Fiction France n°9 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Twenty new French ďŹ ction titlesÂ to be read and translated

foreword

Published twice a year, Fiction France offers a selection of excerpts from French fiction along with English translations. The French publishers wish to highlight these books abroad by targeting translators, agents and publishers who take the risk of promoting contemporary fiction. Fiction France’s aim is to create a new burst of enthusiasm for translations of contemporary French literature, to be a literary showcase for book professionals around the world, as well as an essential support to the French book market abroad. It is a tool which fully reflects the mission of the Institut français. On page 109 of this ninth issue of Fiction France, you will find those titles presented in the previous issues whose foreign rights have since been sold. How can you take part in Fiction FRANCE ? 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 and European Affairs.

Please do not hesitate to contact the Foreign Rights Managers of the publishing houses at the addresses listed in the table of contents and on the page presenting each text.

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 2011 Next publication date of Fiction France: 12th March 2012

The Institut français is France’s new international agency for cultural policy affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign and European 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 on line at www.institutfrancais.com.

contents

p. 8

p. 13

p. 29

p. 35

p. 40

Philippe Adam

Vincent Almendros

Virginie Deloffre

Patrick Deville

Brigitte Giraud

Lucky Days

Dear Lise

Léna

Kampuchea

Not to Worry

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: October 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Rachael A. Small rachael-small@uiowa.edu

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Michael Lucey mlucey@berkeley.edu

Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Translation: Ursula Meany Scott ursulameanyscott@gmail.com

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Charlotte Mandell cmandell@earthlink.net

Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Translation: Jonathan Kaplansky jkaplansky@videotron.ca

p. 18

p. 23

p. 45

p. 50

p. 55

Véronique Bizot

Marie Darrieussecq

Hubert Haddad

Khadi Hane

Titiou Lecoq

A Future

Clèves

Opium Poppy

So Hungry It Hurts

The Ladettes

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen

Publisher: Zulma Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Amélie Louat

Publisher: Denoël Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Au diable vauvert Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Judith Becqueriaux judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr Translation: Margot Miller miller.margot@gmail.com

Marie-Pacifique Zeltner rights@audiable.com Translation: Ann Kaiser kaisertranslations@yahoo.com

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Translation: Hester Velmans hestervelmans@gmail.com

madsen@pol-editeur.fr

amelie.louat@zulma.fr

Translation: Linda Coverdale

Translation: Tegan Raleigh

linda.coverdale@gmail.com

teganraleigh@gmail.com

p. 59

p. 64

p. 69

p. 89

p. 94

Simon Liberati

Carole Martinez

Diane Meur

Michel Quint

Anna Roman

Jayne Mansfield, 1967

The Field of Les Murmures

Down to the Plain

The Lovers of Frankfurt

The Valley of Absinthe

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton

Publisher: Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Sarah Hirsch

Publisher: Éditions de l’Aube Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Cécile Dutheil, cdutheil@grasset.fr (until January 1st 2012) Heidi Warneke, hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Jane Marie Todd foremost92@gmail.com

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: John Cullen jocul@earthlink.net

jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: Jane Kuntz kuntz@illinois.edu

sarah@editions-heloisedormesson.com Translation: Alison Anderson alisona@mindspring.com

Marion Hennebert marion.hennebert@orange.fr Translation: Jeanine Herman jeanine_herman@yahoo.com

p. 75

p. 80

p. 85

p. 99

p. 104

Léonora Miano

Mikaël Ollivier

Christian Oster

Marianne Sluszny

Claire Wolniewicz

These Troubled Souls

The World in Hand

Road Trip

The Brother of the Hanged Man

The Weeping Lady

Publisher: Éditions Thierry Magnier Date of Publication: Autumn 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: October 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

Publisher: Éditions de la Différence Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: April 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Maylis Vauterin

Johanna Brock Lacassin j.brock-lacassin@actes-sud.fr Translation: Alexander C Totz alexander@cinoche.biz

mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

Frédérique Martinie contacts@ladifference.fr Translation: Pascale Torracinta pascale_torracinta@hotmail.com

maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr Translation: Tanyika Carey info@tanyikacarey.com

Publisher: Plon Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Rebecca Byers

rebecca.byers@editions-plon.com Translation: Madeleine Velguth velguth@sbcglobal.net

Philippe Adam

Lucky Days

What would you do if you suddenly became a millionaire? In Lucky Days, Philippe Adam tells the stories of fifteen lottery winners. The author does not give each lucky winner the same treatment: sometimes he sketches a silhouette of a winner at the moment of critical impact, sometimes he develops a serialized story in long, alternating sequences, such as the tale of the culture-hungry couple feeding their hopeless snobbery with their spending. Little by little, the stories weave together in a spiral, the heroes blending into each other

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Rachael A. Small rachael-small@uiowa.edu

in a collective fresco of unusual nouveaux riches. The author enjoys showing us multiple paths, playing with all possible combinations. But disappointment always sets in the next day. As if this jackpot served as a multiplying factor for all the characters’foibles, obsessions, scruples, faults, defects and mania. Philippe Adam ably uses his taste for brevity and satire in service of an original construction, channeling as much the art of Bach fugues as that of television editing during the last decade.

July 18, my account was credited. I got up, went to the bank and knew that I would never have money problems again. It was hot, people were dreaming of going on vacation, and I was a millionaire.

We remember what we’ve won. What we’ve lost we put aside, somewhere in our memory, which holds no grudges.

Biography

Born in 1970 in Paris, Philippe Adam is a Professor of Philosophy. He is the author of many texts, including novels, short stories, opera libretti, poems and song lyrics. Publications By Verticales: De beaux restes (Lovely Leftovers), 2002; La société des amis de Clémence Picot (The Club of Clémence Picot’s Friends), 2003 (collection Minimales), then Canal Tamagawa (audiobook), created during his residence at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto in 2004. Ton petit manège (Your Little Merry-goround) (Prix Renaissance de la Nouvelle 2009) was published in 2008 and Les centenaires (The Centenarians) in 2010.

With our family, there’s always this feeling like we don’t give them enough, we never think about them, we’ve become selfish. Even though Gilbert had decided to buy his older brother a place in midtown. His parents got a cruise to Egypt, but they complained about the heat and the food. They went to Canada. They went to the Balearic Islands, to Morocco and Australia and not once did they thank us. We would get post cards saying things like, “We’d barely recovered from our one hundred fifty thousand hour flight when our papers were stolen, our luggage was lost, the hotel breakfasts are vile, your father’s gotten sick, we hope to come home soon.” As soon as they got back, they’d quickly gather the whole family, inviting us over so they could describe in detail how the bathroom water was black, how badly they were treated at the Turkish bath and the tale of the bellhop who, instead of shining their shoes, returned them all muddied. And they bring gifts for everyone, except us, “because you two, we never know what to give you, you already have so much,” Gilbert’s mother smiles. But I know that deep down she believes that you don’t give gifts to rich people.

I had a hard time with the numbers. When they said 1 million, I debated how many zeroes to put after the 1, and if I had to sign a check for three million seven hundred eighty-three thousand two hundred fifty-nine Euros and zero cents, as I did for my first piece of property, I was overwhelmed when I had to write it out in numbers. I would have liked to have a machine write it for me or for the notary to take care of it. But instead, the notary watched as I slowly filled out the check, like I was a child learning to color clowns and elephants, a kid who he was ready to congratulate, despite the tongue hanging out over his big felt-tipped marker, head tilted awkwardly over the page, for getting there, doing it, for not coloring too much outside the lines. Katia and I called it “running errands”. We would make appointments to meet on the Rue Saint-Honoré and set off to raid the boutiques. I’d try on coats that looked better on her than they did on me, dresses that flattered her, and I’d buy them for her. We’d laugh a lot. I’d spend a lot. We’d have fun. But Katia forgot me. She found other, richer friends, more powerful and interesting than me, and I know that ever since, she has turned her nose up at what I’m still weak enough to think of as our friendship. People apologize for little things in life. They ask for forgiveness when they forget to hold the door open for you. But the one who crushes your fingers says nothing. I had often thought that by being careful, and especially by not allowing myself to go out on the weekends, I could perhaps put some money aside. Instead, I was suddenly rich. Tremendously rich. But that didn’t keep me from continuing to walk the dog nightly. For New Year’s, Paul knew a hall we could rent fairly cheaply. Hervé had heard about a caterer who, along with the meals, provided plastic place settings, banquet tables and folding chairs—and even a supposedly incredible party band. The caterer suggested an appetizer of duck foie gras, monkfish stew as a main course, topped off with nougats glacés, a menu which Charlotte and Emilie quickly criticized, citing the disastrous mix of foie gras and fish, which did not bode well. We met with a representative from a different company that would take care of the place settings, chairs and tables for all eighty-three people we were expecting, and would serve each of our friends all-you-can-eat amuses bouches, beef Wellington and baked Alaska. So the room, the band and the caterer were reserved. In the meantime, we won the lottery. Of course, the question had to be asked: should we still invite everyone, should we still let everyone pay his own portion as originally planned? There were many discussions in the car, many midnight fights, but in the end we decided that none of our friends would benefit from our largesse. After all, we didn’t want to give them bad habits.

Scouring the sidewalks for discarded tickets, crumpled up tickets, running them through the machine to be sure they actually were losers, in hopes of finding that rare pearl, the ticket that’s been thrown out by mistake, the jackpot carelessly gone unnoticed—I’ve lived like this for a long time. This profession has no name. I’ve always been this bad with numbers. My broker suggested that I buy an island in the Pacific. In pictures, it appears as a lovely circle with white edges softly fading into turquoise-green waters. There are about 40,000 square meters of land, a house with seven rooms, straw and bamboo outhouses for servants who can easily be recruited from the surrounding islets, an Olympicsized swimming pool, enough space left over to build a heliport and set up ten or twelve companies that wouldn’t have to put up all their buildings there, just their headquarters. I refused. I was afraid that my name would later be tied to a scandal. I was afraid that they would bad-mouth me for living in that house all alone, that they’d say Olympic-sized swimming pools and turquoise-green seas would be too much for that little dot down there, me, as seen in photos taken with the help of the new heliport, this little thing that takes up so much space and doesn’t even know how to swim.

Philippe Adam

Lucky Days

In the beginning you don’t know what to do, you still have the dreams and ambitions you had before, old desires that don’t go with this new power you suddenly seem to have. The Colins cancelled. They sent us a check, covering their part of the rental fees for the room, band and caterer, a check accompanied by a quick note wishing us a happy holiday. The Maillots did the same thing, without the note. And the Duboses, the note without the check. Our friends the Mérions called. They said that they were going on a family trip because one of their aunts was dying of stomach cancer. Something came up for Caroline. Some had the flu. Others were afraid of catching it and were therefore avoiding parties. Georges, Frédéric and Jean-Luc didn’t even bother to let us know that they weren’t coming. Justine, in tears, sobbed that she would explain later—suffice it to say, we never saw her again. The night of December 31, we arrived at the hall already expecting that many guests would be missing. In the parking lot, the musicians took their instruments out of their cases, drums, drums and more drums, from very big to very small, all red and white. In the room, the caterer finished setting up the serving tables where, on large platters, pains surprise mingled with canapés and sushi plates. We were early. We wanted to help set up the tables and chairs, we wanted to help carry the drums but, each time, they told us not to bother. Pascal showed up, followed by Asma who apologized: her little girl was sick, she couldn’t stay very long. Marine couldn’t stay long either, and we

Vincent Almendros

Dear Lise

offered her a glass of champagne, looking out at the empty room. Of the eighty guests we’d invited, perhaps only twenty showed up, and so the room seemed bigger, the buffet more lavish. Those who ate weren’t jostled or crowded by anyone and those who didn’t eat walked about, went out to smoke, went to the bathroom, wandered, actually, the way we too were wandering, keeping up appearances for better or worse, thanks to that silent glass of champagne we shared with Marine. The band played. In the middle of the room someone blew a whistle, then the drummer men began playing their drums and the drummer women followed. So it began, like that, suddenly very loud. Someone asked if it was Brazilian music, we didn’t hear the answer. With the drums, anyway, we couldn’t hear anything else.

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Michael Lucey mlucey@berkeley.edu

The feeling of floating is nothing compared to the feeling of power that follows, the desire to run, to hug or slap people. Also, the feeling of no longer being tied to everything that weighed you down before, like you’ve gone right over to the other side of things instead of missing them entirely, you’ve ended up somewhere else, somewhere different, where you’ve finally found your place. Thanks again to this number problem, sometimes I would not know exactly where I was, especially on certain nights, when I believed it was the year 10,000 and insisted, in a dream, on paying 3000 Euros for things that were only worth a hundred. I made a big scene on those nights, shouted, twisting the sheets on my bed. I would have liked it if my dreams had a butler who, from time to time, would order me to leave please, go now, wake up, fuck off, or for once, be good, sleep.

Because of the dog, I would go every night to the Quai de la Croisette and the Quai d’Offenbach, around the lake in Créteil. It was his walk, the path that he and I were used to. I thought that after he died something else would begin for me, but I continued to walk along the same walkways, at the same times. I was tied to all those dog owners whose paths I’d crossed there for so many years that they’d become, unknowingly, my last and only friends. Distance. It’s as if, having won, I’ve learned to measure what separates me from the others, and I see better now the distance between us.

We spend a long time thinking about what we’ve won. Later, we won’t think, we’ll only have this fever, the desire to bite a horse or enter the ring to go up against a bull.

Biography

Vincent Almendros was born in Avignon in 1978. Dear Lise is his first novel.

Lise could entertain herself with nearly anything, and in this case it was me. When I sat down next to her in the back seat of the Mercedes, I didn’t know that we were leaving for such a long trip. Who could have imagined I would be following her to the ends of the earth? She was fifteen years old.

Lise could entertain herself with nearly anything, and in this case it was me. On the Friday in question an imposing black car stood waiting for us on the street outside her apartment. It was late in the day. The autumn sky was darkening slowly. On seeing us approach, the driver had stepped out of the Mercedes to open its doors for us. Seated in the back of this enormous sedan, we had followed the quays of the Left Bank up to the Pont d’Iéna and fifteen minutes later had reached the Rue Bois-le-vent, where Moune, Lise’s grandmother, lived. Again, the driver got out and helped the elderly woman into the front seat of the car. I introduced myself, we exchanged a few words, and then the car quickly set off again. Once across the Pont de Grenelle, we headed south to find the freeway, along which we’d been driving now for about forty kilometers. Lise had just set her backpack down between us. From it, she took a sketch pad and a soft leather pencil case. Pencil in hand, she trained her gaze on me. She began to draw with long black strokes on the sheet of paper in front of her, all the while chewing on her lower lip. Deep in concentration, from time to time she would tilt her head to the side. Myself, I paid hardly any attention to her drawing, keeping my eyes fixed mostly on the road. Even though it was only my profile she could see, she had made the choice to represent me head on. It was as if she could care less about reality, preferring to focus on her particular way of seeing things, her own perceptions of me. Or maybe she simply didn’t know how to draw. It had now been a few weeks since I had begun working as her private tutor. Where we met is of no importance. What counts in my memory is that it was she herself, with the typical self-confidence of a fifteen year old, who had asked

me to begin giving her lessons. We met once or twice a week at her home. As best I could understand, her parents traveled a lot. They were always on the move, meaning that more often than not we were alone in the house, which wasn’t really a house in any case, but more of an apartment, a huge triplex in the heart of the Latin Quarter. I had only ever seen her mother once, just in passing one day when she was heading out the door as I was arriving, for which she made her apologies. Her name was Florence. The image I retained of her was of a tall woman in a long black dress, very slender and graceful.

Vincent Almendros

Dear Lise

On this particular Friday, Lise’s parents had suggested to her that they all meet at Bignon-Mirabeau. The house was only an hour from Paris, in the Loiret, and boy is it great out there. It’s really great, Lise had repeated. At first I hadn’t understood why she was telling me this. In fact, I have no idea what had passed between her and her parents, but there you have it, I found myself invited to spend the weekend with them in the country. And now here I was, intimidated by the presence of the chauffeur. Dressed in a dark blue suit, the man was in his fifties and had a moustache, a thick one, but well trimmed, and it lent him a good-natured air that seemed inconsistent with his austere silence. Myself, I was only twenty-five, and I knew there was nothing about me or my life that suggested I ought to be driven around by a chauffeur. Indeed, my mind was just then dwelling, who knows why, on the pile of dirty plates that I’d left behind in my sink. What other things, more vague and impalpable, might I also have left behind me? And towards what equally vague and impalpable things might I now be headed? Lise held her drawing out at arm’s length to scrutinize it. She let out a guffaw. It didn’t much resemble me, except for the anxiety you could see in it. My features were severe, my eyebrows bushy, there were dark rings under my eyes, my mouth was thick and my ears all jagged. It occurred to me that she must think me ugly. With determination she added a strange handlebar mustache, a dark black one with a threatening air about it. She held the sketch pad out towards me. I examined the portrait more carefully. Perhaps she was trying to tell me that she could do with me as she pleased. We were moving along at a good clip and yet it felt to me as if we were floating in space. Traffic was flowing smoothly on the freeway that night. Lise had just dozed off against my shoulder, her sketch pad nearly falling from her hand, and I could feel her breathing, or rather, I could hear it, a quiet sound you might almost call a snore. Made uneasy by to the sensation of her head resting against me, I was careful not to move even the slightest bit as I turned my gaze to the reflection in the rear-view mirror of Moune’s impassive face. I couldn’t tell whether or not Lise’s grandmother was asleep, for given her age the contours

of her eyelids were lost among the wrinkles that criss-crossed her face, and there seemed to be something Asiatic in the old woman’s eyes. Her cheeks, thin and slack, seemed to melt into her neck. Given the way she was seated—her head had tilted slightly backwards and her mouth was a tiny bit open—, I was startled to find myself imagining she might be dead. The car slowed a bit and veered off towards an exit ramp. Soon we were driving through fields of yellow and green, a darkening expanse of wheat and rape that spread out all around us until interrupted by a distant line of trees, the beginnings of a forest. Here the Mercedes took up the entire road. We passed over a narrow stone bridge and Lise awoke all of a sudden. We’re almost there, she announced, and picking her head up off of my shoulder she strained to ascertain, as night slowly engulfed us, where precisely we were. There hadn’t been even a hint of doubt, not the slightest hesitation, in her words. We were almost there. It was a sure thing. At that very moment the driver turned the Mercedes into a small driveway. The tires crunched on the gravel. With my seatbelt still fastened, I glanced out the window towards the edge of the road at the flowering shrubs planted along a river. We were slowly pulling up to the house, whose facade was partly covered in dark ivy, when an outdoor light suddenly switched on above the front door. Two dark forms emerged from the house. Moune made a clucking noise, chuckling wordlessly as if to declare that their presence was truly a surprise. Oh! they’re here! she then exclaimed joyfully. Caught in our headlights, Lise’s parents had begun enthusiastically waving their arms as if they were helping an airplane down onto a runway. Her mother was dressed for the country in rubber boots, a hunting jacket, and a tweed cap jammed down onto her head, with the result that I barely recognized her. On the other hand, I had no problem recognizing Lise’s father standing beside her, I recognized him without ever having met him. I knew his face, especially his hair, that huge curly, white mass, but also his pointed nose, his glasses, and his smile. Yes, that was a smile I had seen many times on television, in the papers or on the cover of different magazines. The smile of a man on whom life has smiled. I had stepped out of the car and found myself looking at Jean Delabaere. He was standing there a few feet in front of me. The shrink wrap that had made him rich, that plastic packaging material whose strength and durability was its big selling point, had invaded day-to-day life over the past two decades. It could be found on most of the items sold in supermarkets or megastores, protecting anything you might touch before buying. As a captain of industry, he was a charismatic fellow; the media loved him. These days, his group, the Delabaere Group, had been branching out into many areas: construction, energy, transport. This wasn’t news to me, just as it wasn’t news

that he was Lise’s father—I mean, I had known from the start that Lise’s father was Jean Delabaere. But seeing him in his cable-knit Irish sweater hugging his daughter made me realize that right up to that moment he had had no real existence for me, as if Jean Delabaere had really been only a sound, more a sound than someone’s actual name. I helped Moune out of the car—the driver was also there, holding the door open—and she graced me with a Thank you, my dear. Florence came up to me and greeted me with a kiss on each cheek and a Hello, my dear. Lise’s father approached with an outstretched hand and a wide smile of welcome. Good evening, Sir. Good evening, he said, merrily. The house, standing there quietly in the night, was an old farmhouse with a red roof. Two barns stretched out perpendicularly on either side. On the lawn where we stood in front of the house, a gaggle of haughty geese seemed to be discussing our arrival among themselves. A few ducks were also wandering about discretely, but, more fearful, they kept their distance. Lise’s grandmother walked holding her arms out to keep her balance. Florence kept close by her and had just lighted up a cigarette. Claude—I learned that the driver’s name was Claude—carried our bags. Jean Delabaere himself made his way much more energetically towards the house, bent slightly backwards under the weight of three logs he had found who knows where, cradling them in his arms, the one on top coming right up to his chin. As for Lise, she had disappeared without my even noticing. Inside I found her curled up on the sofa in the living room, near the fireplace that was filling the room with the scent of autumn. She was asleep. Florence came up to me offering a glass of wine. She always does that, she said. Ever since she was a little child, she falls asleep the moment she arrives.

