high-pitched voice, it was far from that of a baritone. Let’s be frank! In other circumstances I would have barely spoken to him. But my life had been radically transformed. The one I had once been no longer was. The once arrogant Maryse Boucolon had been mortally wounded. The time had long gone when I boasted of being one of the few Antilleans to prepare for the competitive entrance exams to the Grandes Ecoles. And that had not been my sole claim to fame! After Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks was published in

the journal Esprit I sent an open letter to the editor stating that in my opinion Fanon had understood absolutely nothing about French Antillean society. To my great surprise, by way of a response to my passionate letter, and despite my extremely young age, I was invited by Jean-Marie Domenach no less to the offices on the rue Jacob to expound my criticism. Since those days of splendor, Jean Dominique, the future Haitian hero of The Agronomist, the hagiographical documentary by the American film director, Jonathan Demme, had passed through my life. I don’t recall the exact circumstances in which I met the man whose behavior was to have such an impact on my life. We were intensely involved in a remarkable intellectual love. Given the splendid isolation in which I had been brought up I knew nothing about Haiti. Jean Dominique not only taught me a thing or two physically, he enlightened me by introducing me to the exploits of the ‘brocaded Africans’, Napoleon Bonaparte’s scornful expression for Haitians. Thanks to him, I discovered the martyrdom of Toussaint Louverture, the triumph of Jean-Jacques Dessalines and the initial difficulties of the new Black Republic. He also made me read Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain, Bon Dieu rit by Edris St Amand and General Sun, My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis. In short, he introduced me to the extraordinary wealth of a land I knew nothing about. Without a doubt it is he who planted in my heart my unfailing attachment to Haiti. The day I plucked up courage to tell him I was pregnant, he seemed happy, very happy even, and cried out in joy: “This time it’ll be a little mulatto boy!”, since he already had two girls from a previous union, one of whom, J.J. Dominique, has since become a writer. Yet when I arrived at his place the following morning I found him emptying his apartment and packing his bags. He solemnly explained that a threat of an extreme gravity was looming over Haiti. A physician by the name of François Duvalier was running in the presidential elections. Because he was black, he was drawing enthusiastic crowds, tired of mulatto presidents and dangerously attracted to the ideology of Noirisme, the Haitian version of Negritude. Yet, he had none of the qualifications necessary to become president and therefore the opposition must join forces to form a common front against this loathsome prospect.

Maryse Condé

My Life Unvarnished

François Cusset

Shelter from a World in Decline

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen madsen@pol-editeur.fr Number of Pages: 248 p.

Translation: Jane Teresa Kuntz kuntz@illinois.edu

A story of revolutionary and romantic disillusionment by historian of ideas, François Cusset. A generation novel of revolutionary and romantic disillusionment that comes to terms with marginality, whether overt or coverat, as the only way to go on living. The writing is tight, lyrically precise, inspired. Biography

François Cusset was born in 1969. A graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure, he now teaches American Civilization at the University of Paris (Ouest Nanterre La Défense), after having taught philosophy at Sciences Po in Paris, and Columbia University in Paris. He spent ten years in New York as a journalist, as an attaché in the book promotion section of the French embassy, then as the director of the French Publishers’ Agency. He currently contributes to a number of French and American publications, and is a regular commentator on the French radio station FranceCulture, in addition to being a columnist for French weekly Politis. He has published several essays in the field of contemporary intellectual and political history, including French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011). À l’abri du déclin du monde (Shelter from a World in Decline) is his first novel.

The novel opens with a sprawling depiction of a single day of rioting in Paris. It could well have given rise to a revolution. It didn’t, in the end. Years later, over the course of one solitary afternoon, four friends separately tell the bare truth about what they have become, no holds barred. Then, together, they spend an entire night in a place seemingly suspended outside of time and space to see what remains of those feverish years, of their insurgent friendship

and of their willingness to laugh it all away. At dawn, they find a ghost between the morning dew, the smoke and yesterday’s tears. The novel comprises three parts situated in three apparently unrelated moments, save the frayed thread of friendship and politics, like the persistence of a desire. Three moments that list all the ingredients of an era, but also, tucked between the lines, the only means of breaking away.

“Everybody to the Madeleine!” The rallying cry rang out in front of the Saint-Lazare train station, a hoarse but distinct voice rising from among the pack of rank and file, some sitting, most standing, as cigarettes and conjecture passed from lip to lip. The word was relayed almost immediately via megaphones, loudspeakers rigged to handlebars, canvassers pulling up the rear along Rue de Rome and Rue d’Amsterdam. We were a little group, over on Rue de Châteaudun, stationed in front of a supermarket under the dubious sign of the savvy urbanite, the store having closed for once, in a terrible rush, right before 7pm, not an employee in sight. Up front, beneath the extinguished neon, a handful of us were strenuously picking away at the padlock that held the metal shutter. When it finally yielded, twenty arms lifted the curtain and in rushed the joyous throngs, while the alarm, although largely drowned out by the din outdoors, was neutralized within seconds by the single whack of an iron bar. Most of the crowd beat a path to the produce section, others went for the canned goods, while a few of us headed straight to the alcohol aisle, and in no time, easy-to-open bottles of scotch were passing from mouth to mouth for the bracing slap of that first gulp, that amber taste of victory—familiar first names on the label like those of hillbilly cousins from Scotland or Tennessee. Bundled up in filthy clothes, the rare loner or two that no one had seen arrive, were now proceeding slowly, wondering aloud where they would be sleeping that night, their gaze turned toward the street, seeing as their makeshift dormitory was currently under siege; then feasting right there on the supermarket floor or shuffling off with armfuls of

bottles and cans. Everyone else was busy stuffing backpacks with whatever they thought might tide them over during the next few hours. Within ten minutes, the store had been ransacked, designated as the rioters’ official canteen. Back out on the pavement, the amateur plunderers, mothers or disheveled adolescents, merrily set about divvying up the spoils with a collusion born of emergency and the glut of unexpected bounty. For each item, the name of an appropriate recipient was shouted out, bundles were undone and re-bundled, rucksacks were emptied and repacked, as were satchels, shoulder bags, brightly colored shopping totes, and one or two discreet man purses. Jars of baby food were swapped for bottles of soda, sliced bread for wafers, mineral water for six-packs of beer, this joke for that, continuously, eyes wide open. Out on the sidewalk there were still a few errant originals with whom the looters were still randomly sharing part of their take. As for the rest, local residents who had come down from their apartments and eleventh-hour insurgents were deep in discussion, hovering in little groups that would break up here to regroup there, a chattering human tide whose uneven backwash formed random troughs and crests, each time in a slightly different configuration. They were all spreading the word, taking stock in clusters of two or ten, reporting the latest messages relayed by cell phone before the jamming took effect, each bit of news increasingly distorted now that it roamed the streets: riot cops massing behind Étoile, gigantic water cannons and a regiment of grenadiers waiting on the ChampsÉlysées, but a clear passage from Saint-Lazare along Rue Tronchet, a scuffle down in the République metro station, serious skirmishes around the Pont Neuf, huge police presence at Nation and Batignolles, where masked youths from the north had launched targeted looting operations two hours prior—an unplanned diversion, but a welcome diversion nonetheless—plus the anxious murmurings about soldiers on the southern rim of the city, and a swarm of helicopters above Ile de la Cité, whose persistent drone could be heard above the street noise. The Saint-Lazare junction was abuzz, unsettled, rustling with more or less plausible rumors. The blacktop was quaking underfoot, a telluric force rumbling beneath the manhole covers, as if roused from a millennial sleep. The street felt like a hot shell ready to crack open, and at the same time like a playground reopened to passersby. At the top of a building on the junction, squarely facing the entrance to the train station, the only tangible proof of what the crowd was alleging spread across a giant screen that a complicit insider or some technical whiz had hooked up to one of the last remaining continuous news channels that still had reporters on the ground. A blurry rush of images showed a pitched battle somewhere in Paris, maybe a stone’s throw away, shields versus iron bars, stones versus flash-balls, images applauded, booed and commented from below, like those of a soccer game. Over the previous few days, carried by a single thrust of anger, everyone had turned against the main media outlets’ cowardice and craven lies, armed with the instruction,

as scrupulously followed by vehement grandmothers as by kids in hoodies, to grab all television cameras and break them by simply letting them fall to the ground. An almost systematic inability to shoot footage, which this one team of reporters had luckily escaped, was now offering the good folks of Saint-Lazare over thirty meters’ worth of luminophores, images that were bound to fire up the faithful. At the foot of this same building, snaking through the crowd of onlookers, a long waiting line, startlingly calm, made its way to the train station’s public toilets which had been reopened for the occasion, the local bistros having proved less than accommodating. Distinct from the other groups on the scene for the number of lone individuals in its ranks, and for how few words were being exchanged, the docile toilet queue led down a tightly packed flight of stairs, along an equally crowded corridor, until it reached a trio of energetic fifty-something ladies, short haired, baggy clothed, with professorial glasses and an authoritarian laugh, channeling the flow whenever a stall became available, three of the most unlikely dames pipi, delightfully against type, who finally assigned me mine, after an excruciating half-hour wait to take a dump. A double relief, to evacuate my bowels after hours of walking and to finally have a few minutes to myself, however fleeting, during which I repeated out loud to myself, as if in a trance, slack-jawed, sphincter wide open, feeling at once abashedly enthusiastic, scared shitless, and utterly amazed: holy crap … holy crap … holy crap … So it was, everybody over to the Madeleine, everybody to the Greco-Napoleonic temple, decrepit ersatz Acropolis cube that no one could really picture except as a vague point of reference, as that colonnade at the other end of Rue Royale. A name without a place, a name so delocalized for some that, one fine April Fool’s Day, when the mass transit company jokingly attempted to rename it “Marcel Proust,” it provoked a wave of panic among the literary types taking one of the metro lines that passed through Madeleine station that day. Yet this time, a name and a place designated as the convergence point, if the rumors were true, of all three marches that had been swelling in number by the hour since about midday: the one coming down from the northern suburbs via Chapelle and Rue Lafayette, the one comprised of Left Bank students arriving scatter-shot via Concorde and the Tuileries Gardens, and then, the demonstrators from earlier that morning heading out of eastern Paris where, since early afternoon, they had deviated en masse from their initial itinerary, the route officially sanctioned by the Prefecture the previous week. Like three human missiles tearing through the heart of old Paris, in addition to actual clashes breaking out in the nooks and crannies of various central neighborhoods, and even down in subway corridors: astounding news, so simple, so serious, so swift, the very newness of it all could be read on the intense faces, and overheard in words of disbelief. We had to somehow get a sense of the larger picture—and sooner rather than later—to get visual confirmation of all the chatter, to let the

François Cusset

Shelter from a World in Decline

eye see what mouths were whispering into ears. A few of us set off, winding our way through the melee, up Rue d’Amsterdam, along which an art deco apartment block near Place Clichy rose taller than its neighbors, and looked to us like a godsend. As if she had been doing it all her life, one of our group, a unassuming brunette with an athletic build, picked up a paving stone and threw it through the glass entrance, allowing us to reach through and open it from the inside. On the eighth floor, we knocked on the door of the corner roof room. A middle-aged black woman let us in, no questions asked, even proffering a few kind words by way of invitation, invoking God in his mercy to keep watch over us all. We stepped over the eclectic tea service scattered on the carpet, before we were finally able to lean over the balustrade of the large, single window set into the gables. And to take it all in. Beneath a cloudless mauve sky streaked with red and purple reflections, the celestial vision of a city at war, bathed in seamless light. The late summer azure, incredibly pure, descended into the boxed valleys of old Paris, haloed once again by wisps of tear gas and the sooty sparks of the barricades, each axial trench of the Parisian plateau still identifiable among the crowded rooftops: the nearby canyon of the Grand Boulevards, with Rue Auber as its diagonal tributary; further on, the furrow of Saint-Honoré with its faubourg converging into the horizon, the Seine in the distance, the broadest of avenues, and at our feet, Rue Tronchet stretching all the way to the verdigris roof of the Madeleine. The domes and bristling steeples that floated above the smoke belonged to the last places of worship in west-central Paris, the Trinité, Saint-Augustin, the truculent Garnier and, further on, the gables of the big department stores and their shimmering halos of color. In the distance, we could make out a few pockets of street fighting from the blackish blaze hovering above, at Palais-Royal, on Mount Sainte-Genviève, over by the Hôtel de Ville. Unraveling between the blue-grey of the roofs and the sky’s robust pink, clouds of white vapor scattered across the horizon demarcated a virtually soundless battleground, as witnessed from our lofty perch. Paris ablaze, anything but a dismal plain.

Julia Deck

Viviane Élisabeth Fauville

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: September 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Irène Lindon direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Number of Pages: 160 p.

Translation: Michael Lucey mlucey@berkeley.edu

How does one live under the weight of an unpunished crime? “Carried out with subtlety, but also by a firm and original hand, ‘Viviane Elisabeth Fauville’ is an astonishingly successful novel.” Livres Hebdo Biography

Julia Deck was born in Paris in 1974. Viviane Élisabeth Fauville is her first novel.

You are Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, forty-two years old. You have one child, a baby girl, and a husband, except that he has just left you. And then yesterday you killed your psychoanalyst. It would probably have been better had you refrained from doing so. Luckily for you, I am here to get things back under control.