Vincent Almendros

Dear Lise

The next morning I was up at daybreak. The fineness of the sheets lent me a sense of luxury and left me feeling fresh. As I hadn’t closed the shutters before going to bed, the dawn’s light, grey and elegant, crept into the room. The walls, covered in a striped wallpaper, felt a touch aristocratic, a touch Victorian. I arranged behind me two pillows, covered in Toile de Jouy, one a burgundy shade, and the other blue, that I had put at my feet for the night. There I was, comfortably ensconced in bed, sitting up, rediscovering my room in the light of day, running both my gaze and my mind over the various things it held,— lamps and dolls, statuettes, frames, a whole heap of objects that in my thoughts I was running my hand over, evaluating their textures, their weight, imagining how it would feel to touch them. Then I got out of bed and went up to the window. Outside the ducks were still asleep on the fog- shrouded lawn. From far off, invisible, came the muted tinkle of a small bell, the kind one attaches to the neck of sheep, repeating itself tirelessly in the dawn.

Véronique Bizot

A Future

Paul receives a letter from his brother, Odd, telling him that “he’s disappearing for a while” and asking in a postscript if Paul would please swing by his house to make sure that the faucet of a sink on the second floor of their childhood home has been properly drained. In spite of a colossal head cold, Paul doesn’t hesitate; he gets behind the wheel and drives the three hundred kilometers that lie between him and that faucet. A Future draws us into a deceptively thin intrigue, from a triplex in Monaco to the Malayan jungle, all without leaving the couch in the family library—or almost. It’s also a road-trip on a tractor, a stroll around the uneasy edges of

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr

Translation: Hester Velmans hestervelmans@gmail.com

Biography

The author of two collections of short stories and two novels, Véronique Bizot is, she herself admits, a “gentle soul afflicted with an awareness of the very worst.” Publications Mon couronnement, novel, Actes Sud, 2010 (Grand prize for the novel of 2010 from the sgdl [Society of Men of Letters]; the Lilas prize 2010); Les Jardiniers, short stories, Actes Sud, 2008; Les Sangliers, short stories, Stock, 2005; paperback edition, 2007.

childhood, an epic swimming session, a Scottish caper, a sectional view of male depression, among other things. It is the story of a large family, no more dysfunctional than any other, a stew of more-or-less true recollections of a rather untrustworthy reality. Here again is Véronique Bizot’s irresistible and instantly recognizable style, the small miracles of contrapuntal sentences, never weighed down by their extraordinary richness; the singular, unique, wonderfully ambiguous universe, where darkness is appealing because it is consistently steeped in comic incongruity, startling lucidity, cheerful turmoil and rather recalcitrant philosophy.

Our brother wrote to me on Wednesday to tell me he was going to disappear for an unspecified while, in a succinct note posted from a railway station, which I received on Thursday and which I promptly copied and sent on to the others in order to forestall any futile searches, and then, in a snow storm, my head stuffed with a colossal cold, I drove the three hundred kilometers between my home and his in order to make sure, as he’d requested in a postscript, that he’d properly drained the faucet of a second-floor sink before leaving, something he wasn’t sure he’d done. Once I got there, finding an icy house, I went so far as to check every single faucet, and then I lit a fire in the library fireplace and spent two or three hours sitting on the sofa with a box of Kleenex, across from the old yellow velvet easy chair that still showed the imprint of my brother’s body and in which he had presumably plotted his disappearance, unless it had been a sudden impulse, just like our father’s, whom we used to see sitting in his pajamas in that very same chair, until one morning when he wasn’t there anymore, or anywhere, and whose death notice it took, five years later, coming to us from some Malaysian government, to make us stop waiting for him. That death notification had outraged our sisters, prompting all three of them to run for an atlas in order to find the exact location of, they suspected, the piece of paradise for which our father had not only abandoned all six of us after emptying his bank accounts, but where, as they said, tapping their index fingers on the Malaysian peninsula, he’d probably done nothing but idle away five idyllic

and shameful years, upon which, slamming the atlas shut, they declared that repatriating his body was out of the question. And if our brother Odd, whom I hadn’t seen in ages, was now implying in his letter that he wasn’t sure he was ever coming back, it didn’t immediately make me conclude he was planning to move to Malaysia, although naturally the thought did occur to me. The conclusion I did arrive at was that the maintenance costs of the house would now have to be borne by us, which, as I’d just discovered walking around all the floors, had already occasioned the sale of a good number of pieces of furniture and paintings. Sitting there in front of the fire and seeing through the windows that the snow was continuing to fall, jeopardizing my return home, it occurred to me that we should have sold the house instead of letting our brother stay there, for he had evidently been leading a deplorable sort of existence there, notwithstanding the fact that he was the only one of us, after two of our sisters had married and the third was committed to a mental hospital, to say he wanted to live there. Yet we’d all been aware that at that point in his life he really had no other option but to live in this house, with which, since we were now legally unable to sell it without his accord, we were now saddled, with its twenty or so rooms and twice as many windows, its cracked walls, its unstable roof, and its grounds that now looked more like a pasture ringed with nettles. Our brother evidently couldn’t bear the idea of another winter here, even though he had once professed to have all sorts of projects in mind for it, all with backing from the local banks, as he’d assured us with suspect enthusiasm. One of our new brothers-in-law, a Swiss dealer in international steel, then carefully enquired what type of project our brother had in mind. He replied that he was thinking in particular about some sort of guest house, and also about combining two ground floor reception rooms for a lecture or banquet hall, and we’d all nodded enthusiastically, except for our brother-in-law, who gave one of his inscrutable Swiss smiles. In spite of the fact that we all knew perfectly well that anyone living there would end up broke in fairly short order, we pretended to believe our brother would be able to manage with his lecture and banquet hall and, after signing the place over to him as if we were doing him a favor, we left him to his own devices. And when the fire in the fireplace began to go out and, after turning the electricity back on, I turned on some lights (you haven’t even bothered to replace the burnt-out bulbs, have you), I began thinking that he must in fact have gone off to kill himself somewhere. So that, taking his letter out of my wallet and rereading it, I could suddenly find nothing in it but intimations of his imminent suicide, notwithstanding the postscript pretending to be concerned about that faucet for which he’d made me go on a three-hundred kilometer jaunt. Folding the letter up again, I suddenly realized how ridiculous it had been to embark on this trip, for the duration of which I’d been able to think of practically nothing but that faucet on the second floor which, if it were to freeze, and if our brother hadn’t drained the faucet properly, could have

caused the pipes to burst, as he’d explained in the letter. But I had found everything in good order, and now I was inclined to think that the story of the faucet had been nothing but a pretext on my brother’s part to make me come out and, once here, to understand the depression, both physical and mental, that must have been his in this setting. If he had written to me, and not his sisters or our brother Harald, it was because two of our sisters were now focused on their marriages, the third was forever out of the picture, and he knew not to expect anything from our eldest brother Harald, the corporate lawyer, who had never demonstrated anything but indifference to distress, and contempt for failure. That was the reason brother Odd had written to me, and not because we happen to be twins and I am therefore his closest kin; but it is because we’re twins that I drove those three hundred kilometers non-stop and in a blizzard, intent on that faucet. Having dawdled too long to start on the return journey, I now found myself snowed in, in an icy house I had not visited in years, and which, if I were to light the furnace, supposing there was even any fuel left in the tank, would take at least forty-eight hours to heat up to fifty-nine degrees, the warmest it ever got up to in winter. Some of the rooms still had old gas heaters, of course, but they were so ancient that all I’d be doing would be to see them explode. I nevertheless resolved to spend the night there, in front of the fireplace in the library. Heaping more wood on the fire, I went upstairs to my old bedroom where, even though my nose had been stuffed up for days, I felt myself inhaling dust; next I went into our brother’s bedroom, an indescribable shambles, blankets balled up on the bed, no sheets, curtains coming off the curtain rings, papers all over the floor, piles of clothes and muddy shoes heaped in a corner. He had apparently taken to sleeping in the next room, a sort of storage room lined with linen cupboards from which I retrieved a quilt, a damp pillow and a scratchy woolen relic of a dressing gown which may have been our father’s, and I carried the lot back down to the library. I slipped the dressing gown on over my coat and on top of that a throw from the sofa, and then I went to inspect the kitchen, which was impeccably clean and where I did find enough to eat, as long as I was content with soup from a carton and canned corn—I counted thirty or so cans of corn stored in a crate. There were dry biscuits too, and instant coffee, and I automatically turned to the sink, but there wasn’t any water of course, if I wanted water I’d first have to go and turn off every single tap in the house. In the scullery I did find some milk, as well as some bottles of Perrier left on top of a stack of firewood, with which I’d have to make do to brew my coffee, and, having gulped down some cold medicine, I was doing just that when our sister Adina rang and I hesitated whether or not to answer it. Either she’s received my note and is therefore aware of our brother’s disappearance, I told myself, gazing at my ringing phone, or else she hasn’t yet received it and what does she want now? Either way, I wasn’t in any mood to listen to Adina’s voice, even less so if she had received my letter, so I put

Véronique Bizot

A Future

Marie Darrieussecq

Clèves

the phone back in my pocket, where it went on ringing. As I left the kitchen with a second cup of fizzy coffee in my hand, I passed the four saddles hanging on the wall under the hall staircase, the four saddles that had once belonged to our three sisters and our mother, and that are all that remains of their daily horseback rides. For years our mother and our three sisters would saddle their horses every afternoon, rain or shine, and then you’d see the four of them riding off down the lane in single file, disappearing until nightfall. But after our mother’s death, our sisters never rode again and never wanted to hear another word about horses; and yet those saddles were mounted under the staircase in the hall, I don’t know by whom, hanging there like four expressionless, somber oval portraits. We three boys never once got on a horse, I have no idea why but that’s the way it was, our mother taught only her daughters to ride, a sport she had practiced since she was a young girl in Norway and at which she’d excelled, right up until the accident. The accident happened one winter in the foothills behind the house, in a fog, on a narrow rocky path, at the narrowest part our mother was thrown over the edge, maybe her horse slipped; our sisters could only report that suddenly all they could make out was the horse standing stock-still in the fog.

Publisher: P.O.L Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Vibeke Madsen madsen@pol-editeur.fr

Translation: Linda Coverdale linda.coverdale@gmail.com

Biography

Marie Darrieussecq was born in 1969 in the Basque country. A graduate of the École normale supérieure, she is a writer and psychoanalyst. In 1996 her first novel, Pig Tales, met with immediate worldwide success. Marie Darrieussecq is today a notable figure in the distinguished younger generation of French writers. Publications Among the most recent works published by P.O.L.: Rapport de police, 2010 (also published by Gallimard in its Folio collection, 2011); Le Musée de la mer, 2009; Précisions sur les vagues, 2008; Tom est mort, 2007 (Gallimard, Coll. Folio, 2009; Tom is Dead, Text Publishing, 2009); Zoo, 2006.

Growing up in provincial Clèves, not far from the ocean, ten-year-old Solange is struggling, caught between parents who leave her mostly on her own and “a school obsessed with sex” where the kids think and talk about nothing else, and in the crudest terms. When a girl “gets it” (her first period), “doing it” (making love) becomes her chief concern. She must choose the boy, or allow herself to be chosen. Strategy, tactics, seduction. The village becomes a royal court, a place of intrigues and shifting alliances. A few years later, no longer ten and not yet sixteen, Solange now thinks of nothing but “it”: sex. The boys prey on the girls, exacting submission through their brutality. But Solange

finds her own victim in Monsieur Bihotz, her kind and slightly simple neighbor with whom, in spite of his resistance, she will become a ruthless Lolita. Clèves tells the story of a young girl’s amorous and sexual awakening in the French countryside, some thirty years ago. The text is extremely unsettling in its radical realism and is well served by a rare literary inventiveness. Clèves describes a world of children going through changes off on their own, while the grownups see little and understand nothing. A beautiful novel, violent, funny, and cruel.

Getting It “Off you go then, to your village fair.” Ten o’clock on an evening in June. Her parents are having friends over. They’re drinking rosé. “Off you go then, to your village fair.” The guests whistle when she appears in her dress. Her mother kisses her and rubs her cheek to get the lipstick off. Her father gives her a ten-franc note. She skips along the road, a little leap at each step, a scuffing noise, chiff, chiff. Her dress swings against the back of her knees. Red dogs are embroidered all along the hem. It’s her favorite dress. She goes by Monsieur Bihotz’s house, glad that he’s not out on his front doorstep. * A ripple runs through the crowd and she hears: “Your father your father …” She looks up at the church clock tower. The hands are at an angle like the thumb and index finger of a pretend gun. A quarter to midnight. She’d been told to be home by eleven-thirty. Shit shit. From Nathalie’s open mouth, in moist red: “Your father!” She sees him. Stark naked. A red kerchief around his neck, his Air Inter pilot’s cap on his head. With his buddy Georges who’s naked too. They’re singing a song about a priest and a nun. “You must bless our dicks!” her father

shouts as he runs toward her. No, toward the parish priest, who’s standing behind her. Her father’s dick, a flopping white sausage, looks a lot different from Monsieur Bihotz’s. * School had been tough enough as it was. What with her being the only one not to go to catechism. Raphaël Bidegarraï, a year ahead of her, cups his hands around his fly and asks her to bless his dick. Nathalie’s mother has loaned her a book with all the prayers and she practices in her room. Gentle Jesus protect my parents and bring peace to their souls. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. “What does it mean,” she asks her mother, “to be ‘trespassed against’?” “It’s when you can’t express who you really are. For example, when I’m doing housework while your father’s off flying planes.” And deliver us from temptation. She recites twenty Our Fathers every evening. She folds the bedspread into perfectly equal sections. Neither her hands nor her feet may touch the edges of the mattress, and her head must be in the exact center of the pillow. Behind the church there’s a statue of the Virgin Mary, in a blue and white robe that’s like a tube, with her hands, her head, and her halo sticking out. Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Ten times. Hands; feet; head in the exact center of the pillow. On the nights when she sleeps over at Monsieur Bihotz’s house, the bedspread slumps onto the floor when he tucks her in. Monsieur Bihotz says that her father just wanted to have some fun, and that this can be a good quality in a person.

Marie Darrieussecq

Clèves

* All the children look like the ones in that film, Village of the Damned, in which aliens impregnate women during a night of mass amnesia. She saw this image on TV: the strikingly pale eyes of a pallid child. It lasts a second, that shock. That second when she saw herself. Those eyes staring at her, the too-white skin, that other child with washed-out eyes and who is herself, deathly pale, and who forces her to lock down her bed in various ways and conceal beneath the sheet everything that might stick out at the side. Except when she slips in beside Monsieur Bihotz, whose massive body protects her. Nathalie says you can tell the priest everything, and she even says you must, telling about the bad actions, the bad pictures in your head to get forgiven. But her father’s dick?

She’d like to know whether what’s inside her is good or bad. To know what there is inside. Inside of a nutshell. What you can see in there. * The whole school is obsessed with sex. Raphaël Bidegarraï asks her if she knows what a slut is. He explains, patiently, with a kind of randy pity. She’s not too sure about “kiss.” “Ah, we’re gonna kiss ‘em all up,” her father says. “Give me a kiss,” says Monsieur Bihotz. “I wonder how she looks when she comes,” says Georges, talking about a stewardess, and Solange understands that those are the words that come most alarmingly close to what a “slut” is. She understands the word, she understands it through and through, forever. A before and an after for the understanding of the word “slut.” Inside a little girl, there’s a slut. Raphaël Bidegarraï, the tallest since forever, lines the girls up and has the boys face them. The girls lift their skirts, and the boys touch their panties. Solange is glad she’s not the one on the day he strips Peggy Salami, whose name already counts against her, and everyone sees the little cleft between the legs, drawn with a compass, tracing two hemispheres from below the belly to the lower back, two parts perfectly joined but slightly apart, neatly dividing in two the body and the schoolchildren and the village and the world, and they’re quite sensible parts, anatomically speaking, compared to what her father and Monsieur Bihotz and presumably all men have. Her mother is made the same way. The front is hidden by hair, but behind there are the buttocks. Her mother spends summer Sundays sunbathing nude on the terrace, lying first on one side then the other to avoid tan lines, and bemoaning the fact that the sea’s so far away. What’s harder to imagine is how Madame Bihotz was. Madame Bihotz: a sort of pyramid in a loose nylon house dress. So fat that the cleft, if there was one, must have been all filled in. Monsieur Bihotz used to undress his mother in the evening and put her to bed. She wore, under her dress, a gigantic slip. Under her arms she had what looked like extra breasts. Madame Bihotz, scrubbed clean but scratchy of chin, would tell Solange stories whenever she climbed up onto her very high bed: Tom Thumb, or Little Red Riding Hood, in their scary older versions. On Sunday mornings Monsieur Bihotz took his mother to mass in her wheelchair. He rolled her from the house into town. That took half an hour, because the slope was steep. Coming home things went a lot faster, he had to hold the chair back. From the terrace, her father would announce that the show had begun: Mother Bihotz and Son wrestling with gravity. *

On Sunday mornings her father sometimes took her for a drive. He let her sit in the front seat of their sporty little Alpine. They’d have fun backfiring their way up hills and barreling straight down, streaking through the underpass beneath the grain silos, va-va-va-voom! Then they’d head back down toward the river and the lower part of town, and they’d stop to get pastries. At that point, they had two options: the sea, an hour’s drive, or the boating center, five minutes away. They’d park in front of the boating center and eat their pastries. Her father would tell her about emergency landings and cumulonimbus clouds that seemed to suck everything up and the day that dumb stewardess forgot to disarm the evacuation slides. He’d say that in Clèves we don’t have the sea but we’ve got a nice lake. He’d have a smoke with Georges at the Yacht Club. On the wall there was a calendar with naked women. At other times, they’d park in some housing development. Her father would leave her the pastries and the radio and come back later. She’d look out at the flat expanse of water. Gusts of wind would rock the car. She’d crack open the window. Gray wind skimmed over the surface of the water. It blew invisibly on her cheeks. She’d sit behind the steering wheel. She’d change gears standing on the pedals, then sit down again. The road flew by, crossed by stags, past watchful hares. Or she was aboard a plane and flicked the little switches overhead. The engines roared; she tilted the wheel, gaining speed, and the ground lost its grip when she suddenly lifted off, as the lake dwindled away into a crumb of blue.

Marie Darrieussecq

Clèves

* What’s amazing, except for one particular house, is how everything changes. How big a stretch must it be, say, from a Mongolian yurt to an American skyscraper, if her parents’ house is so different from the Bihotz place, or where Rose lives? Her mother brought a stool shaped like a Coca-Cola can home from the store for her. And for her birthday, curtains with the Statue of Liberty on them. And Monsieur Bihotz gave her a poster she just loves: a soldier, falling, with the word WHY? Her mother finds it inappropriate for someone her age. Rose’s bedroom is very different. An impression of light, something delicate. Even the walls, even the shape of the room, they’re different. We’d need some other word, especially if we consider Monsieur Bihotz’s bedroom, with its stacks of the daily paper Sud-Ouest, stained coffee cups, and that poster of a 60s singer, France Gall, in a sweet-young-thing pose. Her father says that Rose’s house smells like roses. The Bihotz house smells like dogs and soup, or at least it smelled like soup when Madame Bihotz was

Virginie Deloffre

Léna

still alive. In her bedroom there’s a smell of something unmoving. Maybe the dust. Up close, the dust looks like wooly lint, a thin coat of ashes. At the store her mother is always running a dust rag over everything, because of the traffic. There’s more and more dust these days, her mother claims. Her parents’ bedroom is brown. The curtains have orange flowers. Two matching lamps on two night tables covered in velvet. When her mother is there, she’s always lying down. On her mother’s side, there’s a photo, of a little boy. She puts one hand over her eyes and imagines removing one item at a time: the bed, a lamp, the photo, and everything is transformed, it’s no longer the same bedroom, for the tiniest difference changes everything. And when her father is there, it all changes again.

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Translation: Ursula Meany Scott ursulameanyscott@gmail.com

She’s stretched out on an old-fashioned classroom desk, with the hole for the inkwell. Raphaël Bidegarraï, Christian Goyenetche, Nathalie, Rose, Delphine Peyreborde, the two Villebarrouins, all the Boursenaves, even the little Lavinasses, everybody’s there. Superimposed faces, pairs of eyes like pinheads, and each of them sticks thumbtacks into her body. Red ones, like those the teacher uses to pin up the map of the world. Carefully, one by one, taking turns. Beneath her hand the pressure grows, the hard, hot spot that has become the whole point, from pin prick to pin prick, the entire class, surrounding her. She isn’t tied down but cannot possibly move, can no more run away than could a schoolchild sent to the corner for punishment. She endures the thrusts one by one, slow, deep; her hand rubs the central spot, legs spread as far apart as possible, pleasure she can hardly bear any longer, and when the teacher—a moment for which no word exists—sticks in the last one … she can fall asleep, between the barely rumpled sheets of her little girl’s bed.

Biography

Virginie Deloffre is a doctor based in Paris. Since childhood she has been fascinated by Russia, the Far North and ice. Léna is her first novel.

Léna is waiting for her husband, Vassia, a pilot in the Soviet airforce, to come home. From her communal apartment she writes to the couple who raised her in the Great Siberian North: Varvara, the peasant who still considers herself a communist, and Mitia, the geologist who was exiled there and ended up staying. Before leaving for Star City, where he was selected to train as a cosmonaut, Vassia gave Léna a full account of the 1950s Space Race. Now it is 1987 and the end of the Soviet Union is near. Both space and the infinite expanse

of Siberia, where Léna is from, have yet to be conquered. In this surprising and engaging first novel, we find the Russian soul familiar from Tolstoy. Here are the dramas and turmoil of the Russian people alongside their dreams—such as the conquest of space—which enable these men and women to accept the harshest reality. From glacial steppes to hero-worship, from the collapse of a regime to the mysterious fate of the souls who endure it, there is subtle alchemy and singular charm.

Arkadovnia, November 24, 1987 My dearest Mitia, And you my darling Varia, Is happiness like bread dough that rises only to soon go stale? Here I am, deserted. Once more Vassili has left for the Base. My poor dears, how weary you must be of reading the same words after all this time. My life is so clear-cut. I can simply say this: Vassili comes, then leaves again for the Base. As for me, I’m always here. Every day I work at the Industrial Complex, wearing my blue apron, my hands on my knees. It seems that even as a young girl I was by nature immobile. Of course I think about Vassili constantly, but I’m not really aware of it. In the evenings, on the way home, I stand and queue in the shops. It suits me. Waiting comes naturally to me since I’m forever waiting for him. The shelves have become ever more barren over the past few months. You have to stand in line for everything, I’m spoiled for choice! I take my place in turn at the end of the colourful ribbon that snakes down the grey street. I stand, take one or two steps forward with the crowd, then stand some more. I’m at home in the middle of all those people, with our interminable patience. I feel good there. In the queue I hear the hum of conversations amongst old women. Some voices are high-pitched, others deep; I wrap myself in their words as though they were

a long resonant shawl stretching to the curb. There’s one old lady who is always there, plump with her head bent forward. She’d make you think of a teapot with its lid askew. She never fails to ask me for word of Vassia, who she calls “our officer,” as if she shared him with me, almost as a charitable concession. He never has been in the habit of sending news but I always manage to find something to say. The fact is I need her because she’ll queue up for me when he’s home. She’ll bring us treasures she’s managed to find. Of course she’ll make the most of it, settling in to ferret about at her leisure, sitting there with her lopsided lid, commenting on everything and chiding me for the dirty linen. If she wasn’t so large she might be malicious, but her round figure comes with a polished character. When I see her waddling up to our place, sack over her arm, it’s a sign, like a returning swallow, that Vassia is back. And the time she saves me is precious. Because if Vassili comes, I no longer want to go to the shops. I want to get home quickly from the Industrial Complex, to be close to him during every minute the Base allows. I want to penetrate his presence completely and devote myself to him without anything to pull me away. It’s as if I had two lives, two rhythms: when Vassili comes; and when he leaves again for the Base. But I never know—he doesn’t tell me he’s coming. His return is almost always the same. Suddenly he’s there. The waiting is over as abruptly as it started. My lives switch. Not that he wants to hide anything from me. On the contrary, when he arrives he’s still animated by his life back there and speaks with hurried excitement about it for the first few days; then his stories peter out. But army headquarters doesn’t want the information disclosed. Naturally the plans for manoeuvres remain secret, as do the periods of leave that follow. I suppose we all live in a similar manner, wives of Soviet pilots, in the shadow of the flight plan. I have become used to it. I’d even go so far as to say I prefer it this way. It seems to me that otherwise Vassili’s absence would be less pure, tainted by knowing the exact moment he would return. When he pulls the door to and rounds the street corner, he disappears into a world unknown to me. Time grinds to a halt, and I settle into his absence. The walk is easy and long yet climb high as I might, I can’t see the end. That endlessness protects me. A line of mountains on the horizon that proclaims the limit to the steppe—I mustn’t think of it. I must suppress the imagined instant of Vassia’s return, abolish the bright hopes that tear my heart, so as to meditate in private, time suspended, upon the never-ending hiatus. I also carefully banish the images. His planes with their instrument panels, all those things he speaks to me about constantly—I have no idea what they’re about. I don’t know how you get up inside them, how many steps there are, the colour of the seats, or how he sits in them—hunched over slightly like on a kitchen chair, or sunk comfortably as could be as in the armchair at Vania’s?

Virginie Deloffre

Léna

I can’t picture him. But in this empty and boundless expanse of his being gone, we are together. These are the images separating us. I’m frightened of news, especially the details—sharp blades you mustn’t get close to. Someone need only say a single sentence to me, something like: ‘The squadron will take off from X military airfield at 13.40 hours,’ and I can no longer sidestep reality, the metal wings, flashing dials, a confused jumble of visions that terrify me. Some little overzealous so-and-so from his regiment, for instance, hurries over to my place to tell me he left the Base before Vassili and knows when he’s coming back. Delighted with himself, he bombards me with dates and times, disturbing the atmosphere and causing me to falter in my course. In the nicest possible way I push the nuisance aside, but it takes me a long while to recover my composure. I know what you’re thinking, Mitia, and can picture you frowning. I’ve turned Vassili’s absence into a personal chronicle, an internal legend that ought not be pierced by reality. I’ve shut myself away inside it, within high walls. Isn’t that so? And I assiduously apply myself to becoming blind and deaf. Vassia would add: narrow-minded. He admires the fact that in the five years we’ve been married, I’ve remained totally ignorant of the job that is his life, his passion, and takes up most of his time and conversation. My comprehension, and all my senses in fact, seem capable of consciously closing themselves off to it despite the fact he is constantly exposing me to it; he marvels at this tour de force. According to him, I have elevated selective stupidity to a life principle, almost a philosophical system. He also says that my ignorance is like a fur-lined coat, in which I curl up cosily to hibernate in total serenity for the duration of his absence … and that puts me at the mercy of the tiniest moth! I love it when he makes fun of me—it’s good medicine. He is right. Ignorance is my foundation, the ground on which I walk. It is good solid ground, hardened by the frozen passage of time spent waiting, and offers a sure and reliable footing. But ignorance must be impenetrable. Descriptions and knowledge threaten to trip me up at every footfall, like the danger of unseen crevasses beneath piles of snow, hidden abysses, and yawning caverns. Of course I know his job is dangerous, I know how many pilots die on exercises or test flights. That knowledge should remain walled-off from our existence. The wall is not a problem, it was I who built it. And I am grateful to the ever-helpful Soviet army, with its obsessive mania for secrets and sealing every leak. Real life reaches me through a crack at times, though thankfully those moments are few and far between. Do you remember last year, when I wrote from Moscow? His regiment was designated to take part in the anniversary of the Revolution. He had to fly a Sukhoi in an aerial display. He was so proud, and I was so disconcerted. Military headquarters invited me and put me up in

an apartment I found too vast and luxurious. It was the first time I had been to Moscow. The city unnerved me—too much rushing, too chaotic. I really saw myself for what I am, and what a bad choice he made—a child from the Siberian north, comfortable in silence and the frozen tundra, terrorized by cities and the exact opposite of a suitable companion for a Soviet airforce pilot. I’ve always felt I don’t measure up to Vassia. But honestly, when he’s flying three miles high, how on earth can I? The worst part was the programme with timetables in the newspapers. The whole country knew where he was, what he was doing that day. And so did I, who never knows anything. His squadron was announced; I looked up like everyone else. Vassili had been gone two long months during which I hadn’t seen him, or heard anything from him. Yet I sat there thinking: there he is, passing over me, the third one on the right … now I know exactly where he is and what he’s doing, and his absence is tainted. I watched the small speck of Vassili in the sky, then looked around me. There was the zooming of engines, the smell of aviation fuel, happy cries from the crowd. And there I was in the middle, besieged by unfamiliar sensations hostile to me, which form no part of my world. Everything was wrong. I’m familiar with Vassia’s absence and it’s not like that. It doesn’t make noise or have a smell. It doesn’t take me by the hand, drag me to the window. In our courtyard grows an elm tree, its large leafy arms stretching to the windows. Trees! Of course I had seen pictures in school books, but the sound they make when the wind shakes them, and their smell—how can you understand this in arctic Siberia? The first time I saw them was with you, Mitia. You had brought me down South where they grow. At first they appeared shyly at the borders of the taiga, then in clusters, ever more prominent, then a huge verdant kingdom. My wonder abides. I’ve become like Tsvetaeva who could write anywhere: all she needed was a table, a window—and a tree. That’s where I live, at that window … reading or sewing when he is there and I hear his voice beside me. And when he’s gone? I sit doing nothing as often as not, my hands in my lap. Then Maria brings me some sewing that’s overdue, or vegetables to peel, to keep me busy, thinking she’s making me happy. But no, I prefer doing nothing. Vassia’s absence draws me to the window, sits me down gently. Comfortable and soft to the touch, it spins invisible fleece and I forget myself within it. His absence smoulders inside me slowly over the weeks it lasts, along the length of the waiting lines, and in the evenings on the way home. It keeps me company, like the lamplight in the house when I used to come home from school, small and flickering. And both of you, there beneath it. For you two, on the contrary, I see you all the time. Right at this moment, Uncle Mitia, under the battered yellow lamp. In your hand my letter, yet another. Varvara by your side is poking at the stove—what does Lénotchka

Virginie Deloffre

Léna

Patrick Deville

Kampuchea

have to tell us? And you already know what I’m going to say. After all these years I’ve been writing to you punctually, every time Vassili arrives and every time he leaves. I see the drawer in the table with my letters inside. These are the traces, the debris, of all his departures and returns, what’s left of them, pebbles I’ve dropped along the path. All of me is in that drawer, under your gaze and guard. With all my love. Please know how much I love you both.

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil Date of Publication: October 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Charlotte Mandell cmandell@earthlink.net

Léna

Biography

Patrick Deville, born in 1957, travels widely and feels at home in many cultures. He directs the Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et Traducteurs [Foreign Writers and Translators House] (meet) in Saint-Nazaire as well as the journal of the same name. His work has been translated into ten languages. Publications With Éditions du Seuil’s “Fiction & Cie” collection, most recently: Équatoria, 2009; La Tentation des armes à feu, 2006; Puravida: Vie & mort de William Walker, 2004 (reprinted by Points in 2009).

The explorer Henri Mouhot was chasing a butterfly, net in hand, when he bumped his head, looked up, and discovered the temples of Angkor. That is Year Zero of this story, which takes place along the Mekong River and the countries it bounds or crosses, in a journey that unfolds between the trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and the revolt of the Red Shirts in Thailand. France, as a colonial power that has left many traces, is very present here. In Paris, some young Cambodians, in the middle of the 20th century, were doing brilliantly at university: they were the “brothers” who would later find themselves at the head

of the unimaginable revolutionary Khmer Rouge movement; they took power on April 17, 1975, founded “Democratic Kampuchea,” and soon organized the methodical extermination of anyone who resisted their egalitarian system. Their ideology, established in pure madness, remains an enigma to this day, and the author explores the memory of this recent tragedy amid the often enchanting landscape of the Far East. Intermingling in short chapters the figures of accomplished scholars, dictators, and bloodthirsty cadres, the narrator, in this novel, awakens the layers of history in his wanderings along the Mekong.

At the Pilot’s Bungalow Away from the village, I set my bags down in the Viking’s bungalow-on-stilts. Half-tame monkeys sit on the grass eating the fruit he has just tossed out for them. On a table a copy of yesterday’s Bangkok Post. Seated at his desk, the Viking coughs in front of his computer. He is wearing a flowered sarong; his colossal torso is bare and wrinkled, the flabby muscles sunburnt, his hair long and sun-bleached—a sort of very old hippie. He has finally agreed to draw up lists of places, names and telephone numbers. A long ivory pipe sits on its stand. He has the body that the adventurer Perken would have had if Malraux had let him live longer. Had let him become King of Sedang, like Mayréna. From the balcony, we can see dark columns of rain on the horizon over the Burmese mountains. The Three-Pagoda Pass, at the very end of the railroad lines built by the Japanese to attack British India. Old images of one corpse per railroad tie, says the pilot. The emerald jungle swallows up into its spongy mass black locomotives, grounded hulks, phantom barracks whose gaping walls shudder in the typhoon winds. Coolies dead of fever in the marshes of the Siam-Cambodia railway. In the Democratic Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge, the deportation of the New People. The exhausted slaves fallen along the Pursat line. And on the great walls of Angkor, battles, caparisoned elephants, and the conquered are all engraved in procession, lacking only the planes, battleships, train tracks, the black locomotives.

When I left the train station, I went down to the water’s edge. On the river, yellow butterflies fluttering. Water buffalo drinking. Red bougainvillea flaming. Dragonflies quivering. Although this region belongs to Indochina, these are still stories from India and Kipling. At every kilometer, under the railway cars you could still hear verses to the Queen belted out. Beneath whose awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine … As if God had granted them the palm and the pine. In Bangkok, the Red Shirts are hurling flaming buses against the armored tanks. They have set up their camp around the Victory Monument, built to commemorate victory over the French. The Prime Minister’s car has just been machine-gunned, a state of emergency declared. In this village too, insurgents, standing in the back of rain-swept pickups, shout their slogans into megaphones and wave flags, set off flares. The old pilot shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t believe in their victory for a second. At night we settle into bamboo chairs next to a carafe of rice alcohol. He has offered me his hospitality, but seems regretful, coughing and grumbling; he reproaches me for not having come sooner. Now it’s too late. He would rather have met me when he was flying blind in his prop planes. He fills our glasses and clears his throat. The monkeys squabble in the night. He has softened a little from one night to the next, when he realized that the old flying legends interest me. Navigating by eye in the monsoon rains even when you could see nothing two meters away and with no radar. His eyes fixed on the compass and speedometer needles and the watch on his wrist, to guess when he should take the plunge and break through the cloud ceiling, to see the bushy heads of the sugar palms and the checkerboards of the rice paddies, to look for the right landmarks, a bridge, a lake, to tilt his wing ‘till he could find the runway and line up with it. The oldest men he knew were veterans from Africa but also demobilized soldiers from the expeditionary corps, who had stayed where they were with their Vietnamese wives and their kids, unfit to return to Europe. Until the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, twenty or so companies, each with one or two planes, shared the skies of Cambodia. They secretly belonged to the generals of Lon Nol, who were delighted that the guerillas were cutting off the roads. They hijacked the Americans’ fuel so they could supply the besieged capital with everything from durian fruit to pigs—the pilots created the brotherhood of the pig pilots. The Viking landed in Vientiane where they gave him a Beechcraft-18 to reach a runway in northern Laos near the Golden Triangle. There he loaded a shipment for some Chinese that he would dump in the sea off of Hong Kong later in the day. Vientiane was gold, opium, information. On one side the Marxist-Leninist Pathet Lao and on the other the Vang Pao and the Green Berets. The powers that lost in the poker game.

Patrick Deville

Kampuchea

Then the Americans delivered the first dc-3’s, he said, shrugging his shoulders. All runways were classified as Dakotable or non-Dakotable. He paused for a brief coughing fit, filled his glass. The generator is cut off. We speak in darkness, our faces lit up from time to time by the flame of a lighter or the red glow of cigarettes. Laos was crossed by the invisible Ho Chi Minh trail, and the b-52s came and shelled at random. The pig pilots who took off from Wat Tai smoked big marijuana joints in the cockpit to relax. Every one of its bombs, said the pilot, every one of its clouds of defoliant, of Agent Orange, dropped on the villages, brought fresh troops to the guerrillas of Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge. Go look at the craters, he said. In the Plain of Jars. It looks like the moon. Huge shell-holes never filled in, no vegetation, nothing, half the bombs still in the mud, ready to explode. Go look at the craters. He finishes his drink, gets up all of a sudden, then disappears beneath his mosquito net, where he continues to cough. I take down the names of the planes, pour myself another drink, resume my reading of the April 4, 2009 copy of the Bangkok Post, The Newspaper You Can Trust, which has been lying on the table for several days. I skim over the news at the controls of my twin-engine, cigarette in my mouth and bare feet on the pedals, the bottle between my thighs. The planet is passing by below the cockpit and I try to pick out the progress of Reason in history beneath my landing gear. The armies of Thailand and Cambodia have just exchanged fire near the temple of Preah Vihear, causing the deaths of many soldiers on both sides. On this border that has been contested since the Franco-Siamese war of the ’40s. Under the headline, “Khmer Rouge Leader Seeks Freedom To Go Gardening,” Khieu Samphan, former leader of the State of Democratic Kampuchea, soon to be an octogenarian, represented by his French lawyer Jacques Vergès, asks to be set free so he can devote himself to gardening. The shadow of my wings glides over the Pacific Ocean. In Ciudad Juárez, in northern Mexico, the cartel leader Vicente Leyva is arrested while jogging. In Lima, the trial of former president Fujimori is following its course. The shadow of my wings now glides over the Atlantic Ocean. In Arusha, the trial of the Rwandans is following its course. In The Hague, the trial of the Croatian generals Gotovina and Markacis is following its course. Flyover complete, I return to base.