1 The baby is twelve weeks old, and her breathing lulls you like the calm, regular rhythm of a metronome. The two of you are seated together in a rocking chair in the middle of a completely empty room. The boxes stacked up by the movers line the wall to your right. Three of them on the top of the pile have been opened to get at a few essential items: cooking utensils, toiletries, some clothes, and the baby’s things, more numerous than your own. The window is curtainless. It looks as if it has been tacked onto the wall like a sketch, a study in perspective, in which the tracks and catenary wires of the Gare de l’Est function as convergence lines. It’s not entirely clear to you, but you have the impression that five or six hours ago you did something you shouldn’t have. You are trying to reconstruct the sequence of your movements, to reestablish the thread linking them together, yet each time you seem to get hold of the thread, instead of automatically calling up the next memory, it drops limply into the hole that your memory has become. To tell the truth, you are no longer altogether certain that a short while ago you returned to that other apartment you have been visiting secretly for years. Shapes and forms, colors and style melt away in the distance. Did that man who waited for you there even really exist? Moreover, if you really had something to reproach yourself with, you wouldn’t be sitting here doing nothing. You’d be pacing in circles, worrying the edges of your fingernails; guilt would be paralyzing your decision-making capabilities. Nothing of the kind. Despite the vagueness of your memory, you feel quite at ease. Your hips cease to move, no longer transferring their motion to the rocking chair. You carry the baby into the adjoining bedroom, which is a bit more

furnished. To either side of the window are a single bed, its blanket tautly spread under the folded-over sheet, and the baby’s crib. The baby barely makes a protest as you set her down on her back, falling asleep again immediately. You glance around you, put in order the piles of clothes that cover up a wooden chest under the window, and smooth out the dress hanging at the front of a metal rack that also holds all your winter coats and pants. Your sweaters are piled up on the shelf above the metal rod, and your pumps and your boots are paired up and waiting patiently between its wheels. A hallway connects the two rooms and the kitchen. At the end is the bathroom, a tiny space in which your knees bump into the sink and your left foot hits the edge of the shower when you’re sitting on the toilet. Strips of paint are slowly peeling off the ceiling. It would have been a good idea to have a bit of refurbishing done, but you wanted to move in quickly; you told the landlord that in exchange for a month’s rent you’d arrange to have the work done once you had settled in. There’s not much to say about the kitchen. The latest appliances housed under an imitation granite countertop, shiny plumbing, and the gleaming tile floor are on their own enough to justify the huge rent. You take two eggs out of the fridge and a bowl out of the cabinet above the sink in order to make an omelet. It’s a common mistake to imagine omelets should be smooth. The trick is to just barely blend the white with the yolk, and to cook them to exactly the right degree. You often watched your mother as she beat the eggs for an omelet. Her instructions are indelibly fixed in your memory, which isn’t saying a whole lot, since that constitutes the full extent of your domestic skills. You got an education and made a good career for yourself. All that didn’t leave much time to learn to be a perfect housewife. This is something you regret since in those moments when you are feeling a bit out of it and are willing to listen to just about anyone, it turns out there are plenty of people ready to insist that being a good housewife is the best way to hold on to your husband. As you mix the eggs with a fork, you go on attempting to remember what you did today. The baby woke you up at six in the morning. A quiet whimper makes itself heard in the bedroom, still dark despite the absence of shutters. You open one eye and mumble a silly song, one of those pop songs you learned fifteen years ago that are the only kind of lullaby you know. Then you warm up a bottle, sneaking in a quick shower while it gets to the right temperature. Now the baby is in the kitchen in your arms. She’s feeding and at this point neither of you is thinking about anything. You put her back in the crib for a few minutes as you get your things together, brush your hair, put on some mascara. Then out the pair of you go. The nanny lives on the rue Chaudron. From your place, at the corner of the rue Cail and the rue Louis-Blanc, you go straight, then take a left, then a right. The nanny accepts the minimum level of payment. She is scrupulously

Julia Deck

Viviane Élisabeth Fauville

attentive to the cleanliness of her place, lavishes impeccable care on your child, and doesn’t waste any time on useless pleasantries. All this suits you perfectly. In a month you’ll be going back to work, and the baby needs, little by little, to get used to not having you around. Right up till two o’clock you are busy with bureaucratic formalities related to your move, the divorce, the subsidy for a single parent. You buy a few clothes, drop in to the hairdresser’s, and agree to a manicure as well. It used to be that those of your friends who already had children would amuse themselves by going on about the fact that you—who would certainly never be a mother—had the good fortune to spend time on yourself. Were your luck ever to change, you vowed to yourself to spare your offspring any responsibility for your withered beauty. The omelet is nearly done. You fold it in half with a spatula and slide it onto a plastic plate, tapping the edge of the plate to hear the sound made by the bizarre material from which it is made and which does such a good job of imitating porcelain. You bought it at the Monoprix by the Gare du Nord. You weren’t paying a whole lot of attention to what you were buying, being too busy watching another customer in the same department out of the corner of your eye. He was about your age and looking at the same products. You were trying to figure out if he too, obliged to move quickly, had had to leave his family dishes behind. But you couldn’t work up the nerve to ask him the question. You pour a can of peas and carrots into the middle of the half-moon shape of your omelet and then stick the whole plate into the microwave, a serious breach in the art of omelet making, bringing your mind back to this morning’s activities. It seems that you did indeed go back to your husband’s place, and why not: you still have the key, and you realized there were several things there that you needed. Nothing had changed in the apartment on the rue Louis-Braille in the past month. Julien says he’s going to move, but he doesn’t seem to be in a rush. In point of fact, he doesn’t seem to spend much time here. The sink and the dish rack are empty, there’s no plastic bag in the garbage can, and the tv guide dates from before you left. You gather up a rectangular tray, some hand towels, and the toaster. Rummaging around in the closet in the second bedroom—the one that was intended for the child—, looking for a bag to put everything in, you come across your wedding presents. Of course there is no good reason why the man who treated you so badly, the one you were so in love with and who let you down so badly, should get to keep the set of eight kitchen knives that your mother gave you on that particular occasion. You stuffed the knives into your purse, and managing to remember that much really seems like quite an accomplishment. You finish up the last bites of your omelet and head off to bed.

2 The following morning, Tuesday, November 17, your memory has been entirely restored. The clock at the foot of the bed reads 5:03. You have more or less an hour before the baby wakes up, an hour to find a solution, to clean up as much as possible the mess you’ve created all around you. Your name is Viviane Élisabeth Fauville. Your married name is Hermant. You are 42 years old and last August 23 you gave birth to your first, and doubtless your only, child. You work as the public relations manager for Biron Cement. The Biron firm makes a lot of money and occupies an eight story building on the rue de Ponthieu, just a few steps from the Champs-Élysées. In the lobby, the receptionists, smooth and clingy, like the strips of plastic in old kitchen window shades, exchange vague trivialities with the waiting visitors. Your husband, Julien Antoine Hermant, civil engineer, was born forty-three years ago in Nevers. On September 30 he brought two years of horrific married life to a close. He said: Viviane (having come home at some ungodly hour), Viviane, I’m leaving you, there’s no other way, and in any case you know I’ve been cheating on you, and that it’s not even because I’m in love with someone else, but out of desperation. You took the salvo that pulverized your rib without flinching. Your shoulders barely sagged, the rhythm of the rocking chair barely shifted, your fingers barely tightened on the armrests. He started up again: Viviane, please understand, you’ve got the kid, but I need some space. Anyway, I can’t give you what you want, maybe you want too much from me—Viviane, please, say something. You replied: No, I’ll leave. Keep everything. I’ll take the baby, we won’t need child support. You moved out on October 15, found a nanny, extended your maternity leave for health reasons, and on Monday, November 16, which is to say yesterday, you killed your psychoanalyst. This wasn’t a symbolic killing, not the way sometimes someone has to kill the father. You killed him with a Zwilling J.A. Henckels knife, from the Twin Profection series: the Santoku. “The wedge-shaped unique blade geometry delivers optimum stability and an easy cut,” to use the exact words of the brochure you pored over in the Galeries Lafayette while your mother got out her check book. The knife, one of a set of eight, is one you had taken from Julien’s place earlier that morning. There was no hesitation in the moment you picked up the case. It dropped to the bottom of your purse, which you zipped up decisively. Then something quite strange happened. You were about to leave the apartment, your hand was already on the door knob, when a black veil descended over the room. Suddenly it wasn’t you leaving the premises, rather they began spinning around you, rising up on all sides, the floor, the walls, the ceiling jostling together as spatial dimensions abruptly turned themselves inside out. Your palms became damp with sweat, thousands of insects were buzzing inside your skull, a swarming army attacking the slightest fragment of open skin, blocking all openings, covering over your eyes, mouth, and nose.

Julia Deck

Viviane Élisabeth Fauville

Nathalie Démoulin

The Big Blue

Publisher: Le Rouergue Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Number of Pages: 208 p.

Translation: Jeanine Herman jeanine_herman@yahoo.com

A beautiful portrait of a woman in quest of her own life, which should be particularly appealing to female readers. A panorama of France in the 1970s, years of liberation, utopia, freedom. A novel of great literary quality, in the lineage of Annie Ernaux, in its ability to link individual fates and social conditions, History great and small. Biography

Born in 1968 in Besançon, Nathalie Démoulin lives in Arles, where she works as an editor of illustrated books for adults, at Éditions du Rouergue. La Grande Bleue is her third novel. Publications By Rouergue, in the “La brune” collection: Ton nom argentin (Your Argentinean Name), 2007; Après la forêt (After the Forest), 2005.

In 1967, in the Franche-Comté region, Marie, a high school student, falls in love with a young lumberjack, Michel, whom she marries a few months later. In two years, instead of having “a life of her own,” she has two children, and like many young, working-class girls of the time, her fate seems to have been decided. She and her husband leave the forests of their birthplace to settle in a public housing project in Vesoul. Michel goes to work at the Peugeot factory, and Marie also becomes a worker. Ten years later, as Mitterrand is coming into power, she will be divorced, living in a commune in the south of France for a while before returning to work at the Myrys factory in the Aude region.

Devoting a chapter to each year between 1967 and 1978, Nathalie Démoulin shares a decade in the life of this young woman, so representative of her era and social status, remarkably interweaving an intimate and extimate story. The fictional portraits of Marie and her loved ones are woven into the historic landscape of the 1970s, rendered in beautiful, polished writing. This is a “historical” novel of great relevance to recent memory, a frame of reference for current events in French politics, for better or worse.

1973 Lip seemed far away to Marie. Far from Montmarin and the Peugeot factories. Far from the packaging plants, the parts you counted all day long, along with the lists you kept at home of all the expenses, and even when you paid attention, it was sometimes hard to make it to the end of the month. Lip, and the union newsletters, didn’t even mention it at first. Because there are so many liquidations. Because you’re in your world, the world of metallurgy, then watchmaking … The conflict takes on such proportions that Lip workers are on the front page of the papers, talked about on the radio, on the television news. The strike has become an affair of State. But to find yourself in Palente in the occupied factory during this joyous, anxious time of watchwords, collectives, and debates—Marie didn’t see this coming. She looks hard at Delphine, she’d like to interject, tell her I can’t stay, because she wasn’t thinking about going into the factory when Delphine suggested she accompany her. No. What Marie wanted to do was go back to Palente, where they went to high school together, six years ago. Have a carefree afternoon, without the kids. Fall back into adolescence. Angèle kept inserting a Henri Salvador 45 into the slot-fed record player, listening to The Lion Sleeps Tonight over and over, chewing stalks of rhubarb. Raoul was settling into a siesta brought on by the heat. Marie had left the family home to sneak into the Démolys’ garden, and Delphine was there, clearing the table, suggesting they take Marie’s 4L to pop over to Palente. Without hesitating

Marie said yes, leaving her children in Louise’s care, heading toward Besançon with Delphine, like the time they went to La Rhodiacéta, except today they were in a car, it was hot, you could drive with the windows rolled down, humming the same songs by Nino Ferrer, playful and breezy in a polka-dot dress, as if on a merry-go-round, the new kind that turns in the sun and is the color of strawberry ice cream and peppermint soda. You’re too busy taking in all this light, all this chlorophyll, to listen to Delphine; anyway, you know all this already. How the company declared bankruptcy on April 17. How on June 10 the Lip workers decided to occupy the factory. And on June 12, when they discovered management was quietly preparing to lay off four hundred eighty workers, they took the administrator hostage before seizing a supply of twentyfive thousand watches, soon spread out in an indeterminate number of hiding places, as far away as Haut-Doubs and in the region of the Vosges, in the homes of priests who were distillers on the sly, at night, and who didn’t mind accepting clandestine supplies. On June 18, they started up the production line on their own, hanging a banner in front of the factory that said: it’s possible: we produce, we sell, we pay ourselves. The journalists came, the leftists, French intelligence, representatives of the federations and the Unified Socialist Party. Thousands of protesters marched through Besançon. When Marie parks the car, half on the sidewalk, half on the grass, since the neighborhood of Palente ends with Lip and opens onto the countryside, there is still a fairground atmosphere, with people flocking toward the factory in brightly colored clothing. It’s a struggle to park. There are even buses with Belgian and Italian license plates. Marie looks up at the giant clock that has been measuring time from the roof of the factory for the duration of the occupation—it will probably go beyond a million seconds on June 23—and there may be a camera following your hesitant steps, between the prairie and the asphalt, because they’re filming at Lip, coming from faraway to capture images of this workers’ struggle, the way we go four or five hundred kilometers to buy a watch. It feels strange to Marie, right next to Delphine, to cross the road, to enter the factory freely—Lip guarantees you the exact time; at the sound of the tone it will be exactly 3:24 p.m.—to go through the gate, which is not closed. Delphine knows a lot of people; after all, she works at Kelton, in this same watchmaking world. She kisses people hello, on one cheek, on the other, she says, this is my friend Marie. Men walk around in shirtsleeves, you can tell what their bodies are like from their unbuttoned collars, sweat plastering the fabric to their backs; so many men, workers who are here night and day, militants who have come from big cities to support the movement, men who claim to be from the proletarian Left and are allowed to speak. People are drunk on words. No one has ever spoken in the factory this much, people think. In general assemblies, committee meetings, small groups that stay late, barely sleep, don’t even go home, the factory has become the place where they live, in the intensity of the struggle,

in the anxiety of waiting for the riot police to burst in. They believe in it, with great conviction. Self-management. The quartz watch. Saving jobs. Before the armed guards move in. Before the confiscation. Before a hundred thousand people march through Besançon. Before Messmer, the prime minister, shouts from the rooftops, Lip is finished! Delphine and Marie go down a hallway where drawings are hung on the wall. Our magic potion is unity, Marie reads in passing. Already, she’d like to slow down, retrace her steps; she’s too upset. This doesn’t tally with her factory life, these unofficial payrolls, these wild assemblies, this illicit work. But Delphine goes before a group, opening her arms. She works at Peugeot-Vesoul, she points out, taking her shoulder, and Marie blushes. Marie is a storehouse agent, amt2, Coefficient 145, while the workers here have a manual skill and the pride that goes with it. We need support, a woman says to her. Marie notices her daisy print dress, and then, to escape, takes a few steps toward the refreshment stand; under the trees she feels better; she can breathe, even if it’s not a field, or a garden, but a green space, in a watch factory. Do they know what will become of them later, when the factories start to close one after another, when they’re living off temporary contracts, gradually losing everything they’re trying to win today, in 1973, a year that will end with the first oil crisis? We settle at a table, leaf through the Lip Unity journal, observe Delphine from afar. It’s almost impossible not to look at her. In her purple pants, so self-assured, she speaks. No one has ever spoken like this in a mixed group of men and women. We’re timid. But we learn to exist in our own way—not like Delphine who can wave a red banner and cry, Lip fights for all workers! Surely the person she is at this moment, in this occupied factory, would be hard to connect, later, to the woman who tucks in her children and puts off joining her husband, with reluctant movements and a sullen crease from lips to stomach, with those two words that always precede everything, not now, that gradually create a stiltedness, only relieved at increasingly distant intervals, like now, in this rustling of leaves, a rustling that renews you, as if you could suddenly decide your own fate. And already you wonder how you will return to the factory on Monday, packaging windshield wipers, having spent a Saturday afternoon like this, even if you’re standing off to the side, lighting a cigarette to appear composed, closing your eyelids because the wind is blowing smoke into your eyes. Are you in a union, Delphine? Marie asks when they’re together again. Certainly not! Delphine replies. You know, what’s going on here is beyond the unions, she adds right away, with a smile overflowing her triangular face, to which it is almost impossible not to respond. Once again they come, a group gathering around them, the woman in the daisy print dress, a very young girl dressed in red calico, who introduces herself, Barbara, but Barbara is not a first name, it’s a story you tell yourself, Marie thinks. “Barbara” is surely a Valerie or a Christine.