A Revolution Underway in Bangkok The city is calm. Leaden clouds roll through a sky already streaked with saffron. The Red Shirts, tired from waiting for the attack, are sleeping in their entrenched camp. Stray dogs. Camp stoves fitted with gas canisters. Stands where meats will hang in the smoke of fryers and the racket of revolutionary radios. It’s dawn over Chao Phraya and the ferryboat passengers are smoking in the rain, leaning on the rail. Lord Jim worked here for a while at Yucker Brothers. Suppliers and traders in teak wood. There have already been battles on this river, the rumble of cannons, the smell of gunpowder. The ferries pass convoys of barges hitched to tugboats. Market vendors go to set up their stalls in front of temples of the recumbent or standing Buddha. All those tons of pure gold from obscurantism, we’ll melt it down, comrades, as soon as we seize power. To turn all the toothless people in the world into golden-mouths. So they can hold a knife between their teeth.

Patrick Deville

Kampuchea

I buy the weekly Cambodge Soir at the airport. I’m waiting for a flight to Phnom Penh where the first Khmer Rouge trial, the trial of Duch, has just begun. Where the survivors can make eye contact with evil behind bulletproof glass. In the first session, after the prosecutor asked him if he wanted to make a preliminary declaration, this man accused of having sent to their deaths some twelve thousand people stood up, a frail silhouette behind the varnished wood bar, his hair grey, broad forehead, ears sticking out, small sharp eyes inside deep sockets. This skinny man, who thinks he has assumed the heavy task of having tortured and then killed over twelve thousand of his compatriots, cleared his throat, drank a little water, then, to the confusion of the simultaneous interpreters to Khmer and English, who had not anticipated translating alexandrine verses, recited the end of Alfred de Vigny’s “The Death of the Wolf ”: Gémir, pleurer, prier est également lâche Fais énergiquement ta longue et lourde tâche Dans la voie où le sort a voulu t’appeler Puis, après, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler.

I’ve got to stop reading the papers. […]

[Moaning, weeping, praying—all are equally cowardly Energetically carry out your long, heavy task On the path to which fate summoned you Then, afterwards, like me, suffer and die without speaking.]

Brigitte Giraud

Not to Worry

When his wife is forced to return to her job, the narrator of Not to Worry must take a leave from his own job as a printer, saying goodbye to his dear colleague Manu, in order to stay home and care for his sick son. In the face of devastating illness, the small family loses its bearings as “normal” life, seemingly unreal and out of reach, leaves them behind. When the father’s leave is almost up, his colleagues from the printing press donate some of their own vacation days to allow him more

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr

Translation: Jonathan Kaplansky jkaplansky@videotron.ca

Biography

Brigitte Giraud was born in Algeria in 1960. She has written five novels and also directs the “La forêt” collection at Stock. Publications Her most recent novels, published by Stock, include: Une année étrangère, 2009 (Jean Giono Prize 2009) (paperback edition, J’ai Lu, 2011); L’amour est très surestimé, 2007 (Goncourt Prize for short stories, 2007) (paperback edition, J’ai Lu, 2008); J’apprends, 2005 (paperback edition, lgf, “Le Livre de Poche” collection, 2007).

time with his son Mehdi. This unconventional show of solidarity is utterly unexpected, encouraging reflection about our responsibility to those among us. But the generous gift brings complications, and is ultimately a trap. The narrative explores what it is to devote one’s life to someone else, as well as the notions of gifts and debts, submission and domination, while also examining the nature of parenting today, and especially, what it means to be a father.

Mehdi fell ill just as we were moving into the new house. It was I who opened the mailbox that day; it was a Saturday morning. I held in my hands the small white envelope containing the test results we were unable to interpret and that would change our lives. I walked along a wooden plank because there was still no walkway in the garden and the earth was muddy. I moved forward, trying to keep my balance. It had rained day and night for close to a week; the river at the rear of our property was threatening to breach its banks, and I hadn’t been able to fix up the area around the house as planned. The builder had delivered it to us uncompleted, and, to save money, we’d decided to finish it ourselves. I recognize today that we’d been optimistic. We were still normal then. We couldn’t imagine then that Mehdi would become our main concern and that the land would never have a fence, or a tree planted in the ground. We didn’t realize you need an unshakeable faith to sand, hammer nails, paint, climb a ladder or push a wheelbarrow. Our only initiative had been to plant grass seed one sunny afternoon when everyone had deserted the subdivision. It was a day in the middle of the week, one of those terrifyingly calm moments. I had asked Mehdi: Would you like to plant the lawn? Mehdi had looked at me, not really knowing what to think. We went to get the bags I had been stocking in the garage; we read the directions, and even though I realized that I really needed first to turn, dig and level the earth in preparation, I claimed we could just sow it like that, doing it our way. I simply pulled out the bulk of the weeds and gave the ground a quick rake; I wanted to occupy Mehdi and finally take advantage

of being outdoors, justifying the fact that we now lived in a house. I wanted the little plot of land to give us something: grass would be a good start. I smiled seeing Medhi’s feet in his too-big garden shoes. He advanced step by step, concentrating intently. I knew he would tire quickly. But the sun was good for him and he seemed happy, applying himself to the work. Mehdi was a conscientious child, a bit too serious. We had read on the package it took thirty grams of seed per square meter; and Mehdi insisted on following this to the letter. He prepared his piles in advance, using the food scale my wife had just bought, and his rigid zealousness irritated me. I told myself that at his age it wasn’t natural to follow directions so exactly. But it also wasn’t natural to not go to school, to live so closely with his father while not knowing if he’d live long enough to see the fruit of his labor. I imagined that a thick bright green lawn would soon grow and hoped that one day Mehdi would play soccer on it. We had dreamed of this garden from our apartment in the suburbs, with trees, tomatoes and chaises longues on which to doze in the shade after work. We thought life would open up for us when we became the owners of those four hundred square meters. Mehdi walked in a straight line, steadily scattering the seeds. I would have liked my wife to see that—Mehdi standing on his legs, making a great effort and blinking because of the sun. But it is not true that Mehdi and I were that close. We spent most of our days together because I had obtained an extended sick leave from my doctor to care for him, after my wife and I had strained the goodwill of our bosses. At first my wife took more time off from work than I, but since she had just started at the company, she soon reached the limit. The psychological limit, I mean. No one dared suggest to her (obviously) that her sick child was getting in the way at work. The concerns did not come from management. In fact, the boss had met with her one day after work, even offered her a coffee she hadn’t dared refuse (she’d nearly said that coffee after 5:00 p.m. kept her from sleeping, but immediately stopped herself). The boss had invited her to sit down in his enormous office, he in his big chair, she in a more modest one. He’d inquired about Mehdi’s health, the name of the illness, what the treatment involved, and asked about the number of her potential absences, to which my wife replied with a series of lies, minimizing the situation. Yes, my wife had lied, probably because she was lying to herself and because no one, not even the doctors, could predict how the illness would develop. She surprised herself by imagining, in front of her boss, a happy outcome; she censored herself, spoke the words he expected her to say, after which the boss congratulated her on her fighting spirit and, nodding his head in a friendly way, concluded that whatever happened, she could count on his understanding, a sentence she did not know how to interpret, but one he uttered with an open smile. Then, rising from his chair, he wished her courage, which worked, because coming home that night

my wife felt stronger than usual. Strong because she felt supported—and not just by anyone; she was a woman whose boss understood her. She was merely annoyed that she’d left her empty plastic coffee cup on the desk; she’d forgotten to put it in the garbage on her way out and wanted to kick herself. The concerns came from we don’t know where. Since it wasn’t the boss, it must have been the others: colleagues, managers. The fact that my wife had spoken personally with the boss incited jealousy, no doubt. Some comments had been made one morning in front of the coffee machine, though she wasn’t directly informed of them (that would take a few days). One of the managerial assistants remarked that if you had to have a sick child to get a meeting with the boss she’d have given her kids chicken pox; another woman pointed out that no one met with her when her son broke his leg, a double standard, even though the injury was serious, an open fracture requiring metal pins. Everyone felt wronged, and my wife soon became suspect, even though at first she had hidden Mehdi’s illness (I should mention that we weren’t sure in the beginning what it was). No one had given a name to his dizzy spells, his sudden drops in blood pressure. The family doctor had merely raised his eyebrows the first time he explained the results of the famous blood tests; he barely looked at us over the top of his glasses when he uttered the word platelets. And of course my wife and I stared at each other, hoping that platelets referred to something not serious, without actually daring to ask the question. We were wary of receiving an explanation for the incongruous appearance of these platelets, or rather their bizarre proliferation, trusting the doctor, imagining that a doctor always knows how to protect his patients, immunizing them against all evil. And during this first consultation Palabaud had remained noncommittal. He twisted his mouth a bit, wiped his eyes (or his glasses, I can’t remember) as if feeling a pang of sadness, looking at both sides of the typewritten sheet, turning it over and over as if he didn’t like what it concluded. He had uttered one sentence at most, saying something like: “this isn’t something we like to see,” including himself in this unexpected we, leading us to think that an aspect of Mehdi’s tests personally annoyed him, indicating that Mehdi’s health was becoming a collective matter, to be considered by many, all of us present here. The doctor seemed overwhelmed, or perhaps just worried; he had just understood something he couldn’t share with us there and then, and especially not in detail, because the waiting room was full. He had asked Mehdi to undress, and seeing how attentively he had examined the different areas of his body, how extremely patient he was when he talked to him, his smiling, being overly considerate, my wife and I knew that Mehdi was no longer an ordinary child. I felt a vice tightening in my chest and saw my wife slump in her chair. Before ushering us out, Palabaud wrote a letter for a colleague in a hospital in the city and asked us to make an appointment right away. Not to worry, he added in the doorway, but we have

Brigitte Giraud

Not to Worry

Hubert Haddad

Opium Poppy

to keep an eye on him. I have some concerns and I’d like him to see a specialist. So it began rather gently, without the violence of words, a very discreet examination, and on our way home the doctor’s last sentence kept going round in my head. The more I ruminated over that not to worry, the more choked with emotion I became. Not to worry was not compatible with right away—the doctor was contradicting himself. Yet I managed to reassure myself. No, nothing was more natural, he just wanted a specialist to take over; his seriousness was comforting. It was a way of thinking ahead. Contrary to what one might assume, my wife and I spoke little that evening. As soon as we pulled into the driveway (the garage was still crammed with moving boxes), she rushed into the kitchen to make dinner, sticking her head in the fridge, in the cupboards, almost literally disappearing, absorbing herself in making the salad dressing, running the water full blast while washing the lettuce, clinking bottles when picking up the bottle of oil, letting the jar of mustard fall from the shelf above. Then, not sitting down for a minute, pacing in front of the sink, she called Lisa to set the table, Lisa who didn’t know what was happening, had no idea the doctor had urged us not to worry, which meant we would lie awake at night, perhaps every night for the rest of our lives.

Publisher: Zulma Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Amélie Louat amelie.louat@zulma.fr

Translation: Tegan Raleigh teganraleigh@gmail.com

Biography

Born in Tunis, Tunisia in 1947, Hubert Haddad is a poet, novelist, art historian, playwright and essayist, with a vast range of works characterized by a marked sense of innovation and diversity. Publications Some of his most recent novels published by Zulma include: Géométrie d’un rêve (Geometry of a Dream), 2009; L’Univers (The Universe); 2009, Palestine, 2007 (republished by Livre de Poche, 2009) (Prize of the Five Continents of Francophonie, 2008, Prix Renaudot paperback 2008); andUn rêve de glace (Dreams of Ice), 2006.

Opium Poppy is the story of an Afghani boy named Alam, a child soldier who has become a stranger to the playfulness and joys of childhood. The victim of the brutality of adults, he travels the world in search of freedom. “He was constantly being asked his name. The first time, people had started to rattle off all first names starting with A and for some reason they stopped at Alam. To make them happy, he repeated the two syllables. […] That was at the very beginning […]. He’d just been caught

just as he’d gotten off the train, there on the platform.” The portrait of an Afghani boy from the countryside emerges: a child caught between war and the opium trade, between his desire to learn and intimidation on all fronts, between his admiration for a hotheaded brother and his desperate love for a beautiful girl. With breathtaking suspense and drama, this surprising novel depicts the senseless tragedy of child soldiers.

He was constantly being asked his name. The first time, people had started to rattle off all first names starting with A and for some reason stopped at Alam, maybe because of his look of alarm. Had they started at Z and made it to Tahmid, perhaps that would sound right to them because of a certain timidity in his expression. To make them happy, he repeated the two syllables. Alam. That was at the very beginning. He’d just been caught just as he’d gotten off the train, there on the platform. The woman across from him had brittle blond hair and a porcelain smile. She was fiddling with her pen over a bluish-gray form filled with empty checkboxes. “Your first name is Alam, correct?” When he’d sleep alongside cats on the rooftops, his first name was meow. When he was in the trainyards, among the dogs he pacified with stolen sugar, it was woof. It could even be the call of the tawny owl in the forests at night. Why didn’t she tell him her own name? Everyone just wanted him to move his head back and forth acquiescently, like an overburdened donkey. Alam was the name of his brother back home in the mountains. The blonde woman stood up and pointed to an iron bench. “Now get undressed.” Uncomprehending, he moved away from the bench. “Go on, take everything off!” She grabbed him by the collar. He turned away from her with an obstinate pout, drawing in his elbows to keep her from snatching his anorak. What good was it to give it to him in the first place if they were going to take it back? Everything he owned was in those pockets. At least they could give him his old jacket back.

Behind him the woman gave a dismayed laugh. “Come on. I’m going to examine you.” That did little to reassure him, but he let his arms fall to his sides. “Are you a doktoor?” he asked, turning around. By way of confirmation, she took the stethoscope out of a sliding drawer and put it on. Her earrings clanged against the aluminum. The child went pale and he complied without too much resistance, as if the instrument of auscultation were a weapon. Completely naked, his knees trembled slightly. He submitted to her examination more apprehensive than a sheep about to be sheared. “I’m not going to eat you,” the doctor muttered, pressing her index finger against a curved scar shaped like a magnifying glass just beneath his left pectoral. She glided her finger towards another mark in the hollow of his clavicle and palpated up the neck to where his lobe was half-detached from the ear. “Well, that was a close call, wasn’t it?” She repeated these words as she considered the mystery of the constellation on the surface of his skin: three scars of the same size, aligned like the stars in Orion’s belt. To put the child at ease, the doctor started to talk without expecting any particular response, a sort of improvised chant that the boy listened to with the solemnity of a captive animal. “There are a lot of refugees like you who escaped the war. Whole families, orphans, widows, and even criminals. But you have to help us. You need to tell us your stories. How can we help you find your people if you don’t help us? We don’t know all that much. You come from a village in the south, in the Kandahar. That’s what you showed us on the map. What happened? Why did you leave? I can only wonder how you could have survived the machine-gunfire. It looks like it was an execution. Usually they only massacre the men and enlist the kids or abandon them. But there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. Our role is to protect you, and you’re safe from them now. You’ll learn the language we speak here, and get an education. You’ll get a job, you’ll have a future … ” The boy looked at her hands on his skin. They were too white, like buffalo bones in the desert. He was surprised that she took such an interest in his old wounds. They were no longer bleeding and didn’t cause him any pain now. Since then, months had passed. It wouldn’t be long before he’d wake up on morning a man, just like that. Just like his brother, One-Eyed Alam, before he’d been recruited.

Hubert Haddad

Opium Poppy

A little later, in the literacy class, he would obediently answer to the name they kept calling him. There was something satisfying about it: Alam wasn’t completely dead. His name, repeated by the stranger at the podium, resounded deep within him and when he nodded his head, it was with a wounded expression. Today, the instructor wrote the date on the blackboard: November 3. He explained the meaning of the word être. Conjugation, the source of all action, gave the verb its power. Without it, nothing really exists. Nothing would fit together. Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes … Why did he have to stumble through

this language spoken by other people but hold back his own words and songs? Ever since he’d been captured, he was treated like the son of parents who didn’t exist. He was taught things that weren’t real. The only purpose children served was to please adults. Kids around him would smile at the teacher, whose affection they wanted, especially the girls—except for the tall one in the front row. She had braids thicker than the plaits of a horse’s mane and she sat hunched over, with her bones projecting out from birdlike shoulders and her face like that of a sad puppet. Sometimes, when she stopped dreaming and was asked a question, she’d surprise everyone with her clear voice. It conveyed a joy that her body and posture did not. The kids from Serbia and Kosovo made fun of her smooth, black skin, but it didn’t bother her and she even found it entertaining. She had a wise, panther-like, glittering gaze. Her entire family was set ablaze before her very eyes during a surge in the civil war along the borders of her country. She told the story herself—Diwani, the Tutsi who had been seized by the remaining members of the routed Interahamwe militia. Seized and raped by these hordes with long machetes who had been recruited from among groups of soccer fans. The teacher asked his class of lost children, without a trace of malice, “Who can make me a sentence in the simple past using the verb être?” He seemed to be seeking forgiveness, as if he wanted them to tell him, “It’s not your fault. Go on, keep persecuting us with your simple past.” He was tall, with broad hands, and at the podium gesticulated with his head and arms. The past is never so simple. What happens, happens thousands of times. It was never easy to pick out the executioners, recruiters, smugglers, customs officers, informants, and police. And who can really swear they committed a given act at a given time? Diwani was asked to recite the verb conjugation for “to save,” sauver. She began, “Je sauvai, tu sauvas, il sauva … ” She stopped with a whimper and buried her face in her hands. Even the little white kids stopped laughing. Troubled, the teacher announced that class was over. The place they were kept was called Camir, an acronym for Centre d’accueil des mineurs isolés et réfugiés, or the Reception Center for Unaccompanied and Refugee Minors. White kids from Eastern Europe were top dogs in the dormitories and the cafeteria. Those from Africa and Asia didn’t share the same affinities. To form a gang you needed at least three who spoke the same language. There were half a dozen white kids who had all suffered through disaster and now were fighting back. They’d known drugs and prostitution, and more than one had a taste of death. They were the prey of wolves with jaws of steel. Yuko, the leader, with lupine eyes and pointed ears, was scarcely fifteen years old and claimed to have killed a young insolent gypsy one night in a train hangar in Belgrade. The others obeyed him like abused puppies. Yuko couldn’t stand for anybody to look him in the eye. It made him feel as if somebody had punched him in the stomach and made him want to beat the offender to a bloody pulp.

He wandered the halls of the center feeling inexorably forsaken. With no hope for the goodness of men, he would try his best to be the worst. He was already practicing on the boys who’d approach him, the little terrorized refugees from the middle of nowhere. Keeping them under his thumb required constant extortion. Yuko knew that if the administration managed to single him out, he’d end up in the juvenile section of a detention center. He’d been accused of many crimes in other countries as well as minor offenses in France, some of which could land him in Magistrate’s Court. Not having papers was sometimes a blessing. There wasn’t a single anthropometric database that could identify him. He knew his rights. The Geneva Convention prohibited his being expelled from the country. Sometimes it was the little gnats that managed to keep out of the legal cobwebs. Yuko wasn’t all that comfortable with the atmosphere at Camir, which was halfway between a boarding school and transit camp. Here there were no big shots with switchblades or shotguns, no older sisters who were junkies and always asking for money. At least he was left in peace. He would escape before anyone dreamed of putting him on trial. In a lonely corner of the park, a leafless tree swayed in the harsh wind. His forehead against the window, he watched two magpies at play, jumping from one branch to the next. Ashen clouds passed across the roofs of workers’houses that stood in a line under the angular skyline of the industrial zones. Now the sound of light steps drew his gaze closer to the fogged-up window, then away from it and towards a corner of the hallway. Diwani was approaching but didn’t see him. She never noticed either men or boys and only walked in her half of the world. “Stop!” Yuko yelled, grabbing her by the wrist. He laughed with cold senseless rage and bent the girl’s arm so she would give in and fall to her knees. But she didn’t yield to the pain, and her dark gaze fell on his chalky face. “What do you want from me?” she asked quietly. He let her go. He wanted to laugh again and had to restrain himself from hitting her. “Nothing. I don’t want anything. I hate you! I hate you all, niggers, Arabs, chinks! Go away, or I’ll fuck you up!” Diwani contemplated his painful low grin and remembered the last man, the one who was supposed to kill her after everyone else had their way with her. The deserted camp had been on the other side of the border, far from the hills she’d known as a girl.

Hubert Haddad

Opium Poppy

Khadi Hane

So Hungry It Hurts

Rouge district. To her decline in fortune is added a growing solitude. A prisoner of the African microcosm and a Muslim beset with doubts, she finds herself cut off from her community of origin owing to her liaison with Jacques, the father of her mixed-race son. Excluded on all sides, she endures tense relationships with her own children who, little by little, set themselves against her. From meddling and accusatory Malian neighbors to the tradesmen and the cops of Château-Rouge, to the derisory managers

Publisher: Denoël Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Judith Becqueriaux judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr

Translation: Margot Miller miller.margot@gmail.com

Biography

Born in Dakar in 1962 to Senegalese parents, Khadi Hane lives in France. She is the author of several books including Ma sale peau noire (Manuscrit.com, 2001) and Le Collier de paille (Pocket, 2010). Publications Nouvelles du Sénégal (collectif), Magellan & Cie, 2010 ; Il y en a trop dans les rues de Paris, Ndzé, 2005 ; Le Collier de paille, Ndzé, 2002 (paperback edition, Pocket, 2009) ; Ma sale peau noire, Manuscrit.com, 2001 ; Sous le regard des étoiles, Ndzé, 1998.

at Sonacotra, Khadidja is harshly judged by all. But this absurd trial, in which Africans and Europeans alike compete in stupidity and injustice, awakens in her the strength of both humor and unexpected courage. An intense portrait of Château-Rouge, and in particular the market of the Place Dejean, So Hungry It Hurts is remarkable for its inventive language and a singular tone steeped in double belonging. It is a novel that tells the difficult freedom of an African woman in France.

Absorbed in my thoughts, I didn’t hear Sali come into the kitchen. To me, Mali seemed like the land of plenty, even though there, with everyone living cheekby-jowl, it was a lot of work to maintain a feigned fraternity. I was almost ready to go back. But then the thought of my parents and of the women who had examined every part of my sex to discover any mark of the forbidden act … Suddenly I felt disgust at being a woman. A bulging behind, a sagging belly, a cretinous servility toward a polygamous man, were all that stood between me and Séné, Aunt Néné, or Medina. I would be compelled to produce a baby every year, to do the laundry and dishes, to watch over my husband and service his every desire so he would provide for my children. I swallowed my rage. Pots and pans were piled high atop the sideboard, empty and dry as the seasons of my country. Never had they seemed more useless. For the first time I was losing it. Tears ran down my face. I banged my forehead on the table, unable to control the despair that filled me. It belied the wisdom of Grandma Mah, who had predicted a long life full of happiness for me. I was not happy. How could I be, what with Ahmed crying in the living room and nothing to give him to eat? I jumped when Sali brushed my shoulder. She, too, was used to days “without.” Over and over I had held forth about a better tomorrow, and celebrated hope and faith in God. But now I was at the end of my rope. “What’s wrong, Mama?” asked my daughter. She had come around the chair and was standing in front of me. “Nothing,” I lied. “Don’t worry, it’s fine.”

“I can see you’ve been crying.” “Don’t worry, really. I was just having a bad moment.” “I’m old enough to understand, you know.” She wanted to press further, so I laid my fingers on her mouth. Little good it did. My little girl was lecturing me. She took my hand to her cheek; kneeling before me, she made me touch her eyes, her cheeks, her chin. Joined together silently, we prayed to God to just give us the food—the fucking food promised in the Book. For my part, I no longer believed in that heap of good words. My daughter preached the opulence of the believer, she predicted a private Nirvana that awaited, a promised land where the nabobs and the poor would be equals, as ordained by the hand of God. Her words made me dizzy. What about this supposed paradise where everybody was the same? Delusions of the poor. They said that, in that backwater no one had ever seen, a thousand golden palaces awaited the believer, wine flowed freely and rivers of this drink, forbidden on earth, ran beneath his feet and his table overflowed with all the food you could eat. For this Heaven to come I could not have cared less. It was here and now, on earth, that I wanted to eat. I grasped my daughter’s arm and told her to be quiet. We had to be patient, she was saying, our turn would come. We would have God’s favor. Maybe He was testing my faith. I no longer believed. It was too late. “You must believe, Mama,” counseled Sali. “You always taught us never to give up. God is Great, right?” She pressed her lips to my forehead. An hour later, old Uncle Jules folded his lips in a reassuring smile. He had brought rice, fish and other provisions bought at the Sonacotra store. At last my children smiled again, but the charity made me ashamed. I stared at the chéchia perched on Uncle Jules’pate. This was the cap that announced a man’s faith in his authority over women. On every Malian scalp, it reigned over scorched earth, swaggering, pleased with itself, and it boded no good. On old Uncle Jules it brought out my hatred of men. He handed me a fifty-euro note. “It’s not a lot,” he said, “but it will help a little.” Then he started in again on his old war stories from when he was a young soldier in the French army, with the children for his audience. It made them laugh to learn one of his buddies had nicknamed him “Jules.” His real name was Souleymane. Souleymane Diallo. “What would I have done without you?” I interrupted as he was explaining how he had cheated death during the war in Indochina. The old man only smiled, as was his habit. “God rewards those who suffer.” After he said that, how was I going to broach the subject of belief in Him who would save the faithful from harm? When was I going to be saved? I wanted to ask. Hunger gnawed at me. And it was eating away at my children. The story of my life, a string of adversities in Mali, and now in Paris, had swallowed me whole.

“Uncle Jules, am I guilty of anything that would make God refuse to answer my prayers?” I dared ask. “What have I done to Him?” He scratched the three white hairs under his cap. Then, with a serious air, he meditated on God-knows-what before turning a baleful eye on me. His voice trembled as he said that God never held a grudge against any of His creatures. “What makes you think he has one against you?” he scolded me. “I can’t seem to get out from under,” I sighed. “Why does God not give me the bread promised in the Book?” The old man had no idea. Far from admitting it, however, he began prophesying, like all poor Africans for whom hunger is simply a fact of life. He too evoked the Goddamned paradise where nothing would be lacking. But it was here on earth I wanted God’s help. “Be patient,” he advised. “God tests those he loves. Consider yourself blessed if it’s hard for you. His reward will come soon.” “When?” I screamed. “I’m tired of waiting. It’s now and only now that I want His reward. My knees are worn out from praying on the rug and I can’t stand any more spittle on my face. What more does He want from me?” Afraid of the wrath of God, Uncle Jules began repeating the formula of repentance that immediately wipes away all sin. On his fingers, he counted. Astaghfi rou Allah! A hundred times Astaghfi rou Allah! 1 Just by hearing me blaspheme, Jules had sinned. He blew into his palms exaggeratedly, patted his face with both hands, and began to call up God with all the spices of Mali and serve Him to me with rice, manioc and semolina; Uncle Jules’gibberish was still a poor man’s gruel. Had he ever seen this paradise reserved for the faithful that I was fed up hearing about? Why wasn’t it here on earth? “Old Jules,” I tried again, “Swear on the Holy Qur’an that God loves me and soon will send down enough food from Heaven to feed my children.” Uncle Jules ignored me. To lie was also a sin. To avoid the horrors of Hell, with only the stoned-to-death Satan for a companion, the old man chose to cite Holy Scripture. He was not going to swear by anything of which he was not certain. It was written in the Book that whoever trusted in God would be rewarded. That was all he knew. I looked the old man in the eyes. Again he rubbed his cheeks vigorously and carefully he said: “Listen, Khadidja. Never has a dead man come back to tell us how it is up there. It is possible the dead we bury simply rot away in the ground. I have no way of knowing. Neither do I know if everything that is written in the Book is true or not. But you have nothing to lose by believing in God. Keep praying; you never know with Him. That’s what I advise. Allah is all-powerful. If he wants to reward you today, you will be rewarded without so much as lifting a finger. If it’s tomorrow, it will be tomorrow.

Khadi Hane

So Hungry it Hurts

1. I beg God’s forgiveness.

Titiou Lecoq

The Ladettes

Publisher: Au diable vauvert Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Marie-Pacifique Zeltner rights@audiable.com Translation: Ann Kaiser kaisertranslations@yahoo.com

2. Be careful.

“I want to know today,” I insisted. “Tell me, yes or no, if God exists. And if He does, why doesn’t He answer my prayers? My children and I have not eaten anything since yesterday. We are so hungry it hurts. So tell me, yes or no: Will He give me food? The old man brushed a thumb over his white beard. He arranged his chéchia on his head and looked at me as if I were the most despicable of all God’s creatures. “What?” He was indignant. “You are saying you don’t believe in God who created you? I remind you that you and you alone are calling down His wrath. So, Khadidja Cissé, sabari.2 Pull yourself together, woman. Honestly, anyone would think you were possessed. Evict the devil from your soul!” After looking at me long and hard, he stood up with a brusque movement. He placed an index finger on my forehead and warned me to say no more. On the day of Last Judgment, no organ would be spared and every one of them would be called to account. The eye for what it had seen, the ear for what it had heard, the hand for what it had touched, the mind for what it had thought. The feet would also have to answer for where they had tread. No question about it. Uncle Jules’ears would hear no more of my sacrilegious demands. He lifted the tail of his booboo, deciding to get as far away as possible from the sinner. In his haste, his babouche caught in the hem of his billowing pants. He tripped. His chéchia fell to the ground and he stepped on it by accident. Old Jules drew back, horrified. His hat was covered in dust. “Jules,” I asked, “is it a sin to love a white man?” Here too he took time to reflect. “Everything from the heart must be accepted as it comes,” he philosophized. “If this man fills your heart, it’s because God put him there. Accept it and forget what others say. No man has the ability to judge anyone else. My child, don’t live for others. “Even if he doesn’t believe in God?” “There is no God but God. He is the only God. It’s the same for everyone.” “Thank you,” I said. “And please don’t think I don’t believe in Him.” “God is Great,” murmured the old man. “Everything will work out. Inch Allah!” Old Souleymane put his chéchia back on his head and left, not without first repeating to himself, Inch Allah! Inch Allah! Hard to say if he was still convinced of my faith in Allah …

Biography

Born in 1980, Titiou Lecoq launched her literary career in 1988 by re-writing the endings of the comtesse de Ségur’s novels. She then spent many years drinking coffee and studying semiotics before setting out to look for a real job, as a doorman, hostess, receptionist, secretary, banker, educational assistant and agent at the National Employment Agency. In the end, she became a free-lance journalist for various magazines and started a blog on the intersection of the Internet, sex and kittens.

The Ladettes, is the story of Ema and her band of girlfriends, of friends, and, if we take a minute to think about it, a novel about how we try to love each other in France at the beginning of the 21st century. But it’s more than that. It’s a book that begins as chick-lit, continues as a feminist suspense novel set in an educated milieu, transforms into a realistic journalistic thriller and leaves you, 500 can’t-put-‘emdown-pages later, deep inside the novel of an era seen entirely through the prism of its five characters.

Reading this ambitious literary project is a continuous pleasure, an addictive celebration comparable to that of Bridget Jones or something by Fred Vargas. Except that it uses their ideas to move toward a global perspective, comparable to that of Despentes’King Kong Theory or Houellebecq’s Elementary Particles, with the acuity, irony and cockiness of these masters. It superimposes on the literary landscape a young woman of her time who, as a little girl, rewrote the endings of the comtesse de Ségur’s novels to suit her own taste. The result is a great French novel.

Chapter 1 Burial and Ladettes For the last ten minutes, Ema had been gazing stubbornly up at the arched ceiling of the Church. She hoped that by following the complicated curves of the Gothic arches with her eyes she could avoid crying, but first of all her neck had started to really hurt, and second it was becoming obvious that she was not going to be able to avoid crying. Even though she’d decided to empty her mind of all thoughts having anything to do with her, nothing could erase this black-clad gathering in the middle of which floated familiar faces, tense and pallid. She had a lump in her throat. On the other side of the aisle, she could see the family and the eternal—and ephemeral—fiancé, Ever Flaccid I. The poor boy had completely collapsed. His face, which had always had the virility of a marshmallow, had literally melted. Even Antoine, seated next to Ema, was pale as a shroud. His hands, set on his thighs, were as inert as the rest of his body. He seemed to be straining toward a fixed point, perhaps the immense golden crucifix towering over them. She didn’t want to be seen as spying on the sadness of others, or to be checking out their mourning clothes, but she couldn’t help furtively examining each person’s demeanor. A vague whispering could be heard as everyone waited for the ceremony to begin. If the simple display of other people’s sorrow upset her this much, she could hardly imagine how she was going to deal with the burial. In fact, Ema had two very specific fears: Option One: laughing uncontrollably, head thrown back in demented sniggering, eyeballs and neck veins protruding, arms flailing about in frantic spasms - the type of conduct that leads directly to the asylum—or, Option Two, much

simpler: collapsing, throwing herself on the ground at the moment of cremation. In both cases, she’d be passed off as a hysteric and would undoubtedly be suspected of drug trafficking -- at a religious site no less, which would surely be considered aggravating circumstances. Fortunately, for the time being, the coffin was invisible. To preserve her mental health, she had already firmly refused to attend the placing of the body in the coffin. “But the embalmers did a remarkable job reconstructing the face, you know.” Ema deducted that this “but” was meant to reassure her. However, as she was a more or less normal human being, its only effect was to horrify her, as she stepped back 100 yards further from the funeral home. Reconstructed face … Ema didn’t want to see this face, not dead, not reconstructed. Given the circumstances, it was quite incredible that the family had been able to arrange for a religious burial. Ema was wondering about the hypothetical sums of money the Durieux family must have had to put up to get around the interdictions of the Holy Word, when she felt someone pulling on her bra strap. There was an audible snap. She turned around, furious. “Damn it, Gonzo, you’re such an idiot!” He held up his hands in what seemed like sincere apology. “Scuse me, couldn’t help myself. Reminds me too much of you sitting in front of me in philosophy class.” Antoine threw them a severe look, but Gilles said, “It’s OK, Antoine, everyone handles stress as best they can.” The priest appeared on the dais, followed by two children from the choir. With a discordant scraping of chairs, everyone stood up,. It was at this moment that Ema understood that Option One was null and void, that she was going straight into the nervous breakdown scenario, and that she was incapable of handling any of this. At the end of the song, the priest motioned for everyone to sit back down. “My very dear friends, we are gathered here today in the House of God to say good-bye to Charlotte Durieux.” That simple sentence, a collection of all the clichés she most despised, brought on a wave of physical reactions that floored Ema. She was overcome with a feeling of weakness at the same time the lump in her throat ballooned like a tumor. Tears were going to gush forth when, divine miracle, the sound of quick-footed steps saved her from disaster. Fred had stopped in the middle of the central aisle, breathless, dazed. Even at this distance, everyone could see the sweat dripping down his hastily shaved face. Gonzo tapped Antoine on the shoulder, “Your brother doesn’t miss a beat.” Poor Fred seemed utterly panicked. Ema discreetly signaled to him to sit next to her. It wasn’t until the moment he slid onto his chair, its squeak amplified by the acoustics of the place, that she caught a glimpse of the back of his t-shirt. The jerk had worn his infamous In Utero t-shirt. To understand the absolute bad taste of wearing such a shirt to a funeral, you have to visualize the drawing in question: an angel in anatomical cutaway, with its muscles, veins, intestines and guts visible.

Titiou Lecoq

The Ladettes

Simon Liberati

Jayne Mansfield, 1967

Despite this interruption, it only took her about forty seconds to become a sniffling fountain of tears. Gonzo taking her awkwardly by the shoulder only worsened her sobs. Ema’s body, like a machine pushed too hard, completely broke down, while at the same time she felt strangely cold, distant from the scene unfolding before her eyes. Ema watched herself, helpless faced with her own tears. And the breakdown followed a precise pattern. As soon as the priest or a loved one spoke, she melted into sobs and no longer heard what they were saying, helping her to calm down. Then, as soon as she composed herself, she would hear the eulogies -- and the tears would flow again. It’s as if her organism had decided to empty itself of all liquid. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before she’d be oozing blood. She vainly attempted to concentrate on Antoine who was folding and unfolding the prayer program, indifferent to the range of her crying, deaf to the variety of noises she was producing—sniffling, coughing, whining, whimpering, doleful murmuring, strangled cries.

Publisher: Grasset Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Cécile Dutheil, cdutheil@grasset.fr (until January 1st 2012) Heidi Warneke, hwarneke@grasset.fr Translation: Jane Marie Todd foremost92@gmail.com

As she left the Church, the storm of her sobs subsided and Ema could breathe again. The sky was grey, as it should be for a Parisian funeral. They were all there, the old friends, looking stunned, silently smoking their cigarettes, a little apart from the others whom they were watching, wondering what role they had played in Charlotte’s life. As for them, no doubt it was written on their faces. They could have just as well put up a sign, “high school friends.” They stayed like that for a long time, waiting, standing next to each other, saying nothing. From time to time, a sigh could be heard. A foot playing with piles of gravel. Gilles, eyes red, muttering “Fuck.” Fred, who fortunately had put his parka back on, asked what they’d be doing now. His brother, slightly exasperated, answered that they’d be going home to have a funeral drink. And Gonzo made a bad joke about the deathly ambiance.

Later, Ema would hate being reminded of that “shitty, horrible day”. A series of completely embarrassing episodes, power plays among friends, and how a strange idea had sprouted in her ingenious mind.

Biography

Simon Liberati was born in Paris in 1960. He studied Latin grammar at the Sorbonne and did a little journalism in the fashion press. Publications From Flammarion: L’Hyper Justine, 2009 (winner of the Prix de Flore); Nada exist, 2007 (repr. J’ai Lu, 2010); Anthologie des apparitions, 2004 (repr. J’ai Lu, 2006), translated into English as Anthology of Apparitions, Pushkin Press, 2005.

Louisiana, June 29, 1967. A metallic blue Buick Electra 225 en route to New Orleans plows into a truck. The actress Jayne Mansfield and her companion Samuel Brody are killed instantly. In this taut and terse novel, Simon Liberati retraces the last hours of the thirty-four-yearold Hollywood movie star and probes the most mysterious corners of her life. He tells of her predilection for pink and the temptations

of Satanism; of the large quantities of whiskey and her love for dogs; of orphaned children and abuse by lovers; of an unhinged life and death by decapitation. With its fascination for decadence, its mingling of eroticism and death, and its contemplation of destruction, this novel exemplifies morbid chic and the modern baroque.

1 During the slack hours of the night on June 29, 1967, along a stretch of us Highway 90 between Biloxi and New Orleans, a metallic blue Buick Electra 225, Model 66, was involved in a fatal collision. The first witness to the accident and its proximate cause was a man named Richard Rambo, driving a Western Star eighteen-wheeler for Johnson Motor Freight Lines. The crash took place one mile from Rigolets Bridge, a tour de force 4,555 feet long, built in 1929, which would be partly demolished by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In New Orleans toponymy the word rigolet, taken from the French, designates a small stream. It is a poor fit for the broad strait that connects Lake Pontchartrain with Lake Borgne, east of the Mississippi River Delta. Coming off the Rigolets, the road, narrow for the length of the bridge, widens to four lanes, two rows of traffic and two emergency lanes. As it opens up, it stirs the urge to leap into the void, to punch the accelerator. According to Fatality Analysis Reporting System, a document produced in 1970 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (nhtsa), the lane configuration increases the risk of accidents involving heavy vehicles during rush hour or times of reduced visibility. At the fatal moment, about two thirty a.m. on Thursday, June 29, 1967, the road seemed deserted. The highway followed an old Indian trail called Chef Menteur (“lying chief,” or oulabe mingo) that had once permitted Choctaw scouts to cross the New Orleans bayous.