Nathalie Démoulin

The Big Blue

There are a lot of us at the moment; we could join hands and form a circle, as perhaps Ivan is doing at this very moment in his hospital, where the old rooms house a new psychiatry, less focused on medication, with theater and dance workshops. And so Ivan will learn how to walk again, at Saint-Rémy, in that drafty castle, as doors open and close by themselves, because the worn doorframes, the fierce … No, no one has never put into words what you feel when you go through the building for a simple visit, and the wind slips in with you, an annoying feather floating in front of you, at least it’s not a leaf already turning red, and when you turn your head you’re sure to see a face glued to the window, or else a whole tree whipped by the wind, its branches scraping insistently, shrrr, shrrr. At the very end of the hallway, there’s a room where Ivan is not waiting for us; seeing us makes him look worried, so we take his hand, we ask him how he is, but we have to leave these cavernous spaces to get the beginning of a reply, to leave behind the echoing of this place, and after ten steps Ivan begins to complain and moan, to hang onto doors; he hasn’t left the hospital in almost three years, not even for an hour, or a moment; for three years he hasn’t moved, and here he is on the verge of starting to dance. And here Marie is, in a factory occupied by mothers who knit, who dress in their Sunday best to march in protest, basically so that they won’t be taken for nomads amidst all the worker priests who think they can take on the riot police, oddballs who think they’re at Woodstock. She smiles a bit tensely, holds out her hand and reddened fingers to greet the new arrivals, who are strangers, or, in any case, who aren’t from here; students, Delphine says, boys with narrow hips and nascent beards, their faces still hesitating between childhood and manhood. Among them is a stockier man with a Kolkhoz look in a bland, rumpled jacket, surely older, Ivan’s age perhaps—the age when you turn on yourself and already hate what’s happened, what you’ve done, what you’ve decided, and what can no longer be repaired. Marie turns toward him first, and holding his hand, lingers for a few seconds on his eyes, which are pale, blue, perhaps, or gray, and, as if in reply, he introduces himself, Serge.

Disiz

René

Publisher: Denoël Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Judith Becqueriaux judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr Number of Pages: 272 p.

Translation: Rachael Small rachaela.small@gmail.com

A novel that is simultaneously political fiction, Bildungsroman, and hardboiled crime fiction. “A novel that can be read as both a contemporary thriller and chilling political fiction.” Livres Hebdo “The dialogues are full of flavor and a pervasive sense of humor offsets the darkness of this sentimental education that takes place in the midst of a society in ruins.” Le Point Biography

Disiz is a writer and rapper, born in 1978 to a French mother and Senegalese father. He first entered the scene in 2000 with his albums Le Poisson rouge and Je pète des plombs (under the name Disiz la Peste). His next album, Extralucide, will be released in 2012. René is his second novel. Publications Les Derniers de la rue Ponty, Naïve, 2010 (published under his real name, Serigne M’Baye Gueye).

2025. After many years of oppressing the banlieues and a brief civil war, the extreme right’s rise to power has radicalized France. Paramilitary groups have taken control of the ruined projects, while a referendum is being drafted that would reestablish the death penalty. This is the world in which the timid René is growing up. He spends his summer of “firsts” under the influence of Edgar, a funny, obsessive and uncontrollable young delinquent. Caught up

in the violence of teenage gangs, he witnesses a murder for which Edgar is the prime suspect. René knows that he must face his fears and set the record straight. But does he really know the whole truth? In a novel that speaks the language of the projects in all its eloquence, strength and humor, Disiz introduces us to a seductive and sensitive young boy forced to grow up too quickly in a society at war with itself.

2 The next day he awoke to sticky boxers and the sounds of his mother shrieking. She was shouting for him to bring her the plastic tub from the bathroom. Still lying down, on her side, she retched red wine into it and grunted at him to clean it all up. He immediately complied. As he dumped the purplish muck into the sink, a few splatters got on his t-shirt and he wiped them off with the back of his hand. He set the tub down next to the bidet and, bending over, saw a thick, dried maxi pad abandoned behind the ceramic vault. He picked it up and carefully examined the different shades of coagulated hemoglobin on the top of the pad. Purple, brown, pink, violet, it made him think of a painter’s palette. He brought the cloth up to his nose, it smelled of iron. He threw it into the little covered trashcan under the sink and then stared at himself in the broken mirror, eye to eye. A sudden attack of vertigo seized him. It felt like he was falling, as though in a dream. He winced. Who are you? he asked himself. He loved that feeling, at the very edge of unconsciousness. Nine in the morning, Sabrina had been drinking all night and was sleeping it off on the old couch in the living room, her mouth dirty, a breast popping out of her vermillion faux-silk nightgown. René observed the mass of maternal flesh. The path of the veins, the areola, like a big burgundy patch that circled a large, flabby tit. He carefully covered his mother with a sheet and kissed her forehead. Then he went back to his room, slipped into a few layers of clothing, grabbed his InstinctIphone and left.

René was hungry. He could’ve stolen some money from his mother’s purse, but told himself it’d be wrong. He stared at the ground and prayed to God to make a bill or a few coins appear, spare change fallen out of some pocket. When he was younger, on his way to school, he’d found a wallet in a bush and proudly brought it to the police station. But if he were to find a bill now, he’d buy himself a tasty sandwich from Berbou, the Nigerian butcher in Errains Park, and cover it in lobster sauce and pili-pili. A smack to the head brought him out of his gourmet daydream. “Gimme your phone, you little fag,” the order came from a deep black face. Frightened, René fished around in his pocket but didn’t find it. The boy stood up in front of him. “Keep track of your shit, nigger. Hey, nigger, are you even a nigger?” the guy said, handing his phone back to him, which he’d dropped. “Um … yeah, no,” René stammered. “So what are you, then? Arab? Pakistani? Chilean?” “My mom’s Franco-Arab and my dad, I dunno, Malian, I think.” “Yeah, well, so you’re a real bastard then, aren’t you?” Edgar laughed. Edgar was black and not very tall. His head was shaved and his tiny nose, framed by oval nostrils, was pinched by the armature of a pair of gold metallic sunglasses. When he opened his mouth to speak, his fleshy lips revealed straight, bright white teeth. His delivery was quick, interspersed with laughter and expressions he’d created himself. “Whatcha up to, huh? Shouldn’t you be at school?” “I don’t go anymore.” “Why?” “I dunno … just don’t …” “Just don’t? ‘Fraid you’ll get all balled up, yeah. Don’t worry, they’re all fags in Forgerons. They always show up by the dozen, but I swear, throw ‘em at me one by one, I’ll fuck’em all up the ass. Even in a group, I’ll fuck ‘em, sons of bitches.” Edgar’s manners and confidence fascinated René. He liked the way he dressed. The Stetson that hung from a lace around his neck, the plunging leather cigarette pants over a pair of Jordans, the black, checkered, short sleeved shirt under a navy blue leather vest, and above all, around his waist, his Louis Vuitton leather fanny pack shaped like a pistol sleeve. “Alright, come on. Follow me. Let’s go grab us some bitches.” René wasn’t the impressionable kind. Always hanging back during recess, he was one of those boys other kids made fun of for wearing the same jacket all year long and not talking to anybody. He wasn’t a kiss-ass, a go-getter, a bully or a ladies’ man. He was never seen with girls, one of those kids others called “dumbshit” or “geekwad” or “psycho” … The kind of teenager people worry will wake up one morning and head to school armed with a Kalashnikov, ready

Disiz

René

to shoot anything that moves from the schoolyard to the dining hall, like they do in American schools. He was never invited anywhere. Whenever something was being planned, a movie or a birthday, he automatically excluded himself, thinking that it just wasn’t for him. But Edgar’s proposition, “grab us some bitches,” that was something he’d wanted to do for a while now … He didn’t even know why, maybe because this boy had returned his phone to him when he could have stolen it, but René felt himself drawn in by the miniature whirlwind that was Edgar. He’d follow him anywhere. […] It was four a.m. when René got home. As he began to climb the stairs, the horrifying thought occurred to him that his mother might be awake. Walking home alone, clasping the red flower she’d given him tightly in his hands, he hadn’t been able to think about anything but Jeanne. He inserted the key in the lock as quietly as he could. Amid the silence of the building, the click of the cylinder seemed like thunder. As usual, the damned door creaked. It was almost over. Now he just had to close it without making noise. But it creaked again. “Where were you?” He flinched at his mother’s voice, then instinctively burst into tears because he knew what was going to happen. “I was at a birthday party, mom, I swear. I didn’t do anything wrong.” She pulled his hair back with her left hand and slapped him with her right. He tried to escape his mother’s grip, bent over to duck her blows and protect the flower, which had already lost a petal. “You scared me, you little shit! Where were you?” she screamed. She stopped abruptly and snatched the black hat with the leather strap in her thin hands. “What’s this? Where’d you get this? Whose is it?” “A friend lent it to me, mom,” he said, almost on his knees, hiding the flower he wanted to save behind his back. She caught a whiff of weed in the hat’s thick felt, which was all it took to throw her into an uncontrollable rage. She clawed his cheek and beat him all over. He fell to the floor, more in self-defense than in pain. “And you smoke too!” she shouted, kicking him. He ran into his bedroom. She screamed, bewitched by the liberating rage of manic-depression. She grabbed the chair he used as a nightstand and threw it against the wall, shattering it. René tried to subdue her, and was able to for a moment. Then she threw him off violently and screamed like a banshee that she was going to kill herself, slit her throat or jump out the window. René apologized with all his might and tried to take her in his arms, but she pummeled him until he backed off. She violently slammed all the doors and entrenched

herself in the living room, while René, shaking with uncontrollable sobs, straightened up his room as best he could in the aftermath of the tornado. He stopped briefly to listen for noises on the other side of the apartment and make sure that his mother hadn’t carried out her threats. Not a sound. He ran into the unlit living room. “Mama?” he asked, worriedly, in the voice of the little child he’d been not so very long ago. She was sprawled out on the bed. He stretched out by her side and was reassured to see that she hadn’t done anything serious, she was just crying under the sheets. As usual, she reeked of alcohol. “Please forgive me, mom.” “Leave me alone, go to sleep, don’t worry, I won’t do nothin’,” she said, softly. “Can I sleep with you? Would that be ok?” “Do what you want, I don’t give a shit. I’m gonna croak soon anyway and then you can do whatever you want, smoke, drink like your mother. You’ll be alone …” And she kept on talking for a long while, repeating the same lament while René, who was used to it, held her in his arms, simply reassured that she wouldn’t do the deed, jolted by the horrible things he’d so often heard her say.

Disiz

René

Félicité Herzog

A Hero

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr Number of Pages: 304 p.

Translation: Hester Velmans hestervelmans@gmail.com

A novel that evokes Jean Cocteau’s “Les enfants terribles”, in which Félicité Herzog paints a no-holds-barred portrait of her father and deconstructs his myth. Opening a window on the fascinating world of the French aristocracy and its privileges, this novel further describes the last gasps of that milieu and raises the question of its legacy with sensitivity and insight. Biography

Félicité Herzog was born in Paris in 1968, the daughter of Maurice Herzog, the renowned mountaineer and author of Annapurna. She has worked at the multinational Areva corporation since 2007. A Hero is her first novel.

This is about snapped climbers’ ropes and wounded siblings. With a father who was the first man to scale Annapurna, a minister in de Gaulle’s cabinet and an eternally absent Lothario, and a too-intelligent mother, heiress to the ironworks at Le Creusot, Félicité Herzog did not have a run-of-the-mill childhood … She spent her holidays shuttled between the two family chateaux—in the summer, the one at Apremont, and in winter, the one at la Celle-les-Bordes, which the Queen of England had once visited. She tells of her illustrious but disappointing father who was never around, too busy building his legacy; of her

grandparents, her uncles and aunts, who served as models for Proust … She also describes her intense and stormy relationship with her brother Laurent, and the atmosphere of high expectations in which the two of them were raised: the obligation to excel, which Laurent wasn’t able to handle. Was it to escape from so much pressure that he wound up inventing an imaginary, gentler world for himself, where he might do as he pleased? With Laurent’s mental illness and death, tragedy overtakes Félicité’s ostensibly gilded, easy life … A sober and sincere book, a coming-of-age story.

All my life, I have been robbed of my father by other women. It started with the au-pairs, a slow succession of English or Austrian girls who appeared and then disappeared again without explanation. When he was home, always a great occasion, he would spend most of his time watching their moves with keen attention, and then responding to their complaints until the season of sighs, followed by the season of tears, a recurring cycle of events as predictable to me as the lunar calendar. We were perfectly accustomed to the hierarchy of his desires. Perhaps this was inevitable in an adventurer of a father who knew no limits, driven by a constant need to overstep the boundaries. We were simply obliged to put up with it. At an early age I was sent to Germany, England and the United States to perfect my command of foreign languages. My father was the one who had a large network of acquaintances willing to look after me. It was always the same scenario. A woman of somewhat enhanced beauty, a devotee of Big Hair, her face imperceptibly marked by the passage of time and her eyes veiled with a film of nostalgia, would be waiting for me at the airport or on the railway platform. She usually spoke an elegant but outdated French in a delightful accent, either fruity or slightly hollow, which immediately ruled out any hope of perfecting my language skills. In her living room, there would be some shelves holding a few perfumed French books, from Zola to Sartre, with a smattering of Yourcenar, a legacy of her French studies at the Sorbonne, or of her work as

an interpreter in Paris, which, once discovered, confirmed that the stay would be useless—for its intended purpose at any rate. Finally, on the third day, as she served me a meal and as I feasted on her Kaiserschmarrn or her mince pies, something in the air like the sky before a storm would interrupt the repast. Raising my head, my fingers smeared with marmalade, I would see her big kohl-rimmed eyes, quivering with endless mascara-caked eyelashes, well up with tears—a final message intended for the man who had once adored her “doe eyes”. After a fruitless but quite honorable attempt at keeping it to herself, she would clutch the hand I had only just managed to wipe clean, and would end up confiding to me some piece of information rendered unintelligible by her sobs and a distorting Scottish brogue or Black Forest accent, suddenly erupting with “And to think you could have been my daughter!” An endless procession of peevish female disciples artfully drawn in by him devoted themselves to perpetuating his legend in books, interviews, translations and unlikely film projects. He would have them over to our Paris home for tea or a drink, invite them to dinners arranged by my mother, or to the house my mother had purchased for him in Chamonix, without a twinge of conscience about offending the woman who shared his life, or about embarrassing the one who was passing through his bed. I didn’t know if this showed a fundamental lack of awareness that he was doing anything wrong, or true perversity, but I did suspect that his legendary gleaming smile concealed darker glints, and that he wasn’t the man he pretended to be. If I happened to be there, he would introduce me to his surprised and embarrassed girlfriends as if it was the most normal thing in the world, enjoying their reaction, a mixture of shame and forced geniality. But they would continue to keep watch over this Moloch of the Himalayas, at least for a while, serving themselves up as his fodder, opening their address book for him, rewriting his articles, correcting his synopses, running his election campaigns, assisting him in every transaction, negotiating his contracts and devoting their talents to organizing galas honoring his glory, only to be supplanted, sooner or later, by a new worshipper full of fresh energy and similarly entranced by the charms of such a valiant man. Once they’d lost all their illusions and their pride, they would come and find me, to tell me of his treachery, his cowardice. I listened to the predictable sequence of events with resignation and boredom. It may be that the injuries, the physical ordeals, the worldwide fame of his exploits, the countless accolades and honors he received over the course of his life, made him unsuited to the role of father. He had proudly watched our births, had counted our fingers and toes in the delivery room with great relief, having apparently been convinced that he was only capable of siring deformed children. Later on he would show an interest in how we were doing whenever

he happened to cross our path. But an overpowering desire for more sublimation, not to mention the infernal womanizing, drowned out all other aspects of life—friendships, intellectual life, family ties, or simply connecting with others—compromising every interaction. After my parents’ de facto separation, we would occasionally see him for the holidays or on vacation. His schedule rarely squared with the school calendar. His involvement in politics, his younger children, his social engagements, his frequent travels abroad and his hectic adulterous life, all contributed to our increasing estrangement. Thus my relationship with him turned into a kind of paper chase. Sometimes a postcard would be waiting for me when I came home from school, evidence of this elusive father’s existence, who had already flown off to another destination. Always the same message: “My sweet little Félicité, I’m in Seoul selling metro cars. I hope you’re being a good girl and that you’re working hard. Big kiss from your Papa.” The essence of our relationship was contained in those ten-by-fifteen-centimeter cards. He did occasionally surprise me by surfacing, and, after exchanging some bitter words over the phone with my mother, he’d decide to take me to lunch at Chez Edgar, the restaurant most popular with politicians at the time, or at Lapérouse, normally off limits to children. A navy blue limo would pick me up, invariably twenty-five minutes late, long minutes which I spent on the sidewalk watching out for it. A heavy, corrupting curtain of discretion hung over those rooms of high-level meetings and attentive maître d’s. On entering the dining room, we would immediately be surrounded by a hostess and several waitresses with whom he appeared to be on intimate terms, at the very least calling them by their first names and knowing what their tasks were. Seated male patrons would warmly greet him on all sides. Magnificent, he had the triumphant but serene air of a man who has come back from the brink: “Maurice” was bathed in glory. Disoriented, intimidated, sporting a haircut that made me look like a skinny little monk, my face obscured by a pair of glasses I had to wear for my astigmatism, I couldn’t help peering at my father like an old, wizened child. “This is my new girlfriend!” was how he introduced me to his coterie, laughing. Suddenly, a wave of heat would flood into my chest and rush up to my cheeks and to the very tips of my ears. My head spun with bewilderment at this befuddling, quite irrepressible discomfort. I tried in vain to protest it wasn’t so. In the face of such confusion, the words would not come. The lunch was then spent listening religiously to him relating his achievements in the worlds of politics and business. When it was time for dessert, one of the ladies would give me a packet of Pierrot Gourmand lollipops, and the sweets released me from that dreadful grown-up lunch, finally returning me to my childhood. For the rest of the year I prided myself on being able to do without my famous father’s attention, the way one might challenge oneself to try living on