After a noisy surge in power, Richard Rambo’s truck was about to reach its cruising speed when, banking around a curve, the driver perceived on the left shoulder a flashing light emerging from a cloud of steam. He shifted into neutral, pressed on the accelerator pedal, then geared down several times to slow his big rig to the speed of a farm tractor without burning out the brakes or putting needless wear on the brake lights. When he pulled up opposite the revolving light, he recognized a fogging truck by its foul-smelling spray. Rambo, a native of the Everglades, had long put up with such pesticidepropelling vehicles, which the state of Louisiana, following the example of its neighbor Florida, employed to fight the spread of mosquitoes. The chemical offensive had poisoned residents of the swamplands since the war. The 1953 Willys Jeep pickup truck, on which a cannon resembling a machine gun was mounted, looked more like a light tank than Department of Health equipment. Shaking and sputtering, it showed no concern for what it left in its wake. The cfc-ddt aerosol gas, propelled by a breeze from the Gulf of Mexico, invaded the four lanes of highway. You could not see ten feet in front of you. Rambo applied the Jake brake, which made a wheezing sound. According to expert opinion, his speed at the time of impact was between zero and twenty-five mph. Then he heard a noise that, as he later told the police, resembled “the explosion of a bomb.” No shock wave was felt in the truck cab. The impact did not seem to affect the big rig. He was preparing to step on the gas to escape the chaos, when the undercarriage began to pitch dangerously, with a clatter of scrap metal and the crash of broken glass. Something was interfering with the rear wheels. The brakes squealed, and Rambo brought the vehicle to a halt in the night. The insecticide formed a cloud so thick that, in the outside rearview mirror, you could not make out the reflectors on the nose of the trailer. The atmospheric pollution refracted the powerful flashing beacon, bathing the inside of the cab in colorful strobe lights. Outside, the breeze was poisoned by the smell of ddt and volatile organic compounds. As always during the hot season in the Deep South, the air was dripping with humidity, and the stridulations of insects formed a web of sound as suffocating as the gas. They were the only ones not bothered by the attentions being shown them. Rambo, after stepping down from the footboard, slipped around the front of the enormous tractor-trailer to avoid venturing onto the freeway. He retrieved a crowbar from a compartment in the back of the cab. As he advanced, he banged on the axles in search of the object that was blocking the big rig’s undercarriage. According to his statement, he thought he had flattened one of the garbage containers that stray dogs push onto the road. Once he had crossed the fifty feet separating him from the back of the vehicle, he stopped, and abandoned all hope of continuing on his way.

Simon Liberati

Jayne Mansfield, 1967

The only thing gleaming in the dark was the chrome-plated handle sticking out from a car door flush with the underside of the semi. How had a car gotten wedged beneath his truck? At first he thought he had driven over a wreck abandoned on the side of the road. He leaned down to see. Jammed more than ten feet under the trailer, the front wheel of a Buick, far more fragile than the ones on the big rig’s axles, was twisted at an impossible angle suggestive of a broken limb. Fury without forewarning had slammed the pale blue metal—alien, lighter, feminine—into the greasy, filthy regions below the chassis, without regard for the crumpling, ripping, and irreversible damage that contact between the two materials inevitably inflicted on the more fragile one. It all must have happened at an insane speed, in an absurd, irreversible movement. Panic, amplified by the pesticides--a nightmare floating in an atmosphere that made it hard to breathe--seized the driver. The overall impression at the sight of the bluish hulk compressed under the chassis of the trailer was crushing defeat. Suffocation. The legal record indicates that Rambo suffered from allergic asthma and that a close relative of his had been run over by the Santa Fe Express. Human flesh abhors certain ordeals, which evoke old wounds and shared suffering. The steam was dissipating into the atmosphere and the bright Mississippi moon peeked through. At the rear of the truck it illuminated the car roof, torn off and pulled up like the lid of a sardine can (an image repeated in the papers the next day). Only at that moment, more than two minutes after the accident, did Rambo realize what had happened. The blue Buick had plowed into him from behind with such momentum that it jammed three-quarters of the way under the chassis of the trailer. The violence of the impact suggested an abnormal force, another heavy vehicle ramming the Buick. But the blue trunk behind the roof was smooth and untroubled as a vacant swimming pool, while behind it Chef Menteur Highway was as calm as it had been before the catastrophe. The red glow of the fogging truck reappeared in the distance, continuing to blink blindly in a chemical cloud, as if nothing had happened. A car, dropped from the sky; a falling meteor. At that moment, the cannon stopped propelling the insecticide, and lights lit up on the sides of the pickup. The other driver had turned on the jeep’s emergency flashers. Just above the chrome handle was a dark tuftlike patch. Rambo touched it and immediately drew back his hand. Soft yet coarse. Was it seat stuffing? A bit of ponytail? The hair of a doll? Or of a woman? Rambo, leaning on the metal flank of the truck, had the irrational fear he would burn himself. But everything was cold. Overcoming the aversion that the yellow hair (a wig?) inspired in him, he struggled to unjam the door. It was wedged tight between the pavement and the semi’s chassis.

He moved to the rear and tried to open the trunk, but it was locked. Blindly, he read with his finger the logo “Electra 225,” coated in soft plastic and clipped to the intact trunk, also soft, clean, brand-new …. the car was brand-new. So too, not far from the still-scalding exhaust pipe, was the license plate under his palm, with its numbers and the letters spelling out m i s s i s s i p p i. The extreme softness of the metal and the support it offered allowed him to catch his breath. He had to force himself to lift his head. Everything was perfect for five feet, up to the hinges of the trunk, then the horror began again. On the rear shattered windshield, the mass of the truck had vertically thrust back the painted sheet-metal roof as if it were the canvas top of a convertible, peeling it open on impact, shearing off the support posts. He stumbled over a piece of blue metal in the shape of a boomerang, a detachable part of the mudguard that had fallen to the ground. He scraped his palms on loose gravel, dropped to his knees. On all fours, he heard something moving. Not silence any longer, yet not a sign of life or the buzzing of insects. Something was slyly hissing. Steam rose from the carcass underneath, the palpitations of a beast brought to heel, cornered in its flight. The soft hissing revealed the hemorrhaging of a severed hose pipe or the draining of a cylinder head. The menacing little noise just before an explosion. A dynamite fuse, a short-circuit, a coolant leak …. The motor gave off the combined stench of gasoline, hot oil, and radiator fluid. The blood of machines. Dark juice was dripping onto the asphalt under his hands and feet. He backed up a few yards.

Simon Liberati

Jayne Mansfield, 1967

Carole Martinez

The Field of Les Murmures

In the year 1187, on the day she is to be married and in the presence of a scandalized wedding party, young Esclarmonde refuses to say “I do.” Rather, defying her father, feudal lord of the domain known as “Les Murmures,” she demands that her vows to offer herself to God be respected. The young woman is walled up in a cell adjoining the chapel of the castle, where her only opening onto the world is a small barred window. But she was not alone. Instead of the solitude to which she aspired, Esclarmonde

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr

Translation: John Cullen jocul@earthlink.net

Biography

Carole Martinez, born in 1966, was an actress before becoming a schoolteacher. Her best-selling first novel, Le Cœur cousu, received several literary prizes, among them the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens and the Prix Ouest-France Étonnants Voyageurs. Publications L’Œil du témoin, a crime novel for young readers, Rageot, 2011; Le Cœur cousu, Gallimard, 2007 (republished in the Folio collection in 2009).

finds herself at the crossroads of the living and the dead. From her tiny cell she will make her will known throughout her father’s fiefdom and her breath will stir the world beyond all the way to the Holy Land. Carole Martinez gives free rein to the poetic power of her imagination in this novel, which offers s readers an experience at once mystical and carnal, on the border between the real and surreal. She transports us to her extraordinary universe, a dreamy, cruel world filled with fascinating sensuality.

I am Esclarmonde, the sacrificed one, the dove, the flesh offered up to God, His portion. I was beautiful, you cannot imagine, as beautiful as a girl of fifteen can be, so beautiful and so delicate that my father, who never grew tired of gazing upon me, could not bring himself to consider ceding me to another. From my mother I had inherited skin of a rare translucence. Behind my so very pale bluegray eyes and alabaster face there flickered an elusive flame. But the neighboring lords were lying in wait for their prey. I was an only daughter, and I would fetch an excellent dowry. Amid the vigorous sons that God had given my father, amid his comrades in arms and their young squires, I was a bird that sang at all hours. In the din of hooves and weaponry, I sang what Modesty forbade. I reverberated like a bell jar in the middle of the enclosed garden where I was kept on fine days, sown into that “mille-fleurs” tapestry amongst the wild buttercups and gladiolus ripped from the regional meadowlands, and my voice ascended in those flowery perfumes; my voice, light and clear, ascended to God, my voice ascended like the smoke of Abel’s sacrifice. Everyone in the country roundabout spoke of that young damsel, that sweet angel kept at Les Murmures, set down upon the cool grass of its high lawn, and people said that if one wished to make his way to the castle, which was perched on the edge of a cliff, all he needed to do was to follow that ever-singing voice, the voice that night alone seemed able to silence.

I was drawn and shaped by men’s words. So were we all in that country, all of us girls, so were we all, but my father was beyond a doubt the best sculptor; he had forgotten to speak to me about the defects of my sex, and he had sent away his chaplain, who could never hold his tongue. Imagine how men must have dreamed about me, that fair maiden, so tender and docile, about the guiding, virginal song, about the fortune attached to my person, about the girl child so beloved by her father! But about my own desire, no one cared a thing. Who had strayed so far from the path of reason that he would question a young woman, were she even a princess, as to her own wishes? Women’s words were mere babble then, and women’s desires dangerous whims to be swept away with a word, with the swing of a rod. My father, though a soldier, was always gentle with me. He simply opposed, with great obstinacy, any thought of sending me where God required me to go. He refused to let me join a convent, which would have snatched me from him more surely than any marriage. He was a petty noble but a great knight, who had built himself such a towering reputation, both in tournaments and battles, that he was called upon to train and form many boys: my maternal cousins, his vassals’eldest sons, and even some younger sons of more powerful lords. Our world overflowed with horses, dogs, and loud young men, drinking, hunting, and following me out of the corners of their eyes. Of all those whom my father had taken in, he loved one most: Lothaire, the youngest son of the lord of Montfaucon. This powerful neighbor had entrusted his boy to my father’s care when the child was eight years old but had knighted his son himself. After his dubbing, Lothaire had hastened from tournament to tournament, hurling himself into the mêlées with violence and enthusiasm. He feared neither his adversaries nor the demons that people sometimes saw hovering over the fields and the lists and carrying off the souls of the dead, for no one who died in those combats, then forbidden by the Church, had a right to a Christian burial. For two fine seasons, he had roamed from place to place in quest of glory, selling weapons and war horses won in those encounters so that he could worthily celebrate his exploits, living in grand style, and courted by very important personages desirous of recruiting him to their conroi, their “company.” For two fine seasons he was honored, and then he had turned his face homeward and gone back to his native land. Basking in the glow of so many victories, he retuned to where I was. But to my eyes, his face had kept its chubbiness, and I saw only a willful child, metalclad, trained to kill, always in a coat of mail and on a horse, never dismounting except to chase after peasant girls whenever the urge might strike. I knew of his misconduct; the serfs’daughters who came to the castle on corvée to spin and weave would describe his violence to me. Of all the young men, they said,

it was he, the one with the beautiful slate-gray eyes, who was the stingiest with his caresses, it was he who would take a girl like plunder. Never asking leave, never even waiting for a suggestive look, he wielded his yard like a sword-point! And the ruined girls remained silent to avoid ignominy and to keep from being turned out onto the roads. My time loved virgins. I knew what I had to protect: my real treasure, my father’s honor, the intact seal that was said to open the heavenly kingdom to me. And it was that man, that Lothaire de Montfaucon, who, because he coveted my treasure, dragged me into the courtly game. Attempting to civilize his desire, down on one knee, he would beg me to grant him a kiss. But stories about brave knights in the service of their lady never held any interest for me. No doubt, other girls stayed on the lookout for troubadours, other girls took delight in songs of love, in the maiden’s surrender after a long siege, and anxiously wondered whether the champion would take his lady fair. But I had ceased to tremble for the young warriors. In those bawdy stories, I understood, the beautiful damsel always succumbed, and the knight won all his battles. Could there be any doubt of his power? The struggle—oh, how unequal a contest—was lost in advance. The lady had to accept the compliments paid to her, she put the suitor to the test, and, once the obstacles were overcome, she offered herself as a reward to him who had known to be patient and had not contented himself with unlacing his breeches. Such were the tales sung for him, the one true hero of Courtly Love. They showed the refinement of the violent man, for whom simply taking what he wanted had no doubt become too easy a game. As for myself and that boy, I would never have wanted anything to do with him. I felt disgust at the very thought of someone who could be so ugly on the inside and still act the gracious charmer, and I rejected the idea of changing my condition. And yet, my father had yielded and there we were, Lothaire and I. We had been made to stand together on a beautiful wedding chest, and he took in his broad hand the little trembling hand held out to him: mine. From then on, we were promised to each other, and my betrothed paid me court in the manner of the time. He loved himself passionately in this role, a new and difficult one for a young man who had never known how to wait. Of course, I was required to follow the rules, to deflect his desire as long as our engagement lasted, to put up valiant resistance. Following instructions received, I gave not a look and spoke not a word when, with my father’s consent, he would return from the hunt and betake himself to the women’s chamber, there to recount his exploits; but my ears, oh my ears were open in spite of me to the repulsive verbiage of the person who would soon be my master and could not doubt it. Marriage is no light matter. There was no choosing, not even for Lothaire, in fact. The mutual consent required by the Church was only that of the two

Carole Martinez

The Field of Les Murmures

Diane Meur

I would so dearly have wished not to displease my father.

Down to the Plain

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: Jane Kuntz kuntz@illinois.edu

families. But my gallant gained much thereby for as the youngest son of his great house, he had but little chance of escaping bachelorhood and the wandering life of a knight-at-arms. His eldest brothers had received their portion but the two youngest were not destined to make names for posterity. Amey, five years Lothaire’s senior, having recently been denied an excellent match, had already renounced the notion of taking a wife. So Lothaire remained, bursting with rage and ambition. His ardor and skill in tournaments had enabled him so to distinguish himself that in everyone’s opinion, even my father’s, his fine, manly blood deserved to be perpetuated. Our union, therefore, was a godsend. Once he was married, he would become a lord in his turn; his wife, be she ever so frail, docile, and mute, would confer upon him some necessary substance, proper to builders of lineages. A few places remained to be taken in the Duchy of Burgundy. My womb would project him into the future; he would plow my flesh as was fitting so that his glory could take root in it, so that his descendants would be as numerous as the trees of the forest, handsome boys who would take over from him, carry on his name, safeguard his blood, his memory, his glory down the centuries, without taking into account the dowry and the alliance provided by her who would be given him until death should ensue. I would be naught but a chaste receptacle, which successive pregnancies would eventually carry off. And even if Lothaire died before me, my widowhood would be no protection. I would be abandoned again to the highest bidder as security for some pact or other. How was I to escape such a fate if not with Christ’s help? In the minds of the women of my day, Christ was a powerful force. Christ alone could keep men in check and snatch a virgin from them. To families of the time, it seemed that they were concluding a new, holy alliance by handing over to God a child who would pray for them, whether high up in heaven or inside a convent cell. The power of prayer and its spiritual energy maintained the equilibrium of the world; no one doubted that then. Certain women—nuns, mystics, voluntary recluses—were sometimes able to lead their entourage and thus to achieve a degree of freedom that was otherwise inconceivable, an autonomy to which almost no other woman of my class could aspire. But at what cost?

Biography

Born in Brussels, Diane Meur has lived in Paris since 1987. Graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, she translates literary fiction from German and English into French, which earned her the Halpérine-Kaminsky Prize for translation in 2010. She is the author of three novels. Publications Published by Sabine Wespieser: Les Vivants et les Ombres, 2007 (Paperback edition 2009), winner of the Prix Rossel and Prix Rossel for Young Readers, Brussels, 2007; City of Blois Prize for Historical Novels, 2008, and Prize for Best Adaptable Novel, 2008); Raptus, 2004; La Vie de Mardochée de Löwenfels écrite par lui-même, 2002 (Paperback edition, 2010).

In an imaginary ancient civilization, one that somehow seems quite familiar, the scribe Asral is assigned the task of producing a new copy of the laws. Thanks to the ingenuous questions of his guard Ordjeneb, he soon realizes that the sacred language he is transcribing is outdated and that, in order for the new edition to be truly faithful to the spirit of the original, it must be reformulated so it can be understood the way it was four or five centuries before. A creeping sense of doubt begins to take hold. Who was this Anwar, the mythical lawmaker, almost god-like? These laws that subject public life, private relationships and

even women’s bodies to constant oversight, were they all of his design? And is Asral any more likely to find that out than he is to win the heart of Djinnet, a young singer from the basket-weavers’ quarter? Diane Meur has us ponder the larger issues of religion and our political systems via this suspense-filled story swept by jubilantly infectious winds of freedom. Part drama, part satire, a love story as well as a zany rationalist fable, this novel is set in a world we are reluctant to leave behind, one that readers of the author’s previous novels will surely recognize.

He was thirsty, tired, footsore, his feet aching in their sandals. The laces on the left foot had broken and with each step, the sole flopped and dragged. He had been told that if he wanted to find work, he had to go to the Buffalo Gate, in the thick of the market. Yes, but the market here was nearly the size of a city, full of clamor and crowds, with dozens of vendors in each specialty, earthenware and iron pots, carpets and basketry … He had even seen, side by side, one stall with white eggs and another with brown eggs, each merchant ignoring the other, as if dealing in wholly different commodities, their customers neither mingling nor conversing. A veritable city, a vast, open-air maze that seemed without perimeter nor center, probably because, unbeknownst to him, he had been walking in circles. Back home in Jaïneh, things were much simpler, he knew all the merchants. Not that they were really merchants, they were village-dwellers from the uplands who, with each new moon, would descend upon his village with their wool, their cheeses, their figs and grapes, all finer than what was produced down in the valley. In Jaïneh, he would have gone up to one or the other and asked: Cousin, tell me where I might be hired? And the cousin—for they were all related, more or less—would have made his own son stop playing, get up off the ground to serve as his guide. Here, he had no idea how to go about things. People had trouble understanding his mountain dialect, they made him repeat everything, and he had an even harder time making out what was being said to him. They called many things by different names, or perhaps gave names to things he had never seen

before, creating gaps in their speech, entire sentence fragments that made no sense, that were nothing but noise. And when people here saw that you were not understanding, instead of trying to help, or just laughing sympathetically as would the good folk of Jaïahin, his mother’s village—“the ever-laughing people of Jaïahin,” as the saying went—, they shrugged their shoulders and turned their backs. They were not hospitable, no, not one bit. Anyone back home who behaved that way with a stranger would have been admonished, with uncles arriving on the scene shouting “You are a disgrace to us!” right there in front of wife and children. Here, it was considered normal, as was shoving someone who was in the way, or stepping on someone’s foot without a word of apology. “And I, who was born in a two-storey house, the most beautiful in all of Jaïneh!” he thought woefully. Not only did he think it, but spoke it aloud while hitching up the strap of his cumbersome bag, and for a moment stood there rubbing his shoulder, as if to convince himself that he still existed, that in the hustle and bustle of Sır, ¯ he had not become a mere wisp of breeze, something insubstantial and formless, a soul still in search of a body.

Diane Meur

Down to the Plain

But then he brightened: at the other end of an alley, between two walls of chicken cages, he noticed a less crowded area, without stalls or awnings, the place he had been looking for. One could move about more easily, circles were forming around street entertainers, friends greeting one another, hand on heart, engaging in endless discussions. It was a place where news was exchanged, where contacts were made: he was sure to find something here. At this, he burst into a joyful laugh (was he not also from Jaïahin, on his mother’s side?) and set off for the open square, eyes peeled, ears pricked, ready to seek his fortune, for he was sure that luck would smile on him soon. A small crowd was gathering a bit further on, and he went to see what was happening. Uttering a timid “Excuse me” or a “Could I get by, please?” or a “No, I can squeeze by, Auntie, don’t bother yourself!” he made his way through the strangely silent onlookers. As he drew closer, he understood, they were all trying to hear the reedy voice of a wizened old man who was singing, his gnarled arms held away from his body, eyes lifted heavenward. You flee us, O happiness You elude us like the spirit Avanwar … This had to be an ancient song, for the language was akin to the mountain dialects: he could grasp everything, or almost (Avanwar?). The melody was unfamiliar to him, yet very appealing, sometimes deep and haunting, sometimes swirling into arabesques like the ones on the hilt of a saber. It was hard to believe the poor old man’s throat could produce such bird-like trills, such phrasing like cascading springs.

All seek to grasp you, but you evade our every embrace Happiness, O swamp fire, dancing light, You come as you please, And to those who seek you not. He managed to reach the front row and sat so as not to obstruct anyone’s view. He looked around: a well-dressed man, a grandee of Sır, ¯ no doubt, listening eyes half-closed, head bobbing back and forth; a young girl, lips parted, a water jar perched on her head; a porter who had laid down his burden and, squatting, chin in hand, let tears roll softly down his cheeks. To hold and keep you would take the cunning Avanwar, And the strength and might Avanwar, You flee us, O happiness, but never too far, Fleeing yet faithful as our shadow, Happiness, O happiness, A Blessing Avanwar! And with a final acrobatic vocalese, the melody came to an end. The singer had closed his eyes, his body had ceased its swaying and now looked terribly frail and weightless, drained of vigor. The porter scratched his damp beard, the others barely moved, only sighing. He too was brimming with emotion and nostalgia, fully at peace and at ease. Yet he could not help asking the question that had been nagging him throughout the song: “Uh, … so, … what’s this Avanwar thing?” He had not spoken very loud, though audibly enough for anyone within earshot, hoping that one of his neighbors would answer his query, that was all. But no: a tense silence fell over the crowd. The neighbors in question turned toward him dumbfounded, a little girl burst into giggles, swiftly cuffed by a reprimanding mother. The word spread into the crowd, whence rose a steadily growing murmur. “Shame be upon you!” cried the well-dressed man. “He’s had too much barley wine,” ventured the porter, somewhat more indulgent. But others were not having any of it, three boys in particular, who got up and called upon the audience to bear witness. “This fellow is insulting Anwar! You all heard him, didn’t you?” “No, I’m not, I wasn’t insulting anybody. I just wanted to know …” “A mountain man! Of course, what else? So, it’s not enough to slaughter and pillage, wild beasts that you are, but now you have to come taunt us, and smear the name of the Father of the Laws? “But I …” The first blow struck him in mid phrase, and sent him staggering. Then came more—the three boys surrounded him, tossing him back and forth like a ball—to the ribs, to the face, he felt nothing but pain, out of which emerged one thought: if he’d had to deal with only one of these practically beardless

snot-nosed brats, he could have knocked him out with a flick of the wrist, sturdy as he was. But here, three against one, with this crowd that wished him no good, he felt as sluggish and weak as a fly fallen into poppy syrup. A final blow delivered by a hand wearing a ring, or holding some kind of blunt object, opened a gash in his forehead, blood flowing into his eyes, blinding him. He heard the clamor, then lost consciousness. When he came to, some time later, he was lying on the ground, bruised and in no hurry to open his bloodincrusted eyes. “Don’t move,” said a voice nearby. He raised an eyelid. A woman’s face was hovering over his. “Are you all right?” He shrugged. She gestured as if about to remove his cap, he protested: “Hey, you can’t do that.” Cheeky, isn’t she, to remove his cap like that! “Don’t be silly, you’re hurt … ” She inspected his scalp. “You’ve got a nice gash there. Nothing serious, but you’ve bled quite a bit. I’ll have to dress it for you. Can you walk?” He sat up, still a little dazed, taking the hand she offered. Everything happened so fast in this place. The crowd had vanished without a trace, the scandal seemingly forgotten, the market nearly over. Nearby, merchants were piling crates onto carts, dismantling their stalls, paying no attention to the two of them. “I live over there, one of the first houses,” added the woman. “If I help you, I think you should be able to make it.” He managed to get up, put his cap back on, dusted off his cloak, still hesitating. “To your place? Aren’t you afraid that …” “What?” Hands on hips, chin raised, for she was rather short, she looked him over. “People don’t seem very fond of mountain folk here, I don’t think. If they see me with you, won’t they … reprimand you? And your husband, what will he say?” “I’m a widow,” she said, cutting him off. “Come on, let’s go.”

Diane Meur

Down to the Plain

2 Widow, he thought as they set off, him leaning on her, less out of real need than a desire to at last touch another body—he’d been away from Jaïneh for a week now, traveling among strangers, a week since he’d embraced a friend, tousled a child’s hair or even shaken hands with someone. So, a young widow. And quite pretty, however much one could judge given

Léonora Miano

These Troubled Souls

the local headdress, a long scarf worn about the head with one end tossed over a shoulder. Nothing like the scarves the women of Jaïneh wore knotted tightly at the nape of the neck, leaving the face completely bare. Here, they had a knack for pulling the scarf back a little to show their hair if it was pretty, tugging it forward a bit to soften their features, using it to let light and shadow play on their bosoms, covering their mouths to conceal a smile. At present, the scarf was starting to fall off her shoulder, and he lifted it back. “Thank you,” she said mischievously. “You needn’t have, we’ve arrived.” She slipped out from under his arm in order to push open the door leading down to the house. She went down one step, and turned around. “Well, are you coming in or aren’t you? By the way, what’s your name?” “My … ? Oh, my name. It’s Ordjeneb sher-Djenebi Lallit en-Jaïneha.” She burst out laughing. “A real mountain name you’ve got there, like a pile of pebbles rolling around in your mouth … But I wasn’t asking for all that. What do they call you back home, what does your mother call you? “Ordjou.” “All right, Ordjou it is.”

Publisher: Plon Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Rebecca Byers rebecca.byers@editions-plon.com

Translation: Madeleine Velguth velguth@sbcglobal.net

Biography

Born in Douala, Cameroun, in 1973, Léonora Miano has lived in France since 1991. Her first novel, L’Intérieur de la nuit, ranked fifth on the magazine Lire’s list of best books of the year, received favorable reviews and was a tremendous success with readers. The author of several novels, she has also published shorter pieces, Afropean Soul et autres nouvelles, in Flammarion’s “Étonnants classiques” series. In Soulfood équatoriale, a little collection of texts by writers of fiction inspired by their enjoyment of food, published in NiL’s “Exquis d’écrivains” series, Léonora Miano invites readers on a journey to a gentler and more personal Africa than that of her novels. These Troubled Souls is her sixth novel. Publications Published by Plon: Blues pour Élise, 2010; Les Aubes écarlates, 2009 (released in paperback, 2011); Tels des astres éteints, 2008 (released in paperback, 2010); Contours du jour qui vient, 2006 (high school students Goncourt prize) (released in paperback, 2008); L’Intérieur de la nuit, 2005 (discovery prize of the Lauriers verts de la Forêt des livres 2005 and the Louis-Guilloux prize, 2006) (released in paperback, 2006 and published in English as Dark Heart of the Night, University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

Maxime and Antoine, known as Anton or Snow, live in the center of a large City in the North. They could not be more different. Born in Mboasu, Maxime, an undocumented immigrant, has managed to find a job in banking, but to avoid legal problems, he is working under the identity of Snow, who was born in the North. Snow is a born schemer: he lives off undocumented immigrants who pay for his services. He’s an egotist, empty and unproductive, who dreams of modeling and sequined glitter. The two brothers live in unspoken but deep opposition, linked to their birth. Snow is a child born of love; Maxime,

of rape. A family legacy for which their mother Thamar is paying a heavy price: although she lives nearby, in the suburbs of the City, she vegetates in dire poverty, deserted by her sons. But everything is going to change when Maxime is promoted and leaves to head the Mboasu branches of his bank. He will now be able to live free, without using Snow’s services. Maxime decides to take his mother with him, to the Continent. The family’s entire stability is threatened. Finding himself alone, Snow will perhaps find a way to overcome his suffering and become a better person …

Maxime was walking quickly, his forehead creased in a preoccupied frown. He had to find that woman he’d glimpsed one evening while leaving his friend Edouard’s, in the posh part of the neighborhoods north of the City. She was sitting, drunk, in front of a mini-mart. Her frizzy hair, which hadn’t been combed in ages, was snarled in some places, broken off in others. Her skin, caked with grime, was now a strange shade of grey, not recognizably from any human group. Between swallows of cheap wine, she was furiously scratching her head and arms with her dirty fingernails. He had passed her by as one passes by people like that, without paying much attention. Then, as he kept walking, he’d heard her sing: A tete nyasu nye mogn, dina longo di dubabe, janea longo di ye, had recognized the first words of the Lord’s Prayer, sung in the language of his people. He felt a pang of anguish. That song took him far from there, toward Mboasu, where women often had only religion to make their existence bearable. She was certainly not the only woman who’d come from Sombé to lose her way here in search of another destiny. Then why did the sound of her voice twist his heartstrings like this? From that day on, she’d been humming away inside him, without stopping. This had been going on for seventy-two hours. He wanted to find her again, talk to her, even if he didn’t know why. When he saw her, he’d know. He crossed the street, went down the stairs near the subway station, and turned right. His heart was thumping wildly against his ribs. He almost turned back. A sort of instinct kept him from it. He got to the store. She wasn’t there. He went in, asked the owner if he knew her, if he knew anything about her.

The man, busy putting cans of peas on a shelf, gave him a long appraising look before answering that the woman in question was called Thamar, that she came from the Continent, a country called Mboasu, he thought. Breathing with difficulty, Maxime asked if she came often. “Every day, but not at the same time, Cousin,” was the answer. She hadn’t come yet today, so the odds were with Maxime, as long as the shop was open. When he asked about their hours, the man gave him another suspicious look before retorting that the hours were posted on the door. “What do you want with Thamar?” he asked. “If only I knew … . All I can say is that you don’t hear that name often, even in Mboasu.” Bourgeois bohemians, grannies with their dogs, so-called artists, all the social categories of the neighborhood went in and out of the mini-mart. The waiting time seemed endless. Long enough to relive the most insignificant details of his existence, long enough to have fifteen or sixteen heart attacks, long enough to clear out, to be sensible as he had always been, to tell himself that it couldn’t be her. Then he saw her, hobbling along, wearing a big t-shirt and mannish-looking pants, her eyes down, not seeming to see the worn men’s shoes she was wearing, that gaped open in the front. Under his shirt, the young man felt cold sweat trickling down between his shoulder blades. Why had he felt the need to put on this suit? He wore it only to meet his clients, the big accounts he was in charge of. And he hadn’t seen any of them today. She went into the store, bought some of that bad wine sold in plastic bottles, and sat down in a corner, to the left of the door. What was he going to say to her? For that matter, how was he even going to approach her? She looked up at him, as if the questions he was wondering about had reached her. And she smiled. “Would you by any chance have a coin or two, Sir?” He gave her two and remained planted in front of her. She looked up again and waved him to the side so he wouldn’t be in the way of others who might want to give her some change. He squatted down, put his face near hers, without smelling the strong acid odor coming from the woman’s body, this scent of rank sweat and bad alcohol. Placing his hands on the homeless woman’s shoulders, he said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy … .” He spoke to her in the language of the estuary through which the Northerners had once entered the coast of what was to become Mboasu, asked her not to be offended at what he was doing. He in no way wished to be disrespectful. Why did she answer his questions, she who hadn’t spoken to anyone for such a long time, and who until then didn’t care to? She told him her name. That of the town where she was born. That of her people. That of her mother. Yes, she had had a mother. It was long ago. So long ago. His voice trembling, gazing into the woman’s eyes, Maxime said only his first name. They wept. For shame. For sorrow. For joy. For a mad hope: that of a second chance. They walked together holding hands, paying no attention to people’s glances at the mismatched pair the two of them made: a woman of indeterminate age, dirty, wearing men’s clothing and old lace-up half boots, and a tall young man,

Léonora Miano

These Troubled Souls

elegant in his three-piece suit. They took the subway to Maxime’s; he felt he could use public transport now that his departure was set. When Thamar sat down, people got up. They moved away. They didn’t dare hold their noses, but they resolutely distanced themselves. They didn’t want to be so close to poverty, lice, bugs, all that. They didn’t want to think about what might make a human being—therefore themselves—sink into such a state. As for Maxime, he no longer saw the dirtiness, nor the hair dried out from lack of care, nor the black fingernails still clutching the neck of the green plastic bottle. He saw her as she was on the day she left. Young, pretty. It was not his place to reproach her. She had reproached herself enough. No wrong to forgive. Thamar did not forgive herself. Her existence was nothing but a long self-flagellation. He felt like hugging her to himself, like laughing. They were alive. They were together. They were going to be able to love each other, maybe even better than they would have in the past. Maxime took into his hands the grey palm that she kept pressed against the top of her bad leg, and closed his eyes. He still felt enough strength in himself to love her. He had missed her so, this mama that everybody thought was his older sister, she was so young when he was born. When she had disappeared from his life he was barely four years old, but he had remembered her in his own way, and had missed her. Of course he’d never talked about it. Nobody said anything about her, aside from the gossip exchanged by the shrews of Asumwè. One didn’t complain at Modi’s. It was not that kind of household. The grandmother had been right to forbid lamentation. Life was supreme. Life always won out. Soon they got to his place. While she was taking a shower, the first since she didn’t know how long, Thamar realized that she didn’t quite want to die. What she had so searched for was there: a glance. Interest. Love. That accepts. That does not judge. That raises you up. Maxime had thrown out her rags, had lent her a sweatsuit, in which she was little by little starting to look human. Later they’d go buy her some clothes. As for her hair, there was nothing they could do with it. He put a towel over her shoulders and started to cut it, leaving only a short afro into which he rubbed Palma Christi oil. She had washed it, but there were still whitish patches on her scalp, a kind of fungal infection that needed treatment. They didn’t talk. What question could they ask? They’d have the time to talk. About everything. Later. What was important did not lie in possible explanations. He wondered whether she’d like to come to Mboasu with him. Now that he’d found her, he did not want to be separated from her again. Very softly, she spoke Daniel’s name. He had to tell her that Daniel had died from a particularly violent attack of malaria, when he was only sixteen. He’d been buried in the cemetery across from the Sombé cathedral, next to the Jesuit school. When she said she was sorry not to be able to visit his grave, he told her that he was to leave the City in a week and that he’d be very happy if she agreed to go with him.

Thamar could have decided to do this long ago, but she hadn’t had the courage. The French government offered a cash incentive to immigrants who wanted to beat it before undergoing the humiliation of deportation. However the politicians didn’t have enough money to redeem their lost honor. They couldn’t pay enough for broken dreams, lapsed ambitions, youth lost along with its beauty and vitality. Like many sub-Saharan people who had scorched their wings on the shimmers of the North, Thamar had thought it was impossible, inadmissible to go back home defeated. Having gone so far away, for such a long time, only to return empty-handed. The money offered by the national government would never be worth what one would have earned oneself. And yet, alongside Maxime, everything seemed possible. She couldn’t hold back her tears, thinking that he was the child of rape, the one she had wanted to forget so as not to have to think of his father, of the savage frenzy with which he had thrown himself onto her, on the rough earth of the path, one day when she’d gone to buy corn from an old woman who grew it in her yard. She didn’t even know who this man was. He wasn’t from the neighborhood. She saw herself again, bits of dry grass caught in the tufts of her disheveled hair, scraping her feet as she ran along the earthen paths, a trickle of blood running down the inside of her thighs, on the day she was assaulted. Weeping, she had flung herself into her mother’s arms and told her everything.

Léonora Miano

These Troubled Souls

Mikaël Ollivier

The World in Hand

Pierre is almost 16, interested in classical music and piano, a tenth-grader with a flexible schedule and dreams of becoming a pianist. He lives in Versailles with his well-to-do, but somewhat uptight Catholic parents. One day his mom disappears in an IKEA parking lot. That night his dad gets a text message, “Don’t worry about me. I just can’t do it anymore, that’s all.” Everything changes from then on. Pierre must get to the bottom of what’s really happening at home, uncovering his family’s story, which is much more complex than it appears, through a series of touching but gritty coincidences and romantic encounters.

Publisher: Éditions Thierry Magnier Date of Publication: Autumn 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Johanna Brock Lacassin j.brock-lacassin@actes-sud.fr Translation: Alexander C Totz alexander@cinoche.biz

Back from summer vacation, Pierre learns of his dad’s involvement with the woman who runs the corner bakery and can’t stand his father’s newfound happiness. But meeting Isil, his new neighbor who plays cello and attends his conservatory, is a game changer. Through her, Pierre discovers himself and starts understanding his father better; understanding above all that without his mother’s departure and learning about his family’s secrets, he would never have met Isil, and surely never have discovered himself.

It’s my oldest memory, one of my first Christmases, but I was clueless. I didn’t know diddly, I can’t even say that I lived day-to-day. I lived in the moment. The immediate moment. I inhabited the moment. I had no idea what time was. My world was confined to a few faces, smells, and sounds, along with hunger, sleep, fatigue, heat, and cold …

Biography

It all clicked for Mikaël Ollivier at age 15 in his favorite art movie house. As the lights came up after an Alfred Hitchcock series, he told himself that this was what he wanted to do. But what could this be? He didn’t know yet. A passionate film buff, he morphed into an insatiable reader and, at 25, began writing. More than just a writer—of fiction both for young adults and adults, short stories, tv and film scripts, crime novels, and deeply personal or science fiction narratives—Mikaël Ollivier is a storyteller, the this he was looking for in his teens. Publications Among his most recent works published by Thierry Magnier: Perched in a Tree, ya paperback collection, 2010; Tsunami, ya paperback collection, 2009; The Alibi, ya novel collection, 2008; Everything Must Go, ya novel collection, 2007; My Father Was Still Dead Yesterday, ya novel collection, 2006; Blood Brothers, ya novel collection, 2006; The Great Mystery, ya paperback collection, 2006.

I’m sitting on my mother’s lap, there’s a photo of it. It’s dark, my chubby little baby face is lit only by four angel chime candles, this tiny mobile on a shiny brass pedestal. The flames form columns of hot air, turning spokes which, themselves, turn a spindle bearing three angels waltzing faster and faster, causing their little metal arms to joyously tinkle the little bells. My parents turned the lights off to better contrast the flames glimmering against the metal. The angels started turning, noiselessly at first. The reflections on the ceiling seemed to ripple as if it were a body of water. Then the first chime, and another, and another, then more frequent, closer together. The angel waltz hit its cruising speed, and the sound of the little bells became rhythmic. Ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding … . A soaring ride—the promise of a magical future, of a spellbinding softness, of the simple, poetic, and fragile beauty of life.

And on that Christmas Eve, I saw the angels in my sister’s face on the other side of the table. Alix was agape—attentive, immobile, and as transfixed as I— her eyes shining with a golden, luminous dance.