Félicité Herzog

A Hero

a desert island. His behavior, and what people told me about it—embarrassed aunts, defeated mother, knowing glances and hushed silences—convinced me one could not have a trusting relationship with a man like that. I therefore wound up cutting him out of my life altogether. Just before it was sold, my father paid us one last visit in our white house, a rambling two-story on the Rue Jean-Richepin that clashed with the Hausmannian architecture of Paris, abandoned by him years earlier and which my mother had resigned herself to selling in order to put to rest the last illusion of matrimony. A sense of turmoil and disintegration reigned in our home, the staff had asked to be paid off and some had already quit, the au pair—this time a German girl—had been fetched home by her parents for health reasons, removal men came every day to pick up some piece of furniture or some other item, holding up an order slip as sole explanation, my mother emerging on the stair landing, haughty and removed. The flimsy mesh of our lives, such as it was, was stealthily unraveling. The curtain was falling on a bitter comedy in which my older brother Laurent and I were both essential players and reluctant spectators. I gazed at our visitor, who, silhouetted against the light in an armchair in the downstairs salon, was talking to us. Or, rather, in the absence of any response from us, was talking to himself. The gray sheers absorbed the light from the street, though streaked with the darkness of the post office tower, a modern edifice erected in Rue de la Pompe some years earlier that had spoiled the block’s village aspect and now threw a fatal shadow over our house. With his salt-and-pepper hair, carefully combed locks, tanned complexion, his upper lip lined with a thin moustache, my father at age fifty-five, dressed in a three-piece suit and a shirt from Charvet, was to us an extraordinary being. The velvet eyes wide with amazement over his superhuman feat, yet clouded with sacrifice. He had known glory, every triumph the world had to offer. As a result of his political and social success, he had acquired a stunning social ease, and was by turns fatherly, lively and teasing, leaving us tongue-tied. I can’t remember anything he said. Ot was it the music of what he didn’t say, the movement of his beautiful hands, tanned and mutilated, impatiently tapping the armrest of his chair with one of his fingers, the one the surgeons had stitched up like a woolen sock after his return from Annapurna, his frame briskly rising out of his chair to check on some old tome in the bookcase, leaning forward, balancing on what remained of his heels thanks to his custom-made orthotic shoes? Only the greatest actors possess that talent for pretense—they who know how to present themselves in the best light, practice ahead of time the angle of their profile, modulate the timbre of their voice to match the emotion, always give a favorable version of the facts, and are skilled at monopolizing the conversation. Something in him wasn’t real. I listened to him attentively, soaking up his charm, mesmerized, and it occurred to me, quite simply, that he was lying.

Thierry Hesse

Unconsciousness

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Violaine Faucon vfaucon@editionsdelolivier.fr Number of Pages: 336 p.

Translation: Louis Cancelmi cancelmi@gmail.com

“A powerful meditation on brotherhood and the vicissitudes of existence, Hesse’s latest novel marks a new milestone in a singular body of work.” Livres Hebdo  In the tradition of Kundera or Moravia, the author of “Demon” (2009, hailed by critics and booksellers and translated in Spain, Italy, Israel, Norway, and Ukraine) confirms his exceptional talent with this novel of family and society. Biography

Thierry Hesse is a writer living in Metz. His previous novel, Demon, was published in France to critical acclaim and subsequently translated into half a dozen languages. He has also contributed to two joint publications: Futures of the Novel (Naïve, 2007) and Encountering Sebald (Inculte, 2011). Unconsciousness is his fourth novel. Publications The American Cemetery (Champ Vallon, 2003); Jura (Champ Vallon, 2005); Demon (Éditions de l’Olivier, 2009. Re-issued by Éditions Points, 2010).

In the Vogelgesang household in the late sixties, the boys were routinely required to take what their mother called a heart quiz, the purpose of which was to help make them more mature, more responsible, more human. What has become of them all these years later? The elder brother, Marcus, a charming and carefree bachelor, hopped from one experience to another before settling in Roubaix, where he teaches ethnology and sleeps with his female students. Carl, having started a family and worked for the same insurance company for twenty years, fell under the spell of a certain Stern, who over the course of a few weeks made him both his business partner and his

lover. He lives—or rather lived—in Metz: he has been in a deep coma ever since he inexplicably fell from his office window. Thierry Hesse follows these brothers on their journey, recounting their amorous adventures, moving between private life and public life, revealing the true face of an era in which big insurance companies took the place of religion, and where the power of capital is omnipresent. Weaving together both narrative and commentary, emotion and irony, classicism and a sensitivity to the spirit of the times, Unconsciousness is the work of an author at the height of his powers.

2. The fall Carl was forty-nine years old the day he fell into a coma. Marcus, who was already in his fifties, had long believed that the difference in age made him more vulnerable. But just as children may sometimes die before their parents, a younger brother may be struck down before the elder. The logic of age is no logic at all: it is no less absurd than it is misleading. So he was three Christmases or three Eurovision Song Contests older than his brother—so what? Did that mean death or decrepitude should strike him down first? And yet when he learned of Carl’s fall, and its dramatic aftermath, he couldn’t help thinking that it had happened to his little brother, as their mother always referred to him when the two boys went out together for an afternoon of horseplay in Luxembourg square: Keep an eye on your little brother, she would say. And even later—after he’d set off on his own for good and become the family’s stray dog, rarely letting anyone know what he was up to—still, on the rare occasions when, from some corner of the planet, he would pick up a phone, there invariably came a moment when his mother would say to him, Marcus, I’m putting your little brother on now, all right? But Carl was still alive. His earthly credit had not dried up entirely. Even though he’d come dangerously close to the end, and even though—according to the doctors at Hôpital Bon-Secours—his chances of recovery, following a three-story drop onto the street in downtown Metz, were less than slim—even so, all hope was not yet lost. What bothered Marcus, in fact, were the circumstances of the accident. How absolutely idiotic, he thought, to fall out an office window. He could imagine a child, left unsupervised, falling out of a window,

or an old man suffering a concussion, or someone panicking as the building around him went up in flames; but a man in the very prime of life, watching a crowd ten meters below as it drifted aimlessly through the warm September night—it was just stupid. If the accident did result in Carl’s death, then a shoddy death it would be. […] A week after the accident, Marcus was feeling guilty because he was incapable of putting himself in Carl’s shoes: he could not understand what his brother’s present state was like. Vegetative, the doctor at Bon-Secours had told him. This particular doctor had been one of the first to examine Carl. Vegetative, but with the usual reservations. What did that mean? Was it a definitive state, or a provisional one? What did anybody actually know about it? Was Carl suffering? Did he have any awareness, however vague, of what was happening to him, of what he was enduring? What Marcus wanted to know was whether a coma, like any other pathology, affected one’s physical well-being. And what, exactly, was the nature of his condition? What sensations, what discomforts, what agonies would his brother be subject to? A coma, the doctor had said, when it comes down to it, means not feeling anything any more. Was he certain about that? In order to feel, continued the man of science, you have to have a nervous system. Your brother’s has been severely damaged. His cerebral cortex is partially destroyed. So Carl’s debility consisted in this double disappearance of feeling and suffering? in the impossibility of being affected by your surroundings: noises, colors, shapes, substances, tastes and smells, light and darkness, conversations among those who visit you and hover over your carcass? Had all sensation, then, and all pain, truly disappeared for Carl? Was it possible? Was it even conceivable? At least you’ve been spared all the nonsense they’re saying about you, Marcus might have told himself. If Carl had simply been sick, his brother would not have been so unnerved. He would have spent hours at his side, imagining he was doing him some good, helping him get back to his old self. Don’t give up, Carlito … Against the coma, however, the game was much harder to play. Here he was confronted by an injury without words, without a wound, without any apparent suffering. An injury that was, essentially, nowhere to be found. When he returned to Metz the following weekend, his brother had been moved to a different room. The new one was smaller, engulfed in shadow, and equipped with a number of worrisome machines whose lights flickered like so many candles. In a hallway that served as a changing room, a nurse in yellow clogs presented him with a skull cap, mask, gloves, slippers and scrubs, all made from a greenish crepe-paper-like material. The outfit rendered Marcus unrecognizable. And the brother he found upon entering the room seemed a mere effigy of his former self. Marcus looked at him from the plastic chair

Thierry Hesse

Unconsciousness

he’d brought over to the side of the bed. The more he looked at Carl, the more distraught he felt. His brother’s eyes were closed and his crumpled eyelids expressed as much life as the skin of a packaged chicken breast. On this particular day, Marcus remained silent. He fiddled nervously with the magazine he’d purchased at the train station, rolled it into a tube, unrolled it again, until at a certain moment he began to wonder just what he was doing here, squeezing this cylinder of paper between his thighs. Shouldn’t he have prepared for this visit? Wasn’t there some sort of how-to manual for relatives of the comatose? Yet he’d gleaned precisely nothing from the scientific journal a pharmacist friend had lent him, and he was beginning now to think that the world of medicine existed at a significant remove from the world of human beings. Especially if you fall on your skull and see your existence so transformed that slipping your loafers off under a table, peeling an orange over your plate, being irritated by your neighbor’s piano-playing, ceases to mean anything at all. Back up North, he listened half-politely, half-skeptically, to what a colleague from school was saying about her father-in-law, who after suffering a stroke had been discharged from the hospital in Lille and was now installed in their laundry room at home. “The doctors told us to talk to him as though he could hear us,” she told him. “You talk to him every day?” “Every evening, actually. After dinner, when the kids are doing the dishes and my husband takes the dog out, I tell my father-in-law what I did with my day. On weekends, we trade off. My husband reads him the newspaper. I guess it’s supposed to stimulate his sensory faculties …” “And has it? Has there been any progress?” “Not really, but we’re hanging in there.” The following Saturday, from the edge of his chair, Marcus leaned over his brother and, as it was just the two of them in the room, asked him, in what he believed to be an affectionate tone: “Tell me, Carl, what happened that night? Why were you still at the office? Was Stern with you? Did you drink all that cognac by yourself?” On the fifth visit, he wanted to show Carl a movie. He didn’t know whether his colleague from the Institut had tried this experiment with her father-inlaw, but the nurse in yellow clogs prevented him from going through with it, on the grounds that installing a television and dvd player might interfere with the proper functioning of the machines that were keeping his brother alive. In the movie he had in mind, a character called Walt has come to collect another man named Travis. Walt has been looking for Travis around the Mexican border, where for some time now Travis has been wandering, half-crazy after a break-up that had pretty much destroyed him. The two men are sitting in a metallic sky-blue Oldsmobile, and Walt, who plans to bring Travis back to California where his young son, Hunter, is waiting for him, isn’t interested in

travelling with a mummy. I don’t know what kind of trouble you got into, Travis, I don’t know what happened, but damn it, I am your brother, man. You can talk to me. I’m tired of doing all the talking. This movie, Paris, Texas, was to Marcus less about failed love than about the reunion of two brothers. You could guess what had driven them apart: two brothers raised by the same parents have different childhoods, and later on they have different ways of loving people, of dealing with pain. They rarely laugh at the same things, and their understanding of life is never quite the same. So Metz, Marcus told himself, this city of yellow and gray where he was born all those years ago and which he’d abandoned by the time he was an adolescent, Metz had become his own Mexican border, a border to which he now returned every Saturday, got off the train, walked across the station plaza, left his bags at the Métropole hotel, then walked over to Bon-Secours, where he transformed into a crepe-paper man before entering the room where the brother he once had known had, to some degree, disappeared. Like Walt in the Mojave desert. And yet he continued talking to him from time to time. He had read that detainees, deprived of all human contact—as in the case of the Englishman Terry Waite, taken hostage by Hezbollah and placed in total isolation for a period of several years—were able to conserve their mental sanity by carrying on fictional conversations with their loved ones. But did this have anything to do with Carl? Hadn’t his brother been demoted to the lowest rung of living creatures, that of plants, to whom has been assigned only the tiniest parcel of soul—what we call a vegetative state? And this vegetative state, was it anything more than a bittersweet prelude to death? Not death in the biological sense, perhaps, but in the properly human sense of loss of self, of dispossesion of one’s dignity, of what counts as being a mind, a consciousness, a homo loquax. To those who had known Carl, who had shared his life, heard his voice, known his gaze, his ways of being, his likes and dislikes, and who no longer saw in this room anything but an expressionless body, sustained in its basic functions by the good graces of chemistry and electronics, wasn’t he already dead? Unlike Travis, the wandering brother in Paris, Texas, who begins little by little to speak again, Carl had never responded in any way to anyone. For a month now, he had neither moved his lips nor fluttered his eyelids. No sound had escaped his mouth, no word, no cry, no moan (not even a complaint about the quality of the food or the bedding). Likewise, after each visit to the hospital, Marcus would return to Roubaix in a state of ever greater discouragement. The doctors at Bon-Secours were right. The comatose life was indistinguishable from that of a potted ficus, and whatever movements he performed for Carl’s closed eyes, whatever words he spoke to him, were only sprinklings of useless water. Was there anything to do then, other than contemplate for hours on end the green and blue blinking lights of a respirator manufactured, according to its label, in Stuttgart? BonSecours was getting him down.

Thierry Hesse

Unconsciousness

Tierno Monénembo

The Black Terrorist

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com Number of Pages: 228 p.

Translation: C. Dickson c.dickson@wanadoo.fr

A high-spirited and generous novel depicting the true story of a Guinean-born man who created the “Maquis Rescue Force” in the Vosges region of France. Through the fascinating figure of Addi-Bâ, the reader discovers the history of the Senegalese Tirailleurs who came to the aid of the French army during the Second World War. The King of Kahel, winner of the 2008 Prix Renaudot, sold 70,000 copies in France and was translated into English, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Catalan, Korean and Vietnamese. Biography

Born in Guinea in 1947, Tierno Monénembo chose to live in exile beginning in 1969. Since his first success with Les Crapauds-Brousse in 1979, he has published a number of novels with Éditions du Seuil. His work, which includes ten books deeply inspired by the Fulani culture and the history of their tribal lands, are of major importance in the corpus of contemporary African literature. Publications Among his most recent novels published by Éditions du Seuil are Le roi du Kahel (The King of Kahel), awarded the Prix Renaudot in 2008; Peuls, 2004; and L’Ainée des orphelins (The Oldest Orphan), 2000.

While out gathering mushrooms one day in 1940, a man and his son happen upon a “poor nigger” asleep under the trees at the edge of the Vosgien forest. The young Guinean man, who had been adopted at the age of thirteen and raised in France, is taken back to their village, where he causes a sensation and proves to be at once austere and charming. He will go on to inflame the hearts of women and arouse the protective instincts of the townspeople. But that is only the beginning—in 1942 he comes into contact with the Resistance and founds one of the first groups of Resistance

fighters in the region. The Germans, hot on his trail, refer to him as “the black terrorist.” Who betrayed Addi-Bâ? One of his many mistresses? A professional collaborator? Or was it two feuding families who had been nursing mutual hatred for ages? Through this fascinating figure, a little-known facet of France’s history dealing with the men known as the Senegalese Tirailleurs is brought to light. With compelling verve, Tierno Monénembo also evokes day to day life in the Vosges region … as if he were writing about an African village.

Did anyone tell you that before he came to Romaincourt, no one had ever seen a nigger, except the Colonel for whom the heart of Africa and the belly of the Orient held no secrets? No? Really? You must at least have heard about the commotion it stirred up back in those days, due to the Boches, the Wops, the Angliches, the Yankees and a bunch of other people who all held a grudge against France, and who’d decided, God only knows why, to turn the world upside down just to bug this country. Bedlam, Mister, the grand caillon, as they say in our parts! Bits of Lorraine in Prussia, Latvia stuck onto Siam, shards of Czechoslovakia all over the place, Kanaks at the North Pole, Laplanders near the Equator, and him, lost out here in the back country of the Vosges, a region whose name he’d never heard pronounced until several months after we’d found him lying half-dead at the edge of the Bois du Chenois. Yes Mister, it was the world war, the chale avvaire, as mâmiche Léontine called it. She who after sixty years in Lorraine had not given up one bit of her Sundgau accent. You must have heard about it, no one could be unaware of that period, even back in your country on the banks of the Limpopo. The Valdenaires were the first ones to see him, Mister. The father and his son, it was the time of year when meadow saffron blooms! They were out gathering golden chanterelles when suddenly the son let out a shriek, surprised by what sounded like an animal having its throat cut. He closed his eyes and pointed at a dark and disturbing heap sprawled in a clump of alders, where the earth seemed slightly less muddy. The father started, ran over, large beads of sweat

bathing his face, then quickly regained his composure. “Calm down, Etienne, it’s only some poor nigger.” “A German spy, then!” “The Germans haven’t got any more niggers, and that’s what started this war … Come along, son! “But, Father … ” “Keep quiet, Etienne!” The Germans had just bombed Épinal, and I, Germaine Tergoresse, still knew nothing about your uncle. Didn’t know that his name was Addi-Bâ and that he’d just escaped from a garrison in Neufchâteau. More than anything else, I had no idea that a few months later, he would be living in that house you see over there, just across the street, turning my family’s whole life upside down and leaving a permanent mark on the history of this town. That unusual encounter with the Valdenaires was what started it all. I didn’t witness the scene, but I know it took place at the end of September, a dismal fall when bombs were exploding under the hooves of deer and wolfdogs would come whining up to the doors of houses. Ring any doorbell and they’ll describe him better than if Renoir had filmed him: his short stature, his skin the color of castor beans, his button nose and catlike eyes, the Tirailleur uniform stained with sweat and mud, the alder bushes under which he lay, the smell of peat and the grunts of the wild boars under the chestnut trees. It takes a lot of chance incidents to make up a life, doesn’t it? Just think, had none of it ever happened, had Etienne obeyed his father, I wouldn’t be here going on about your uncle. But as fate would have it, later on at the dinner table, just as he was tucking in to his tofaille, a ham and potato bake, his mouth had opened as if of its own volition, blurting out in a single volley, “So are we going to leave that nigger in the forest, Father?” And yet every fiber in his being had knotted together to form a sturdy net in an attempt to hold back that question. At least that’s what he’d thought. He’d succeeded in doing so along the path leading homeward, and even the whole time it took him to draw the water, dig up the vegetables from the garden, collect the charcoal and light the fire. Then the dam had broken with such force that he was relieved, in spite of his father’s stricken face. Yes, he felt relieved of that burden rather than regretful about the enormous blunder he’d just committed. In the seventeen years of his life on earth, he had never behaved in such a way. To speak to Papa like that in front of Mama at the dinner table, and while there was a war raging outside!

“You’ve got a nigger in the forest, Hubert?” His mother’s voice had the same tone as on other days, neutral and calm, but with a slight inflection that hinted at something vaguely tragic and shocking. “You’re hiding something from me, Hubert Valdenaire!” Tierno Monénembo

The chores, the distant respect with which they addressed one another, the dark clothing, the shuffle of wooden clogs, the long silences punctuated with wheezing and panting—had always marked the rhythm of life in the house, but young Etienne knew that when his mother said “Hubert Valdenaire,” nothing was right with the world.

The Black Terrorist

His mother stood up suddenly, while his father sat gloomily chewing on a crust of bread spread with Brouère cheese. A few minutes later, while he was out in the garden, hurrying to get the tools put away and close up the chicken coop, he heard—for the very first time— loud voices coming from his parents’ room. After having put the baskets and wheelbarrow into the shed, his fervent curiosity kept him awake; he put his ear to the floorboards of his room in the attic, to better hear the whispers coming from downstairs. “It would be sheer madness and you know it.” “You wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago.” “All right, so I’ve changed, is that a sin?” “He’s wearing a French uniform.” “They’ve burned down entire villages for less than that.” “He’s going to die, Hubert!” “Then let him die!” A long silence ensued, interrupted by the usual comings and goings: coughs, hiccups, wheezing, and the father’s febrile hand rummaging in the medicine chest trying to find his pills. “What I want is to live without the bombs, without the Boches and above all without the niggers. Might as well face facts.” “The facts are pretty sorry.” Then, after mulling it over for a while, he said, “That poor nigger doesn’t have a chance. The village still does. We’re at war, Yolande.”

“Then I’ll be the one to go and get him.” “Fine then, go ahead!” Other strange noises, more intense, more distraught. Young Etienne heard footsteps crunching in the courtyard gravel, the heavy metal gate opening and closing, and the sickly voice of his father echoing in the night. “Just some clothing and food then, nothing more! Go wake up the boy, tell him to bring the flashlight. Tell him to get the rifle too. Try and find my boots, my cap and my scarf!” They found him just where they’d left him-under the alder bushes, now even stranger, more disquieting and unreal in the wavering light of the torch. It was evident he hadn’t budged in all that time. He lay there inert, despite his hollow groans, as resolute and imperturbable as those who have surrendered themselves to their fate. He’d grown indifferent as to whether he would die from the hunger, the cold, the Germans, the collaborators, or just a peasant wanting to settle a score with a dirty nigger who’d dared to drag himself that far. “Do you speak French?” ventured old Hubert as he helped the boy set down the basket of food. The question remained unanswered, but strangely enough, it silenced the man’s groans. “Do you speak French?” The father’s voice had lost all conviction. He knew the man wouldn’t answer. He moved a few steps closer while Etienne was unpacking the basket. The man didn’t stir, that reassured them. They couldn’t explain it, but they knew he was still alive. If he were dead, they would have felt it somehow, the smell of the earth, the rustling of the woods, the rippling of the air, something at once familiar and unusual would have convinced them of it. Etienne extended the loaf of bread and their eyes met for the first time, and for the first time that dark face, that clear gaze, that calm and stubborn soul suddenly mingled with his, for all time. The nigger ate the cheese and the chicken, emptied the bottle of Contrexéville mineral water but obstinately refused the pork and the wine. Young Etienne almost told him, “One can’t afford to be picky in your condition,” but he let it go. He thought it must have been because of the empathy that situation, as pathetic as it was unexpected, inspired in him. Later he would realize it was because he had just met the most unforgettable man he would encounter in the course of his lifetime.

Yassaman Montazami

The Best of the Days

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com Number of Pages: 148 p.

Translation: Tanyika Carey info@tanyikacarey.com

Masterfully written and rich in detail, Montazami’s first novel beautifully evokes memories of a world long gone by. Biography

Yassaman Montazami was born in Tehran in 1971 and has lived in France since 1974. Doctor of psychology, Montazami worked for several years with political refugees and taught at Paris vii, Diderot University. She currently practices in a hospital. The Best of Days is her first novel.

After her father’s death, Yassaman Montazami took to writing in an effort to keep alive his memory. The amusing memories she had of this unconventional man helped to gradually ease the immense sorrow of his loss. Behrouz, “the best of days” in Persian, was the name given to the little boy who miraculously survived his premature birth, a name predestined for an irrepressible clown and idealist devoted to justice. Sent to France by an adoring mother to pursue studies he was never to finish, Behrouz participated in his

own way in the 1979 revolution by making his Paris apartment a refuge for Iranians in exile. The two-way traffic between Paris and Tehran allowed the author the opportunity to meet a host of unlikely characters from very different backgrounds: a Gone With the Wind fanatic and wife of a colonel on the lam; a libertine poet and mystic forbidden to publish; a Maoist revolutionary locked away in Evin Prison, and even a former businessman turned opium addict.

1. The Shah’s Court.

Of the dozens of people my parents took in over the years, Shadi Khanoum stayed at our home the longest. In our family, Shadi Khanoum will always be remembered for one story in particular. One day, during the reign of the Shah, my grandmother invited her over for tea. This wife of an Imperial Army colonel started waxing nostalgic about the tragic fate of Princess Soraya, the Shah’s second wife, who had abdicated the throne because she was unable to bear an heir. “But my dear madame,” my father said provocatively, true to form. “The most tragic thing wasn’t that she was barren, but that she was clitoral!” “Excuse me, my dear?” exclaimed this honorable woman who was clearly hearing the word for the first time. “Clitoral, did you say?” “Yes!” he replied straight-faced. “Clitoral!” “My goodness!” she cried. “But how can you be so sure? Couldn’t it have just been a horrid rumor spread by bad people who wanted to sully the court?” “Absolutely not!” my father affirmed. “I can assure you she was clitoral. And not just a little bit, either!” “But I can’t believe I’m only now learning of this. This is incredible!” cried Shadi Khanoum. “I never would’ve thought she’d be one to meddle in politics. Did the darbar 1 know about this? “Definitely!” continued my father, completely unflappable. Amused, the other guests lowered their heads in embarrassment, catching the joke. “It wasn’t a secret. In fact, that’s what hastened her downfall. Imagine our Shah with a clitoral wife, you know that wouldn’t work. It’s impossible!” “I believe you!” she concurred, affronted by the news. “Anything is better

than that, even democrats! And to think, I cried so much over that poor woman’s fate. Now I really regret it,” she lamented, wiping nonexistent specks of dust off her taffeta skirt with the back of her diamond studded hand. From the beginning of the conversation, my grandmother had been glaring at her son while the other men present—including my grandfather—discreetly slipped out of the living room one by one and gathered in the hall. There, with bulging cheeks, flushed faces, and jiggling bellies, they held on to their sides, trying in vain to stifle their laughter as the maids looked on, dumbfounded. My father, always the epitome of self-control, gallantly swept up the teapot. “More tea, madame?” “I’d love some, my dear Behrouz. And I can’t thank you enough for enlightening me. When I tell my husband …”

Yassaman Montazami

The Best of the Days

16 My father was usually up to this type of mischief. He even had a reputation for it far beyond our family circle. Despite the pain I felt at his funeral, I must admit it was the funniest I’d ever attended because everyone had a colorful story to share about him. Who remembers the time at the restaurant when Behrouz convinced the waiters he was blind and every time they brought a dish over to the table, he “accidentally” knocked it over? Who remembers the time at the family party when he snuck away, shaved off his moustache, and came back to the table as if nothing had happened! When the guests noticed the change, he exclaimed, ‘You’re just now noticing it? But I haven’t had a moustache in more than five years!’ Oh! and there was the time when one of the Shah’s ministers (his wife was friends with my grandmother) held a reception to celebrate his fiftieth wedding anniversary. Behrouz was smoking a cigar with the old man on the terrace and suddenly said: “Married to the same person for half a century, that’s admirable, very, very admirable … But just between you and me Monsieur Minister, tell me the truth—how many times a week do you get laid?” And who could forget the night those young militiamen stopped him at an intersection in Tehran and asked if he’d been drinking and he answered, “Of course I’ve been drinking! In fact, I’m completely plastered, if you must know!” Instead of denying the charge, which is the norm in Iran, my father admitted it—all the way to the police station. He spent the whole day there maintaining his guilt, embarrassing even the militiamen, who out of respect for his gray hair, kept muttering to him over and over, “Deny it. Just deny it, will you old man! You shouldn’t be here, you should be home with your grandchildren.” I myself remember the time when much to my embarrassment, my father showed up in a blue worksuit for my parent-teacher conference with my German teacher, Frau Schilling. He spent the entire meeting speaking in a

thick Iranian accent—pretending to be an illiterate immigrant—just to prove to the teacher that a brilliant student such as myself could come from a working class background. It wasn’t until I was ten that my father started easing up on the pranks. His relationship with my mother had begun to deteriorate and the shame at not completing his thesis was slowly making him bitter. But before then, not a day went by when my father didn’t author some manner of mischief or practical joke. Life with him was a perpetual April Fool’s Day. I was so accustomed to this schoolboy atmosphere that when someone unexpectedly rang the doorbell and there was no practical joke or prank in place, I started stamping my feet in anger and disappointment. I wanted to run and find the whoopee cushion or dribble glass. I’d beg the grown-ups around me to concoct something, anything—balance a bucket of water on the door, hide under the sofas and beds, duck behind the curtains, make turbans out of towels, put on long faces and announce the Shah had died or start jumping for joy that the Soviets had invaded Iran. My father always consoled me by promising me he’d tell a joke. He was also great at telling stories. With him it took on a whole new dimension, evolving far beyond the stereotype. He was such a gifted raconteur that even if you’d heard the tale ten times before, it still sounded new. He had hundreds of amusing anecdotes and could easily recall them by consulting a little notebook in his jacket pocket. On dozens of pages he’d scribbled bizarre, almost surreal three-word associations, such as: “prison-Turkish-sodomy,” “cabinet-husband-broccoli” or even “parrot-condom-freezer”… Even when he was gravely ill, my father didn’t give up his antics. On one of the last mornings of his life, while my mother was busy shopping in the supermarket, he was suddenly overcome by fatigue and had to sit down on a bench. As he sat there hunched over, elbows resting on his legs, forearms hanging between his thighs, he realized that if he just slightly turned his right wrist so his palm faced the sky, he’d look like a beggar. Suddenly, the idea of living out such an experience before dying—the way others choose to go skydiving or take a cruise around the world—filled him with a childlike joy. He cast his eyes downward, and tried to sense the movements of passersby. Some people slowed down and stopped, momentarily shading him in their anonymous shadow. He heard them fish around their pockets or change purse, and then without a word, they dropped the cold coins into the palm of his hand. The alms he received were almost sacred in his eyes, and he forbade us to spend them. These few coins, he said, symbolized what was best in man, they were the embodiment of generosity, and even more so, of love. If the world he believed in never came to be, at least before leaving this life, he would’ve witnessed his fellow man fill the hand of another who extended it. My mother, brother and I couldn’t walk past these coins without a shiver going up our spine. We owed them our respect and deference. And even after his death, we still haven’t dared touch them.

Jérôme Noirez

120 Days

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel proussel@calmann-levy.fr Number of Pages: 464 p.

Translation: Edward Gauvin animula.vagula@gmail.com

A well-known author, winner of the 2008 Prix Bob-Morane for “Lessons from a Fluctuating World”, and the 2010 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire for “The Tune of Words and Woe” A strange, terrifying, grotesque, and dreamlike universe well-served by a resolutely literary style like the music-box tinkle of a haunting, unforgettable tune A talented and peculiar new take on the Marquis de Sade’s masterpiece Biography

Born in 1969, Jérôme Noirez was a musician (composer, singer, and teacher) before devoting himself almost exclusively to writing. He has published a dozen works, including novels for adults and young adults, picture books, and collections of essays and anthologies. The figure of the child stands at the center of his literary universe, which mingles humor, affection, terror, and the grotesque. Publications Among his most recent books are the short story collection Le Diapason des mots et des misères [The Tune of Words and Woe], Griffe d’encre, 2009 (Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire 2010) (paperback J’ai Lu, 2011) and the novel Leçons du monde fluctuant [Lessons from a Fluctuating World], Denoël, 2008 (paperback J’ai Lu, 2010).

Eight middle-schoolers: four girls, four boys, ages twelve to fifteen. They know each other, ignore each other, and take different paths to school. One evening, none of them come back out. They wake up in Silling, a dark, underground place, part-bunker, part-boarding school, where over the next four months, they will be forced to submit themselves to strange rituals and mock schooling, sometimes captivated, sometimes left to their own passivity, both watching and taking part in bloody tragedies.

Cross-cut with this tale is another: that of a radio storyteller charged with the task of addressing the sequestered students from his computer. He willingly obliges for a fee, although unconvinced he has an audience. And so he goes about recounting stories of teenage years—humorous, tragic, and horrific; fairy tales full of zombie princes and giant mollusks. Between inside and outside, between the semi-fantastical and the almost-real, strange conjunctions are born.

Day 4 Heebie Perulero copied her classmates. She sat cross-legged on the mattress, back against the bolster, and wound the leash through her fingers—the leather one (or was it pleather? she couldn’t tell) that shackled her ankle and yoked her to the box spring. Then she let herself slip into a stupor … a hebetude, that fancy word whose root was like her name. On a shelf she shared with Gilles Pellegrin were two bottles of water, a box of tissues, and the wrappers of a few protein bars that had been their only meal. Colombe Audoly and Lubin Delfour had cried. But not for long, and not very hard. The others remained silent, or sobbed so low that no one could hear them. Fanny Guilbaud—never could stand her—spoke up at some point. “What are we doing here?” she asked a few times. No one replied, but Heebie noticed that Alban Michaudet, whose bed was across from hers, separated from her by a dark no-man’s-land, seemed to want to. A start, a twitch of the lips. At least that’s how it’d looked. There were two doors. One of them was right next to Heebie’s bed, so she got a good look at the people who came through. First a woman, somewhat plump, of indeterminate age, smooth-faced and chubby-cheeked: she could have been repeating middle school for the nth time, in a special ed class. She was the one who gave out the protein bars. She’d had a few words to say. Eat slowly. If you want to throw up, there’s a tub under the bed. If you have to pee or poop, use the tub. Don’t get it everywhere. And keep your mouths shut for now; no use talking. Her tone was a frozen blend of indifference and aggression,

especially her way of dragging out the word “poop,” as if all the shit in the world had just dropped on her head one day. Heebie decided to call her Canteen Lady. Another woman came through the door. On the beautiful side, and less mechanical in her bearing. Heebie exchanged glances with her, but said nothing, for lack of a better stance besides silence. That cow Fanny couldn’t help but let out her “What are we doing here?” and the woman replied, “Be patient.” Her voice was almost a lullaby, and Heebie would’ve liked to listen to it longer. At least three people came through the door by Lubin’s bed, outside Heebie’s field of vision. A man and a woman. All they did was take a look around. Canteen Lady, it seemed, could make her entrance on either side, stage left or right. She gave her spiel to the four in back. Canteen Lady’s childish expressions lent urgency to the need to pee and poop, which no one had given into up until then. If she’d said piss, urinate, defecate, or even shit, they could’ve waited, held it in. But by giving the acts such infantile names, she’d swept reason aside, directly addressing untamed, incontinent sphincters. The fight was over before it had even begun. Michette was the first to give in. She was sitting on the edge of the bed— the leash was long enough to let her—her hands resting on her knees for a moment, with a terribly tragic air, worrying her lower lip with her white incisors; then she quickly dropped her underwear, jammed the tub under between her knees, and began relieving herself. The sound of her pee running into the tub was all they heard. Everyone was watching her, even those who genuinely wished to turn away. Poor Michette, eyes lowered at her task, was fully aware of their gazes, especially Yves’, from the next bed over. Her lips went pale. Heebie took it all in. She wanted to see how the other girl coped, sitting with her panties around her ankles. Michette wiped herself with a tissue, slid the tub back under the bed, pulled up her panties, and curled up against the bolster like a sloth clinging to a branch. All that was left was a few drops on the blanket. No one dared make a move or a sound. Even Gilles’ heavy breathing had grown inaudible. Michette’s embarrassment had filled the entire room, swallowed all the air and what little light there was. They came to hate her, that little girl, wanted to call her pottypants for the shame that filled and overflowed her, the shame that her fetal curl, her silence, her gnawed lip, and the stain on the bed made horribly obvious. But they each had to resign themselves to it: micturition summons micturition as a yawn does a yawn. And each one of them, at the same time, with embarrassed haste, started pissing in his or her tub. The boys, with ridiculous mannerisms. The girls in a more athletic, more choreographed way. Heebie, kneeling on the mattress, firing off a volley of urine; cheekily, she defied the others. Fanny following suit, going at it even harder, gripping her lower belly. Gilles, whose inexact stream seemed to well up from his thighs. Yves, who just kept shaking it. Lubin, who

Jérôme Noirez

120 Days

seemed to be drawing a millimeter-scale map on the bottom of his tub. It took on a competitive air. Which of them would most bravely swallow, trample their modesty? What immodesty would make the others immodest? Bladders emptied and the blast of a waterfall or applause rang out in the room. Only Alban and Colombe proved less sporting. But that was because they’d doubled up on events in this decathlon. Still, no one really paid any attention. They were pissing, pissing without end, inventing new bladders just to keep going … And finally, when every urethra had squeezed its last drop, they slipped their underwear back on, put their tubs away, and did as Michette had done. For the emptiness in their gut encouraged curling up, and curling up itself gave them something to think about. A short while later, Fanny’s question returned to plague their ears. Heebie closed her eyes. Tears clung to her eyelashes. Where are we? Why are we here? What are they going to do to us? Are we going to die, or suffer? And another strange question the young girl might have been alone in wondering: where were we before we got here? Afterwards—the only measure of time available to them—Canteen Lady came in again. She collected the tubs one by one: eight round trips, in one door and out the other. Towards the end, her face betrayed her irritation in wrinkles, and she muttered through her teeth, using very strong language—disgusting little turds can’t even hold their shit—that she kept between tongue and teeth like a piece of old chewing gum. Heebie wondered what kept her from barking out loud. Let it out! Cuss us out, since you’re clearly dying to! You can even spit on us, hit us! We won’t defend ourselves—or just enough to give you the pleasure of hitting us harder! But Canteen Lady left as she’d come, taking the last tub and her grumbling into the hallway. Heebie’s tears had dried. She straightened up and exchanged glances with Gilles, who must’ve been watching her for a while now. He sighed, “We could’ve been in the same class if I hadn’t dropped Latin …” The absurdity of this remark lay heavy on her. Yeah, and we could’ve gone out, and you would’ve flattened me with all your weight while reciting declensions. Corpulentus, corpulente, corpulentum … Boys always needed to talk right after pissing. Girls, on the other hand, talked while they peed. It saved time. Heebie made no reply to Gilles. She made do with skimming her eyes over his roundness, as if following the contours of hills along the horizon. She noticed that the light, which fell from the ceiling without any apparent source, had grown slightly brighter. Maybe there were skylights of some sort above? A space above them, also enclosed, since this wasn’t the light of day. The shadows of the no-man’s-land had faded; Heebie could see the trench that split the room into two unequal parts, and a gangplank like a ship’s, from whose metal railing sprouted six short posts topped with what looked like birdhouses. The device was so bizarre that it left her momentarily dumbfounded. Then she realized what it was.

This room was the town of La Macle, its bridge and kiosks, its river, its checkerboard of streets and roads, and on this scale model of ruins and rubbish, the beds were crosses indicating their houses. Details began to appear to her now. Like the pocked floor near her own bed, the shovelful of earth tossed at the foot of Fanny’s, the nearness of Lubin’s bed to the river-trench, the scattered ballast beneath Alban’s, and probably a host of other details that escaped her … They’ve placed us here like figures in an architectural model. Imprisoned us. Shrunken us. And the middle school? Where was it? Heebie could find nothing that stood for it, indicated it, suggested it. It was missing. In the wings, maybe, offstage behind the walls. Everywhere, in fact. Until then, Heebie’s anxiety had been but a confusion of vague hopes and unfocused fears. Now it metamorphosed into something serpentine, slippery, degrading. This was not only the site of their detention, not only a hole where their kidnappers had thrown them while waiting to ransom or abuse them. No. There was a reason, an actual reason, a terrifying organization, a logic beyond that of mere crime, that gave meaning to the tubs, the pee and the poop, the entrances and exits, the light that waxed and waned, the be patients and the little shitheads, even the time that went by in fits and starts, and then It was Heebie’s turn to murmur, half-whisper and half-whimper, “What are we doing here?” Her only remaining hope was that she’d never have to find out.

Jérôme Noirez

120 Days

[…] Day 7 Appetizers Goat cheese and wild thyme tart on tomato coulis Three-spice free-range fowl pâté Parmesan artichoke soufflé Pike aspic with herb sauce fraîche Entrées Braised round filet of veal with spring vegetables Roast quail and lentils, Indian style Eel stew with Shiitake mushrooms Sole in butter sauce and root vegetable dumpling Pork loin with sage, flageolet beans, and spring onion bulbs Desserts Chocolate bark pudding (a specialty of the chef) Cranberry compote and rose petal meringue Sorbet du jour and soft nougat Seasonal fruit tart

Gilles Pétel

Under the Channel

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Number of Pages: 272 p.

Translation: Susan Pickford susan.pickford@gmail.com

A cynical police lieutenant investigating a murder committed in the Channel Tunnel finds himself caught up in a troubling game of mirrors with the victim. The novel starts out like an ordinary crime thriller, shifting between Paris and London—a city in the grip of financial crisis. But beware—appearances can be deceptive! Biography

Gilles Pétel was born and raised in Dunkirk. He studied philosophy at the University of Nice before teaching abroad for several years. His debut novel, Le Métier dans le sang, was published by Fayard in 1996. He has since published a number of novels and short stories. His play Le Monologue de la femme ivre de bonheur was premiered during his residency at the Lilas en Scène performing arts centre in December 2009. Publications His most recent novels include La Déposition (2002) and Le Recensement (2000), both published by Stock.

Two cities on opposite sides of the Channel, London and Paris, are home to two men who have nothing in common except for a passing physical resemblance. One is a rakish Scottish estate agent, still a fine figure of a man at fortyfive. The other is a French police lieutenant with a wife and two kids, worn down by life though he is just forty. The former is mysteriously murdered on the train from London to Paris. The latter is put in charge of the murder investigation.

As the lieutenant tries to shed light on the victim’s identity and the motive behind his murder, he gradually comes to question his own existence in a game of mirrors where fascination shades into repulsion. As London is rocked by financial crisis, the lieutenant comes to realise through the people he meets that he is not who he thought he was.

The lieutenant’s attention was caught by the sight of fifty or so people gathered outside an art gallery some hundred yards down the street. The large crowd contrasted with the reverential hush Roland had noticed at other galleries. Some event was drawing large numbers of people. Maybe it was an auction. Were they selling off the Crown jewels? Roland chuckled to himself. Buckingham Palace was only just down the road. He thought a crime must have been committed—force of habit, it came with the job. Yet he didn’t see any police hanging around. Roland went over to the gallery. The curious crowd thronging outside did not seem at all scared. Rather, a garrulous air of excitement could be read on their faces as words poured from their parted lips. People were impatiently waiting their turn, guessing at what might be inside, exclaiming, eager to get through the doors. Roland joined the line. It was a contemporary art exhibition—an installation, to be exact. The building housing the gallery set the tone. It was a huge parallelepiped of reinforced concrete with no windows, set down in the middle of a Victorian square like a cherry on a cake, deliberately modern and out of sync with its surroundings. The line was moving slowly but surely. Five people would vanish into the cube as soon as five others emerged from a different door. As the third set went through, Roland estimated that each visit was lasting fifteen minutes on average. It would be a while before he made it inside. His watch read 2 p.m. He had all afternoon. Why not visit the exhibition rather than getting lost in town? It would give him something to talk about over dinner with Kate.

The title of the event seemed more teasing than artistic in intent. A black banner strung across the façade bore the inscription I love London! in red. Roland had seen a man hawking T-shirts with the same slogan that same morning at Victoria Station. Maybe it was street art. An hour later, he was beginning to grow impatient. But what he saw as the visitors were leaving the exhibition kept him from abandoning the queue. Their faces shone with the unhealthy joy of slot machine addicts. They stumbled back into the outside world, openmouthed, eyes rolled back in their heads, punch-drunk. It was a very mixed crowd—suits and ties, workmen’s coveralls, men and women, old and young. Only children were missing. Roland turned to look behind him. The line had doubled in length. Clearly the exhibition was a must-see. I love London! Roland wondered what the exhibition theme might be as he shuffled forward. The crowd’s excitement made him fear the worst. Contemporary art sometimes flirts with pornography: embalmed corpses, naked, dismembered dolls, photos of horny teenagers snapped in the veracity of puberty, toothless old women savouring a Priapus of Herculean dimensions, paintings of turds. It is sometimes but a step from the marketing of sex to the profitable trade in contemporary art, one that unscrupulous gallery directors do not hesitate to take. People were coming to see I love London! to get an eyeful. Roland’s turn came at last. A muscle-bound security guard who looked more like a nightclub bouncer was letting the chosen few into the gallery, closing the broad door of opaque black glass behind them. The door had barely closed when Roland was assailed by a violent wave of sound—strident sirens, gunshots, all kinds of exploding grenades, shells, and dynamite. The bright, dazzling light blinded him. In the midst of the din, a recorded voice screamed London is yours. The lieutenant was the last of his group of five. In front of him were an English couple aged around forty. They were soberly dressed, the man in a suit and tie and the woman in a below-the-knee pencil skirt. The two men in front of them were much younger and more colorful. They were dressed like artists, in a style more suited to their surroundings—pierced ears and noses, tattooed necks, shaven heads, patched jeans and silk jackets. The exhibition might be drawing a broad spectrum of visitors, but they all reacted the same way, blocking their ears and opening their eyes wide so as not to trip. The exhibition was starting off with a bang. The group of five walked on for about thirty feet, the loudspeakers still repeating London is yours, until they reached the top of a flight of stairs leading down to the basement. It was closed off by a transparent glass door that opened as if by magic after thirty seconds and immediately closed behind the last member of the group. Everything was immediately different. A dim red light glowed faintly on the metal steps, which were already resounding with the visitors’ steps. The sound of bombs had given way to music. Snatches of English

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pop music from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols and Amy Winehouse alternated with airs from Benjamin Britten’s operas, in a cacophony orchestrated by a drunken dj. The group began to relax. “Amazing! Brilliant! Incredible!” the couple exclaimed in ecstatic unison, while the tattooed pair were franker in voicing their appreciation: “Shit! Fucking amazing!” Roland was struck dumb. “Shit!” he thought. “It’s crazy in here!” The spiral staircase took them down a hundred or so steps to a narrow door of blue and red glass, perhaps an allegory of heaven and hell. A hidden mechanism triggered by an invisible hand opened the door, revealing an astonishing spectacle. The large room presented its riches to the amazed visitors. The same exclamations rang out again: Amazing! Fuck! Shit! There just weren’t enough words. None of them could get over their surprise. The exhibition space combined several cellars into one Gothic whole. Pillars of black brick held up three semi-circular arches made from poor imitation marble. The effect was of a torture chamber, or catacombs worthy of a Walter Scott novel. Roland was beginning to feel uneasy when the man next to him spoke, calming his nerves: “Look! The exhibition!” Five large rectangular tables filled the whole length of the room. Each was lit by a single bulb hanging from a wire, as if in an illicit snooker hall. The installation on the tables left the visitors flabbergasted. London had been recreated in miniature, neighborhood by neighborhood, with an astonishing degree of detail. Roland immediately recognized Saint Paul’s presiding over the first table which included the City and its surrounding areas. The second featured Buckingham Palace with Saint James’s Park to the south and topped by Piccadilly, where the exhibition itself was being held. Bloomsbury and Trafalgar Square filled the third table. The fourth showed the fashionable avenues of Knightsbridge and South Kensington in the shadow of Hyde Park, while the fifth held the looping meanders of the Thames and the white villas of Chelsea. Roland studied each table in wonderment. London was within arm’s reach. But the show had not yet begun. A young woman stepped forward to meet the group. She was tall and dressed in slacks and a black leather jacket half-unzipped to reveal her cleavage. In a theatrical voice she directed each of them to a table. Roland let himself be ushered over to the fourth table. Then the woman, who looked more like a prison guard than a museum guide, called out, “Ladies and gentlemen! London is yours!” The exhibition was a game. The young woman quickly explained the rules: each visitor had to pay to play. It didn’t cost much: £1 for a house or a building, £2 for two houses, and so on. Each pound sterling spent let the player watch as a building collapsed in an explosion of off-white steam. A brand new building would then immediately spring up from its ruins. The only reward was the satisfaction each player felt.

Gilles Pétel

Under the Channel

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The game began. The players only had limited time. Several explosions had already taken place by the time Roland decided to slip a coin into the box attached to the underside of the table. The others were all focused on the game. Coins were rapidly clattering into the boxes with the clink of metal striking steel. At first, there were a few muttered cries of joy. Soon they were all hooked. The moans grew louder as the rhythm of the coins accelerated, then a gasp of purely sexual pleasure echoed around the room as Saint Paul’s Cathedral suddenly crumbled in a cloud of dust, and a superb thirty-story tower, with views over the river and the greater London area, sprang up in its place. Roland’s score remained low. He wasn’t familiar with the city. What needed knocking down? He hesitated for a moment. A French flag fluttered on the facade of one huge building. For a pound, he could have the pleasure of wiping the French embassy off the map. The fear of being filmed in secret made him hold back. An old building a little further along on the Kensington Road caught his eye—a mansion that seemed to be slumbering on the edge of the park. Boom! The red bricks exploded in a fraction of a second, swallowed up by the table in a magic trick Roland didn’t try to understand. A magnificent luxury residence of iron, concrete and glass, like a Dubai skyscraper, rose from the brick dust, sheathed in light. Roland began to grow excited at his success and he hurriedly slipped another coin into the box. Boom! The Royal Albert Hall, gone in the blink of an eye. A fifty-story tower immediately sprang up in its stead.

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Colombe Schneck

Reparation

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr Number of Pages: 224 p.

Translation: Madeleine Velguth velguth@sbcglobal.net

Some stories must be told, torn from the past, unearthed. Those are the stories that make memorable books. Emotionally shattering and moving, “La Réparation” takes its place among such works as “The Lost” by Daniel Mendelsohn, “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron, or “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Biography

Colombe Schneck, born in Paris in 1966, is a journalist and writer. She is the author of several novels and stories and hosts the literary program “Les Liaisons heureuses” on the public radio channel France Inter. Publications by Stock: Une femme célèbre, 2010 (Anna de Noailles de l’Académie Française prize) (republished by J’ai Lu, 2012); Val de Grâce (2008, grand prix de l’héroïne Madame Figaro prize) (republished by J’ai Lu, 2010); Sa petite chérie, 2007 (republished by Points, 2008); L’Increvable monsieur Schneck, 2006 (republished by Points, 2007).

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This is the story (set in Paris, early 21st century) of a mother who, somewhat by chance, names her daughter “Salomé,” a name which seems vaguely familiar to her. This is the story of a little girl who has nightmares every night. It’s the story of another little girl (Lithuania, 1943) who did not survive the war. It’s the story of the Kovno ghetto, of the Jews of Eastern Europe, the story of a family—the author’s family— between tragedy and reconstruction. But what really happened in the Kovno ghetto in 1943? Do we have the right to write about the Holocaust when what we really like is love and gold sandals? Why all this guilt?

One day, Colombe decided she had to know, she had to understand. Patient but determined, she began her investigation. She questioned her uncle (the writer Pierre Pachet), rummaged through old boxes, met her cousins the world over—in Israel, New York, and Lithuania. She found photographs, heard about the aktion and the ghetto’s horrible selector, the man who would eat a sandwich while sending the Jews to their deaths. And Salomé had her “reparation,” her paper tomb …

Salomé Bernstein, whose beautiful name my daughter bears, was the daughter of Raya, the sister of my maternal grandmother Ginda. My grandmother Ginda was born in 1908 in Lithuania, into a loving, cultured Jewish family. She had two sisters, Raya and Macha, and a brother, Nahum, who all stayed in Lithuania when Ginda chose to go study in France in 1924 and married a doctor of Russian origin. My mother Hélène was born, then my uncle Pierre. All that’s left of Salomé is a photograph. The date, July 1, 1939, and this name, A Panemune are written in blue ink in the top right corner of the photo. I long thought that A Panemune was the name of the photographer, before discovering that Panemune is a suburb of Kaunas, “one of the most beautiful spots in Lithuania, on a bend of the Neman River,” and the location of the Fourth Fort, one of the execution sites of the Kovno ghetto. A couple and a little girl. Salomé is two or three years old; she is blonde, her hair cut in a bob, a side part, a mischievous smile. She is wearing an embroidered white dress. Salomé is seated, not straddling her father’s shoulders, but entirely on his right shoulder. He is supporting her with his right arm and his left arm is around his wife, Raya, my grandmother Ginda’s sister. Raya has raised her left hand to hold her husband’s. She is wearing a white suit and a flowered blouse, has bright eyes, also a side part, brown hair pulled back and a delicate gold bracelet watch on her wrist. His name is Max Bernstein. Already a bit balding, his belt a little too tight, in shirtsleeves and a tie. They are posing in front of a wood house: one can make out a window, lace curtains, a tile roof, and a house number, 19.

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A radiant picture taken in Lithuania of a Jewish family on July 1, 1939. I never saw this photo at my grandmother’s. Ginda would stare at her sister, her niece and her brother-in-law alone, not daring to show this picture to anyone. She did not take it out until 1990, taking it with her to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem in order to fill out the first Page of Testimony on the thirty-one close members of her family who died during the war. With the one devoted to her niece Salomé, she included this photograph. A photo she had never shown her daughter. Speaking of Salomé, Hélène had told me “there is nothing left, not even a photo.” Between Hélène and Ginda there was this silence around this absent person, Salomé. Neither image nor words exchanged. I found a copy of this photo by chance at the Yad Vashem Memorial. It is now on the mantel of the fireplace in my bedroom. I look at Salomé and her parents and I beg them, “Leave, leave Lithuania, that accursed country.” They do not hear me.

Colombe Schneck

Reparation

* * * My grandmother’s two sisters Raya and Macha lived a first life before the war. Raya took piano lessons and married Max Bernstein, a lawyer, much too nice to be a famous lawyer. She had a little girl, Salomé, born in 1936 or 1937. Macha married a doctor after studying law. They had a little boy, Kalman, born in 1940. I knew Raya and Macha’s names without really knowing anything about them. My grandmother Ginda used to say their names very often: “Raya and Macha,” “Raya and Macha,” “Raya and Macha,” Ginda would repeat. These names sounded like a mysterious incantation. I had never heard the given name of Salomé, Raya’s daughter. When, on February 1, 2003, my daughter Salomé was born, Ginda was ninety-six years old, mourning the loss of her daughter Hélène. She came to kiss her great-granddaughter. Salomé was crying. Ginda didn’t seem to hear her. She found her beautiful despite her tears. I didn’t question Ginda about Salomé, the first Salomé, or about her sisters Raya and Macha. Ginda would perhaps finally have been ready; it was now or never, the moment for reparation. A new Salomé had just been born, she was screaming, she was beautiful, she was alive. Ginda could have told me what she had learned when she had gone to Munich in 1946, to meet and talk to her sisters who had survived. She told me nothing. Nor did I question her. How does one talk about the death and return to life of survivors. For her, it was indecent. She watched me take care of my daughter, dress her carefully, admire her. Ginda seemed delighted at this birth. The rest was inexplicable.

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My mother Hélène alluded to Salomé only once. When she anxiously asked me, as if begging me to fulfill a wish of hers that would be very difficult for me to accomplish. Give the name Salomé, “her cousin of whom there is nothing left,” as a middle name to the child I was expecting. And I’d casually answered “why not,” without assuring my mother of my choice. This casualness was only a façade. I had understood very early that things connected with the war and Lithuania, things concerning the life and survival of Raya and Macha and the death of Salomé, belonged to the realm of the secret and miraculous, which needed to be protected from everything. Not knowing anything was, I believed, a way of protecting them. As a child and then an adult, with my mother Hélène and my grandmother Ginda, I respected this secret necessity not to burden them with additional torments. They had already wept enough. I should leave them alone in their sadness and silence, not ask questions. Only once does the anguish appear. My grandmother mentions a check she has received from Germany in “reparation.” I am eight years old. She proposes we go to the Galeries Lafayette “to buy the most beautiful doll.” We take the bus, we cross the Seine, we go into this department store. Lined up in the toy department are dozens of dolls, plump, blond, with pink lips. I don’t like any of them. I start to cry: I don’t want any of the dolls. I can’t make my grandmother happy, can’t choose the most beautiful doll, paid for by the Germans, with the “reparation” money. I think all these dolls are ugly. We go back home together; she holds my hand. She doesn’t ask me why I didn’t want a doll and I don’t ask her why the Germans want to “repair” her. Nothing will be able to repair that anguish. She keeps her warm hand around mine. * * * I was mistaken at first. I told myself it’s too easy; you wear gold kid sandals, you enjoy stories of impossible love, you like taking a dip in the Mediterranean and you think a girl like you can write about the Holocaust? Because that’s what this is about. My mother’s cousin Salomé, her aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents lived in Lithuania before the war. A community of which nothing remains. Ninety-five per cent of the Lithuanian Jews were killed. The ties with this country, Lithuania, where my grandmother was born, where my mother used to spend her vacations as a child, these ties have been obliterated. Since 1945, Ginda and Hélène, the mother and her daughter, have remained silent. Ginda never told her daughter Hélène what had happened to her grandmother, her aunts and uncles, her cousin Salomé, her cousin, little Kalman. Some survived, others died; there was nothing more to say. By talking, I would add sorrow to sorrow. And by giving this beautiful name of Salomé to my daughter, I had unwittingly subjected her to a curse I know nothing about.

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[…] My grandmother Ginda, a very good student, had convinced her parents to send her to study medicine in Paris. She had arrived in 1926. She admitted to me: “Even at my age, I can’t understand how I was able to convince my parents to let me go study in Paris.” She eventually told me one day: “I was determined.” But she never explained whether she had come to Paris to avoid the enrollment quotas at the university; she wasn’t the type to complain. She always held herself so straight. We were having lunch together at the Closerie des Lilas, she pretended not to notice that I was helping her cut her meat, she pointed out the Bullier just across the street, which has become a café but before the war was a dance hall. She liked to talk about those years when she used to dance and work, and I loved listening to her. She lived at the Scandinavia Hotel on the rue de Seine. She would go dancing at the Coupole, wearing a collar of pink, almond green and silvery beads that she had kept, like the Song of Songs bound in leather, with this inscription in English, “For Ginda with love,” that she received from an American suitor. Two proofs that this carefree life had existed. Ginda spoke five languages fluently. She spoke to her brother, sister-in-law and sisters in Yiddish and Russian, to her children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces in French, English and Hebrew, modern languages that couldn’t be used to express what had happened before and during the war. She said she had forgotten Lithuanian. There is no transmission to the children and grandchildren. The world of before is buried and only a few relics remain. Salted pickles, bison grass vodka, poppy seed cakes and Kasha. I’m five years old, twelve, twenty, thirty-five, having lunch at Ginda’s, the same menu year after year. She fixes Kasha, hands me a plate and says “nu,” the only Russian word she uses with her grandchildren. After the meal, I page through the thick leather photo albums in the living room. She’s posing with her brother Nahum and her sisters Raya and Macha in sailor suits. The girls have big white bows in their braided hair, except Ginda, the least clothes-conscious. She comments: “I was the best pupil in my class.” I spend entire afternoons paging through her albums; I don’t ask a single question. I am a child, an adolescent, then an adult, and I don’t know what I’m looking for. There is no photograph of Salomé. I know nothing of her existence. I am waiting for her to tell me a story that I don’t want to hear.

Colombe Schneck

Reparation

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Foreign Rights Here are the titles presented in the previous issues of Fiction France whose foreign rights have since been sold abroad.

Bello Antoine

Cendrey Jean-Yves

u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore]

u Turkish [Everest Publications]

The Pathfinders Gallimard

u Russian [Gelos] u Slovak [Premedia Group]

Benchetrit Samuel

A Heart Outside Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Shanghai 99

Abecassis Eliette

Sephardi Albin Michel

u Castilian [La Esfera de los Libros]

u Hebrew [Kinneret Publishing House] u Italian [Marco Tropea]

Adam Olivier

The Steady Heart Éd. de l’Olivier

u Castilian [El Aleph/Grup 62] u Italian [Barbès]

Adam Olivier

Unfavourable Winds Éd. de l’Olivier

u Albanian [Buzuku, Kosovo] u German [Klett-

Cotta] u Italian [Bompiani] u Polish [Nasza Ksiegamia] Arditi Metin

The Louganis Girl Actes Sud

u German [Hoffmann & Campe]

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Astier Ingrid

Quai des Enfers Gallimard u Italian [Bompiani]

u Spanish [Océano, Mexico]

Readers] u Dutch [Uitgeverlj Arena] u German [Aufbau Verlag] u Hebrew [Keter Publishing House] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Russian [Astrel Publishing House] Berest Anne

Her Father’s Daughter Le Seuil

u Castilian, Catalan and Basque [Alberdania]

u German [Knaus/Random House] u Turkish

[Dogan]

Berton Benjamin

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar Hachette

u Russian [Azbooka Atticus]

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Bizot Véronique

A Future Actes Sud

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Bizot Véronique

Prize Day Actes Sud

The Midnight Mountain Zulma

Back to Back JC Lattès

Constantine Barbara

Tom, Little Tom, Little, Little Man, Tom Calmann-Lévy

Besson Philippe

The Accidental Man Julliard

u Croatian [Disput] u English [Tin House

Bassignac Sophie

u Castilian [Alianza] u Chinese (complex characters) [Ten Points] u English [The Lilliput Press, Ireland] u Italian [Mondadori]

Dantzig Charles

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Books, United States] u German [Droschl] u Hungarian [Joszoveg] u Italian [Barbès Editore] u Korean [Open Book] u Rumanian [Pandora]

Chalandon Sorj

My Traitor Grasset & Fasquelle

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Aubry Gwenaëlle

No One Mercure de France

Honecker 21 Actes Sud

Blas de Roblès Jean-Marie

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Blondel Jean-Philippe

(Re)play! Actes Sud

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My Name Is François Grasset & Fasquelle [Arab Scientific Publishers] Darrieussecq Marie

Clèves P.O.L

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The Black Sea Sabine Wespieser

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Davrichewy Kéthévane

The Separated Sabine Wespieser

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Decoin Didier

Dugain Marc

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Is This the Way Women Die? Grasset & Fasquelle

Delecroix Vincent

The Shoe on the Roof Gallimard

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Des Horts Stéphanie

The Panther JC Lattès

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Desarthes Agnès

The Stars Never Sleep Gallimard u Italian [Marco Tropea] u Russian [Corpus]

Énard Mathias

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants Actes Sud

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In the Black Night Éd. de l’Olivier

Zone Actes Sud

Commonwealth] u German [Droemer Knaur]

u German [Berlin Verlag] u Greek [Ellinika

u English [Portobello, United Kingdom and

Descott Régis

Caïn & Adèle JC Lattès u Spanish

Despentes Virginie

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Grammata] u Hebrew [Xargol] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Lebanese for the Arabic language [La Librairie Orientale] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote, Portugal] u Serbian [Stylos Art] u Turkish [Can] Fargues Nicolas

Apocalyspe Baby Grasset & Fasquelle

You’ll See P.O.L

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Editore] u Portuguese [Sextante Editora] u Romanian [Trei Editura] u Swedish [Albert Bonniers Förlag] Deville Patrick

Equatoria Le Seuil

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Verlag] u Italian [Galaad] Deville Patrick

Kampuchea Le Seuil

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Dugain Marc

An Ordinary Execution Gallimard

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Faye Éric

The Man With No Prints Stock

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Filhol Elisabeth

The Power Station P.O.L

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Flipo Georges

The Commissaire is Not a Poetry Fan Éd. de la Table Ronde

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Grazie] u Polish [Noir sur Blanc] u Russian [Pokolenie] u Spanish [El Aleph] Garnier Pascal

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye Zulma

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Garnier Pascal

The Panda Theory Zulma

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u German [BTB Verlag]

Germain Sylvie

The Unnoticed Albin Michel

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Ghata Yasmine

The Târ of My Father Librairie Athème Fayard

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Giraud Brigitte

A Year Abroad Stock

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Giraud Brigitte

Not to Worry Stock

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Guénassia Jean-Michel

The Incurable Optimists’ Club Albin Michel

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62] u Croatian [Vukovic & Runjic] u Czech [Argo] u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English (Great Britain) [Atlantic Book (Grove Atlantic)] u German [Insel Verlag] u Greek [Polis] u Italian[Salani Editore] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Norwegian [Forlaget Press] u Swedish [Norstedts Forlag] Guyotat Pierre

Coma Mercure de France

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Haddad Hubert

Opium Poppy Zulma

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Hane Khadi

So Hungry It Hurts Denoël

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Hesse Thierry

Demon Éd. de l’Olivier

u Castilian [Duomo, Spain] u Hebrew [Modan] u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Norwegian [Agora] u Ukrainian [Tipovit]

109

Jauffret Régis

Lê Linda

Martinez Carole

u English [Salammbo, United Kingdom]

u German [Amman]

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Croatian [Alfa]

Lacrimosa Gallimard

Joncour Serge

How Many Ways I Love You Flammarion

u Chinese [Phoenix Publishing] u Korean

[Wisdom House] u Russian [Ripol] u Ukrainian [Tipovit] Khadra Yasmina

Olympus of the Unfortunate Julliard

u Finnish [WSOY] u Greek [Kastaniotis] u Italian [Marsilio Editori] u Portuguese

[Bizâncio] u Spanish [Ediciones Destino] Kiner Aline

The Game of Hangman Liana Levi u German [Ullstein]

Korman Cloé

Colour-Men Le Seuil

u Castilian (Latin America) [B Ediciones

Mexico]

La Peine Bertrand (de)

Soundtrack Éd. de Minuit

u Spanish [Pasos Perdidos, Spain]

Laferrière Dany

The World Trembles around Me Grasset u English [Arsenal Pulp Press, Canada] u Japanese [Fujiwara Shoten]

Lalumière Jean-Claude

The Russian Front Le Dilettante

u Castilian [Libros del Asteroide]

Lapeyre Patrick

In Memoriam Christian Bourgois Le Bris Michel

The World’s Beauty Grasset & Fasquelle u Italian [Fazi Editore]

Le Tellier Hervé

Enough About Love JC Lattès

u Chinese [Chu Chen Books] u English [The Other Press, United States of America] u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch u Verlag] u Greek [Opera] u Italian [Mondadori] u Japanese [Hayakawa] u Portuguese [Teodolito] u Spanish [Grijalbo/Random House] u Turkish [Monokl]

Lecoq Titiou

The Ladettes Au diable vauvert

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Baijing

Yanziyue Culture & Art Studio] Lesbre Michèle

A Huge White Lake Sabine Wespieser

u French [Héliotrope, Quebec only]

Liberati Simon

Jayne Mansfield 1967 Grasset u Italian [Fandango]

Lindon Mathieu

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough P.O.L u Dutch [Ailantus]

Luce Damien

Luxemburglar Éd. Héloïse d’Ormesson

u German [Droemer Knaur]

The Field of Les Murmures Gallimard

u Danish [Arvids] u Dutch [Van Gennep]

u English [Europa Editions, United States of

America] u Hungarian [Ulpius Haz] u Italian [Mondadori] u Spanish [Tusquets] u Swedish [Norstedts] Mattern Jean

Milk and Honey Sabine Wespieser

u Croatian [Fraktura] u Greek [Hestia]

u Hungarian [Magveto Kiado] u Italian [Giulio Einaudi] u Romanian [Polirom]

Mauvignier Laurent

Some Men Éd. de Minuit

u Chinese [Art et littérature du Hunan]

u Danish [Arvids] u Dutch [De Geus] u English

[University of Nebraska Press, United States]

u French (for Algeria only) [Barzakh] u German

[Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag] u Italian [Feltrinelli] u Spanish [Anagrama] Meur Diane

Down to the Plain Sabine Wespieser

u English (worldwide rights) [Seagull books] u Italian [Barbès editore]

Miano Léonora

These Troubled Souls Plon u Swedish [Sekwa förlag]

Minghini Giulio

Fake Allia

u Italian [Piemme]

Miské Karim

Arab Jazz Viviane Hamy

u German [Lübbe Verlag] u Greek [Polis]

Life is Short and Desire Neverending P.O.L

Caravanserail Le Seuil

Monnery Romain

Delta Entertainment] u Castilian [Destino]

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta]

u Castilian [Grijalbo (Randomhouse)]

[Sichuan Literature and Art Press] u Croatian [Skolska Knijga] u Czech [Euromedia] u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English (worldwide rights) [Other Press , United States of America] u German [Karl Blessing] u Hungarian [Mandorla] u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore] u Japanese [Sakuhin Sha] u Korean [Minumsa] u Lithuanian [Baltos Lankos] u Polish [Replika] u Russian [Azbooka/Atticus] u Serbian [Akademska Knjiga] u Turkish [Pegasus Yayinlari]

Malte Marcus

u Dutch [Nijgh & Van Ditmar]

u Albanian [Toena] u Bulgarian [Altera/ u Catalan [Aleph/Empuries] u Chinese

Laurain Antoine

Mitterrand’s Hat Flammarion

u English [Gallic] u Italian [AtmosphereLibri]

Majdalani Charif

u Catalan [La Campana] u German

Garden of Love Zulma

u Italian [Piemme] u Polish [Albatros] u Spanish [Paidos] u Turkish [Pupa]

u Catalan [Rosa dels vents (Randomhouse)]

Monnier Alain

Our Second Life Flammarion

u Vietnamese [Les Éditions littéraires

u German [Ullstein]

Malte Marcus

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni? Liana Levi

du Vietnam]

Harmonics Gallimard

u Greek [Kedros] u Italian [Barbes Editore]

Marc Bernard et Rivière Maryse

When Men Clash Calmann-Lévy

u Castilian [Rossell Editorial]

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Free, Lonesome and Drowsy Au diable vauvert

Nahapétian Naïri

u Dutch [Querido] u Spanish [Alianza]

u Swedish [Sekwa] u Ukrainian [ECM Media]

NDiaye Marie

Three Strong Women Gallimard

2009 Goncourt Prize: 31 contracts signed worldwide

Ollagnier Virgnie

Ravey Yves

Schwartzbrod Alexandra

u Italian [Piemme]

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion Editura]

u Croatian [Hena Com] u Hungarian [Ulpius

The Uncertainty Liana Levi Olmi Véronique

Bambi Bar Éd. de Minuit

u Turkish [Can]

u German [Kunstmann Verlag]

The Last Days of Stefan Zweig Flammarion

Kidnapping with Ransom Éd. de Minuit

Co. Ltd] u Chinese (simplified characters) [Hunan People] u Danish [Arvids] u German [Antje Kunstmann] u Italian [Piemme] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Polish [Wydawnictwo Otwarte] u Russian [Atticus] u Vietnamese [Nha Wuat Ban Tri Thuc]

Cinderella Stock

Ovaldé Véronique

And My Transparent Heart Éd. de l’Olivier

u Albanian [Toena] u English [Portobello,

United Kingdom] u Italian [Minimum Fax] u Korean [Mujintree] Pagano Emmanuelle

Childish Hands P.O.L

u German [Verlag Klaus Wagenbach]

Page Martin

Perhaps a Love Affair Éd. de l’Olivier

u English [Viking, United States] u German [Thiele] u Greek [Patakis] u Korean [Yolimwom] u Portuguese [Rocco, Brazil] u Romanian [Humanitas] u Russian [Astrel/ Ast] u Serbian [Nolit]

Pancol Katherine

The Slow Tortoise Waltz Albin Michel

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Castilian [La Esfera

de los libros] u Catalan [Edicions 62] u Chinese (traditional characters) [Business weekly] u Chinese (simplified characters) [Thnkingdom] u Czech [Jota s.r.o] u Danish [Bazar Forlag] u Dutch [WPG Belgie NV] u Finnish [Bazar Kustannus Oy] u German [Verlagsgruppe Random House GMB] u Hungarian [Libri Publishing] u Italian [Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore] u Japanese [Hayakawa Publishing] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Latvian [Apgads Kontinents] u Norwegian [Bazar Forlag] u Polish [Sonia Draga] u Portuguese [A esfera dos livros] u Russian [Astrel] u Swedish [Baza Forlag] u Turkish [Pegasus Yayinlari] Provost Martin

Beefsteak Phébus

u English [Whereabout Press, United States]

u Romanian [Nemira] u Spanish [Demipage]

Raoul-Duval Jacqueline

Kafka, The Eternal Fiancé Flammarion

u English [The Other Press, United Kingdom

and United States] u Estonian [Eesti Raamat]

u Hungarian [Ab Ovo] u Italian [Gremese]

u Lithuanian [Gimtasis Zodis] u Russian [Text]

Haz Könyvkiado] u Italian [Leone Editore]

Ravey Yves

First Love Grasset

u Chinese (complex characters) [Asian Culture

Farewell Jerusalem Stock

Reinhardt Éric

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

Révay Theresa

All the Dreams of the World Belfond

u Czech [Euromedia] u German [Der Club

Bertelsmann] u Hungarian [Athenaeum]

u Polish [Swiat Ksiazki] u Portuguese [Circulo

de Leitores] u Russian [Family Leisure Club] u Serbian [Alnari] u Spanish [Circulo de Lectores] u Ukrainian [Family Leisure Club] Rolin Olivier

A Lion Hunter Le Seuil

u Castilian [Cuarto Proprio, Chile] u Chinese (simplified characters) [Shanghai 99 Readers] u Dutch [Ijzer] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Italian [Barbès] u Portuguese [Sextante]

Seksik Laurent

u Chinese [Shanghai 99 Readers] u Danish [Arvids] u English [Pushkin Press] u German [Karl Blessing Verlag] u Hebrew [Hakibutz Hameucad] u Italian [Gremese] u Korean [Hyundaemunhak] u Russian [Ripol] u Spanish [Ediciones Casus Belli] u Turkish [Can Yayinlari]

Sylvain Dominique

Dirty War Viviane Hamy

u English [MacLehose Press] u Italian [Mondadori]

Toussaint Jean-Philippe

The Truth About Marie Éd. de Minuit

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Éd. d’Art et

A Dead Dog After Him P.O.L

de littérature du Hunan] u Chinese (traditional characters) [Aquarius, Taiwan] u Dutch [Prometheus/Bert Bakker] u English [Dalkey Archive Press, United States] u Galician [Glaxia] u German [Frankfurter Verlaganstalt] u Italian [Barbes editora] u Spanish [Anagrama editorial]

u Polish [Czarne] u Russian [Text]

Varenne Antonin

Rolin Jean

u German [Berlin Verlag]

Rosenthal Olivia

What Do Reindeer Do When Christmas Is Over? Verticales u Italian [Nottetempo]

Roux Frédéric

The Indian Winter Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (complex characters) [Ye-ren,

Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros]

Ruiz Raoul

The Spirit of the Stairs Librairie Arthème Fayard u English [Dis voir]

Fakirs Viviane Hamy

u Croatian [Fraktura] u English [MacLehose Press, United Kingdom] u Finnish [Wsoy] u German [Ullstein] u Italian [Einaudi] u Turkish [Dog ˇ an Kitap]

Viel Tanguy

Paris-Brest Éd. de Minuit

u Dutch [De Arbeiderspers] u German [Wagenbach] u Italian [Neri Pozza] u Spanish [Acantilado]

Winckler Martin

The Women’s Chorus P.O.L

u Spanish [Akal] u Russian [Ripol-Classic]

Sansal Boualem

The German’s Village Gallimard u Bosnian [B.T.C Sahinpasic]

u Catalan [Columna] u Czech [Pistorius

& Olsanska] u Danish [Turbine] u Dutch [De Geus] u English [Europe Editions, United States; Bloomsbury, United Kingdom] u Finnish [Into] u German [Merlin] u Greek [Polis] u Hebrew [Kinneret] u Italian [Einaudi] u Lithuanian [Tyto Alba] u Norwegian [Kagge] u Polish [Dialog] u Serbian [IPS Media II] u Spanish [El Aleph]

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