1 It’s Fun at First ikea’s fun at first. It’s like walking into a dollhouse. Picture a giant Gulliver, sprawled on the carpet, feet crossed above his butt, peering from one room to the next, moving these figurines and furniture around with his pudgy hands. On this particular day, the dolls were me, my dad and mom. And the pudgy hand of destiny really moved us around in unexpected ways. It was Saturday, I was 16, well almost, in a day I would be. My birthday falls on what’s considered the twelfth day of Christmas, the Epiphany. I was born for the king cake, except I’m the toy trinket inside. ikea—I mean, what we were looking for there was my birthday present, which I was celebrating the next day. I so hoped it wasn’t my only present, because furniture is like clothing, boring, practical, it’s not really a present, because birthday or not, eventually you’ve got to buy it. Having your birthday so close to Christmas is already a pain, and forget the stupid candles on the king cake, because half the time you’ve already guessed where the toy trinket is just by trying to stick the candles in. But anyway, my big gift was going to be new furniture for my room. I was so tired of my child’s desk, my wooden toy chest/ bench polished by my ancestor’s backsides, the bed with iron posts that I’ve totally outgrown and which used to belong to my mom and hers before that. We had come to buy furniture that would really belong to me. Gran, my mom’s mom, Marie-Luce Legrand, née Alembert, said that it was stupid because she had everything we needed at her house, but my dad and I were fed up with Alembert hand-me-downs. If we needed that heavy museum stuff we could go to one, thank you very much. We needed air, we dreamed of new things made of plywood, particle board, things temporary and bright. Like stuff I could demolish in the peace and quiet of my own room, without endless reminders about generations before me having not even nicked it. To reach the bedroom section, you have to go through the living rooms, couches, make a stop at the office furniture then cross the kitchens. No choice. ikea is like running in place, you slog, you trudge, you only think you’re making headway when in fact you’re stuck between fake dividers separating fake interiors. You bisect parts of homes and at first you want to try everything. You want to try the chairs, the couches, the lives that are being shown off to

make sure you would feel comfortable in them. To make sure you would feel comfortable living an easy, harmonious life, with perfectly placed—not too heavy—furniture, with uncomplicated art works on the wall—the ones everyone knows and likes, with cool but not lame lamps, with responsible but not overbearing parents. Life as a slick magazine spread or tv series where things are always bright, sunny, witty, no one has a cowlick, your friends are your friends forever, there’s no homework, the antique clock doesn’t tick, and there are no smells of leek soup, bleach, mold or furniture polish. Quickly overwhelmed by all the choices, hesitations, measurements, and reference guides, you lunge for the nearest kitchen stool, totally spent.

Mikaël Ollivier

The World in Hand

Ordinary Reaching the checkout at ikea is an achievement. No one, as seen from the outside world, would ever believe you could fit so much stuff and people into a hangar-like structure. It’s like repeatedly checking your watch when you’re impatient, and time slows up even more. The more ground you cover at ikea the further it seems you have to go, bummed at not being any closer to the exit at every turn. My parents almost came to blows over my loft bed. Almost, because no one argues in our family, no one speaks above a reasonable tone of voice, above all on my mom’s side, it’s a question of education. You’ve got to admit that yelling is a stretch when your name is Marie-des-Neiges, or “Snowy Mary.” I’ve dreamed of having a mother named Patricia, Isabelle, or Valerie. “Snowy Mary” came from Gran. My father is Patrick. White. Patrick White. And I’m Pierre. Pierre-Marie actually, but only Gran uses my full name. My grandfather is Paul. Only “P’s” in our family for the men, like the way dogs born in a certain year only get names that start with a specific letter. Gran hates her daughter’s married name and hers too. Legrand is so beneath an Alembert. And White? But mostly Snowy Mary White, it’s redundant, white on white. Gran says it’s “ordinary.” It’s practically her favorite word, she says it all the time, with this little frown. And ikea is “ordinary.” like Legrand and White. Had she ever actually been there, she would know that ikea is less ordinary than it’s exhausting. By the time we got to the bedroom section, all our initial excitement had long since faded, and my parents and I were fixated on one thing: seeing daylight again. Having crossed through the rugs, curtains, lamps, bathroom, kitchen accessories, and children’s areas, we finally found a stairway leading down to a giant space filled with dishes and stuff you feel you should buy in return for being released. The main floor is just as big as the upstairs one, and by this point we were stone silent. Every step my parents took was a

Christian Oster

Road Trip

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: October 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat mheissat@seuil.com Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

reproachful whisper in my ear that we were only here because of me, wasting an entire afternoon, aching all over, stiflingly hot, annoyed to be carrying our jackets, that we had bought a bunch of expensive and “ordinary” stuff that I didn’t even want anymore. We finally emerged into an immense, surreal space, packed floor-to-ceiling with large boxes. My mom scrounged a Euro coin from the bottom of her handbag for a shopping cart, which my dad got, and we began searching for my ready-to-assemble bedroom kit, elements of which we had already located, having written down their aisle locations with a tiny pad and pencil. This was heavy lifting, the energy for which was long gone, of course, the kind we’d had three hours ago. Finally, with the cart about as maneuverable as a dead donkey, my dad began increasing his stride, sensing that the checkout aisles were within reach. But we came screeching to a stop when we saw the long checkout lines. My mom looked like she was about to cry. She’d cried a lot over the past four years, for whatever reason, silently, and each time it tore me up inside. My dad sighed and got in line. I sat on the boxes containing my future desk, or a piece of my bed, who knows which. My dad said, “Can you imagine, we’ll have to put all this together when we get home?” adding quickly: “If it even fits in the car! Mom had this empty look, and I tried to make myself seem invisible. I sensed something dangerous in the air, between my dad’s uncertain tone and my mother’s glazed eyes. Something I didn’t understand but which weighed heavily on my shoulders, one of those adult mysteries that we young people will only understand much later, once it’s too late. I looked at the faces of the people around us waiting to pay, and saw only fatigue, listlessness, and doubt. I had the feeling that everyone was suddenly fed up with their lives after having fought their way through this life-size catalogue of everyday objects. Beep … Beep … ringing up my desk chair, my bedside lamp. Beep … My special anti-allergen boxspring. Beep … My birch veneer shelves … The funny thing about ikea is that in the end, you’re so fed up with it that paying is actually a relief.

Biography

Christian Oster was born in 1949. Winner of the 1999 Prix Médicis for Mon grand appartement which was adapted for the screen by Claude Berri, he is the author of 14 books published by Éditions de Minuit. He has also written crime thrillers and many books for children (for École des loisirs). Publications Among his more recent novels for Éditions de Minuit: Dans la Cathédrale, 2010; Trois homes seuls, 2008; Sur la dune, 2007; L’Imprévu, 2005 (The Unforeseen, The Other Press, us, 2006); Les Rendez-vous, 2003.

“I set off at the wheel on a summer’s day at half past one.” We know very little about what makes the narrator leave Paris and drive towards Marseilles, a city that came to him more as a word than a destination. Was it just the need to get away? That would be too easy. Perhaps it’s actually because he intuitively knows that it’s only by putting ourselves in the hands of fate that life finally comes up with something new.

With this story in which geography plays a major role, Christian Oster gives us one of his strongest novels. Its enigmatic ending has shades of tragedy—a rarity from an author known for humor and his taste for nonsense. Christian Oster always dreamed of writing a “road novel” in the style of the great American novelists. Now he’s done it. He takes us down the blue highways of central France, in the company of a narrator on a treasure hunt for the unknown.

I set off at the wheel on a summer’s day at half past one. I had a good car and enough gas to reach open countryside. It was only afterwards that the questions started. After filling the tank, I mean. At the same time, it was pretty straightforward. Given that I’d set off by heading south, I decided I might as well carry on. I just wanted to avoid Lyon, which meant that by nightfall I was lost somewhere in the mountains of the Massif central. Lost isn’t the word. I wound up in Riom. I don’t know if it’s a gloomy place. The weather was bleak. Around nine o’clock I had to find a hotel. Once I got to my room, I left it again to try and find the urge to sleep. Riom the city, then, at nearly ten o’clock at night. Luckily, I’d had supper early, a sandwich on the road. There was a café open, I sat outside. The terrace was deserted, it started raining. The few passers-by hurried on their way. They disappeared and no one else came by. I watched the rain splattering on the sidewalk. The temperature had changed, I hadn’t noticed. It was the kind of rain you get with a storm. The air was unusually hot, and right afterwards there were flashes of lightning. At first just a few, isolated ones, followed by distant rumbles, then the sky lit up, with blazing discharges. There was time to see them, as if they were imprinted as fractured bolts standing out against the black sky, which was now no longer so black, no longer had time to lapse back to black as the streaks soon came in such rapid succession that they overlaid one another and seemed to freeze in what had become whiteness. The rain grew heavier, falling in great milky droplets that spattered and foamed. I could hear it too, beating on the canopy I was sheltering under, its heavy drumming overriding the rumbling, and I thought to myself life was getting violent. I sunk my head between my shoulders.

I stayed there waiting for the rain to pass, but it wouldn’t pass, and the canopy sagged under the weight of the water, which was starting to drip onto me. I could feel it running down my back, and moved my chair. Then I thought I’d do better to go back. I was soaked when I reached the hotel. Up in my room I took off my clothes, wrung them out and hung them on hangers to dry. I was completely naked, it was still very humid, and on the bed I opened the roadmap I had brought in from the car. I was about a hundred miles from Brassac-les-Mines, where I knew Simon lived, and I thought I might drive past near the place, get closer to Simon, it was scarcely out of my way. Still thinking about the south, then, I considered Marseilles, Nice, some place on the sea, the sea setting a limit because, at the same time, I was beginning to think about a limit. I couldn’t see myself driving indefinitely. At that point I could only picture myself on the highway; I didn’t even think about walking, except to stretch my legs. That may only have been a temporary solution, driving in order to walk for a while, preferably at rest areas. Where you come across other people. I thought I needed to come across people, I couldn’t see myself as a solitary figure in the middle of a cornfield, for example, or a forest. I’d have felt like I was dying. And I wondered whether, when I’d set off, I simply felt a need to get away. In any event, that’s not what I would have told Simon, had I gone to see him. He wouldn’t have understood or even believed me, and that was one reason I didn’t want to see him. Other reasons had something to do with the questions he would obviously have asked me and that I didn’t feel like answering. All the same, as I said, I found the thought of getting closer to him reassuring. Simon was a friend I hadn’t seen for years but we were still in touch. We always talked of meeting, he came to Paris every now and then to look for old books. Of course, conversely, I hadn’t been to Brassac-les-Mines since Simon had moved there, or even before. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who knew Brassacles-Mines except for Simon. True, I didn’t know many people but even if I’d known a lot of people, I thought, what would persuade you to settle in Brassacles-Mines except to join a woman who was born there, as Simon had done, because there are schools in Brassac-les-Mines, which is where his wife was born and then stayed on as a teacher, and later headmistress, I’d seen a photo of her fifteen years ago. Simon used to talk about her a lot over the phone, then less so, and in fact he no longer talked about her at all, I didn’t even know whether they were still together, the only thing I was sure of was that Simon still lived in Brassac-les-Mines, where he had a small tire company, or a tirechanging company, he didn’t talk much about that anymore either, I hoped he hadn’t gone bankrupt. Either way, he owned his own house, and he was always keen to tell me about his house, particularly his bookshelves. Simon could actually have lived absolutely anywhere and he would still have talked about his bookshelves, about his problem with bookshelves, because he had a problem,

Christian Oster

Road Trip

Michel Quint

The Lovers of Frankfurt

a problem with classification, aggravated by a problem of integration. I listened to him indulgently because, not having the same problem, I didn’t really care. I didn’t read much anymore, I’d been struggling for six months with a history of the United States that I kept starting again from the beginning. I couldn’t seem to get a clear picture, a good enough image of how Virginia was created. Mind you, if that had been my only difficulty, I wouldn’t have left. And actually I hadn’t brought any books with me, apart from The Mysterious Island, which I reread regularly. Although that evening, to be honest, I had no desire to open it. I wanted to go to bed and to sleep, to be onto the next day and back on the road.

Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Sarah Hirsch sarah@editions-heloisedormesson.com Translation: Alison Anderson alisona@mindspring.com

In fact, the next morning it felt like setting off again. I mean: from the beginning. But with the awareness that I had been moving already. Palpably. The temperature had dropped a little. I’d slept well. I’d only noticed one couple in the hotel, Dutch, identified later by their license plates. They were visiting the region. I could have done that too. I still could. No one was expecting me. The truth is I changed direction. I don’t know whether people generally take an interest in the volcanoes of the Auvergne. Whether they bear in mind that these are volcanoes, even though extinct. Personally, I tend to forget. I drove through a landscape of low mountains, with rounded hills and very few peaks, and looked at the vegetation. At one point I got out of the car and climbed my way up to some thorny copses. There was no one there, the ground was quite bare, and it was starting to get hot again. I thought to myself that it was all actually very beautiful, very quiet and very hostile. That you could see far, far away, too far. That I didn’t dislike the mountains but what mattered was knowing what they were doing there and who for. I wasn’t sure about all this. I’d have liked to see a woman appear on the hillside. In that setting I might have found her interesting. But at the same time I was familiar with that sort of situation, how people you meet in a privileged setting stand out. Particularly as on my own, in the wild, I feel vaguely pathetic. Aware that I constitute prey. Mind you, I was prepared to defend myself. Even with respect to the landscape itself, I kept my distance. Or rather, between it and me there was a distance I knew I must keep. It was there, then, I gauged it by eye. No harmony. No capitulation. I stood on my own two feet and walked away. All the same, I did stop once or twice. To see. Not for too long. I thought about remembering what I could see. I might as well say I’d turned my back on Brassac-les-Mines. You only have to look at the map. I ended up over towards Volvic. I drove through the town without stopping, with thoughts of mineral water and the names of different mineral waters running though my head as I listed them mechanically. In the distance I’d seen mountains above the tree-topped hills. It was then about midday and I felt I’d been on the road several days.

Publisher: Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson

Biography

Michel Quint was born in 1949 in the Pas-de-Calais. He began his career as a professor, first of classical letters then drama, before turning to writing plays for theatre, television, and radio, notably for France Culture (in 1986 he was awarded the sacd prize for new radio talent), and finally concentrating on the roman noir. In 1989 he was awarded the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière for Billard à l’étage, his breakthrough novel, and in 2000 he won the Cinéroman Prize and the sgdl prize for Effroyables Jardins (published in English as In Our Strange Gardens), and subsequently translated into 25 languages and adapted for the cinema by Jean Becker. Michel Quint continues to publish novels on a regular basis and devotes his time to writing. Publications His most recent novels include: La Folie Verdier, Éditions du moteur, 2011; Avec des mains cruelles, Joëlle Losfeld, 2010; Les Joyeuses, Stock, 2009 (republished by Gallimard in the Folio Collection, 2010); Une ombre sans doute, Joëlle Losfeld, 2008 (republished by Gallimard in the Folio Collection, 2009); Max, Perrin, 2008 (republished by Pocket, 2008).

Florent, a young French publisher, is attending the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time. Reluctant to go to Germany, where his father was killed, he was also hesitant about taking part in the rituals of the publishing industry’s yearly Mecca. Nevertheless, he books a room in a prestigious luxury hotel, the sort of place a self-respecting publisher is duty-bound to stay. Florent casts a cynical eye over the cocktail receptions and encounters that are all part of the literary sales show. But a flamboyant brunette is about to wreak havoc and throw his whole life into question. A powerful player at

a major publishing house, this bold, impulsive woman seems to be luring him into a trap with unknown consequences. Their sensual, seemingly casual love affair is set against a background of political intrigue recalling a bloody era when ex-Nazis and the BaaderMeinhof Group were part of everyday life. A cast of vibrant, eccentric characters contributes to Michel Quint’s incisive text, which recreates the unique atmosphere of the world’s largest book fair. The novel opens with a double murder that sparks off a thrilling investigation full of unexpected twists.

No one can take this night away from me. Even if I’m being conned, even if it’s all been just calculated pretense. Someone wants something from me. Such lies and swindles I wouldn’t mind in my everyday existence if they were all so sweet. I know that Lena is completely, unintentionally sincere. Or at least I hope so, whatever inadmissible motivation—or law of the literary jungle—lies behind her machinations on the seduction front. Behind the half-closed curtains there’s a faint glow and already a milky dawn, for we’re further east than in France. She sleeps on her stomach. A while ago she got up, furtively, while it was still dark out, with light only from the streetlamps. I was half-awake and she shushed me with a finger to her lips. She took her key from a tiny pocket in her dress and went out, while I went back to sleep, exhausted from her caresses. I opened my eyes again briefly when she came back, still naked and unembarrassed, sucking on the palm of her hand. She’d gashed it while clumsily cutting open a box of medication. Darling, it’s nothing, go back to sleep. Now I’m wide awake. Day is coming fast. I can hear the chambermaids whispering in the hall, the muted rumble of their carts. Just like the place Maman lives now, shut away from the world, where I go to visit when I can get up the courage. She hardly ever recognizes anyone any more. Muffled sounds, demented old people somberly murmuring, breaking now and again into a plaintive cry. A woman calls out to a man, using different names. Étienne, Étienne for an hour, then Jacques, Jacques, loudly, imperatively. Then she’s quiet until the next day. Dirty silence veils the hospice like some ugly cloth covering a birdcage. Lena’s words come back to me. Besides the rushed pleas and commands of lovemaking, there were words to the effect that she was going to kill me. No doubt she used a hyperbolic metaphor, casually tossed out, with

no sting implied. A hyperbolic metaphor can’t hurt a soul. “Old bastard,” and “fat bitch” might be annoying but don’t hurt, and in this case “kill you” must have meant something like destroy my power, eliminate me from publishing, scratch me off the map. No, she wasn’t putting on an act. Neither was I. This morning, exhausted from lovemaking, I haven’t been drinking or smoking, I’m lucid, I know that from now on my life will revolve around her, depend on her. I go back to sleep. Later, in a sharper light, I place my hand on her round buttock, slide it down to the crease where it joins the thigh, circle back to the hollow of her hip. She really does resemble—no cliché—an amphora. I roll on my side and kiss her flank and what I can see of a crushed pert breast. At the same time the noise in the hall is getting louder; there are exclamations. Curt voices, in German. That’s Sandor, no? Or Fitz? Throwing on a dressing gown to see what all the fuss is about, I toss another one to Lena, who is immodestly sitting up in bed, mascara running, lips swelled from kisses. Someone’s knocking on the door, a woman’s voice, slight accent: “Monsieur Vallin?” “Coming!” Lena covers herself and rushes into the bathroom while I crack open the door. Frau Meyer is there, looking austere and haughty but ravaged, as if she’d lost everything in the stock market. “There’s been an unfortunate incident. Herr Schulmeister and Frau von Hochpfalz … They were killed last night.” Remembering that I was the one who was supposed to be killed, I’m on the verge of blurting out That’s impossible when Sandor comes to the door: “Is Fräulein Vogelsang … ” No need for him to finish his sentence. Lena is at my side, pulling tight the belt of her dressing gown: “Yes? What does this all have to do with Monsieur Vallin and myself?” “A blood-stained knife has been found in your room. The police would like to hear your version of the events …”

Michel Quint

The Lovers of Frankfurt

The rest of the Book Fair for Lena and I will feel like an epidemic of the plague. So we must seize the moment, and that’s what we promise each other as we get dressed—I in my tweed, Lena in what the cops obligingly bring her, a sort of black caftan cloak and the famous red dress with décolletage—completely inappropriate given she’s a suspect, making her appear guilty, diabolical, not to mention naked under it all. No one knows that except me. Whence what I believe: eat, fuck, take your pleasure, live intensely before your imminent and inexorable death. We will seize every chance, whenever the investigation allows. Those who love, and who tomorrow will be separated or die, are doomed to incompatible destinies, and they will ring the last drop of pleasure

from every moment. Ave Caesar, qui morituri … The morning of the murder, because we know the police are going to be persnickety and love-spoiling, we tacitly agree to spend the next three days grabbing every chance for a quick caress. We’ll fuck wherever we can, we’ll be indecent and even scandalous. So what. The police have commandeered the swingers’suite for interrogations. Strange the contrast between these still, impassive, clean-cut guys in perfectly pressed uniforms and the erect cocks and female asses on offer. My interview goes quickly, with Sandor as interpreter. Fräulein Vogelsang spent the night with me, except for a few minutes early in the morning when she went to get some medicine from her room. Yes, that’s when she hurt herself. Nothing more to say. Then I wait for Lena to come out after her questioning. Has she been accused of murder? When she joins me, she thanks me for telling the truth, our stories match. For the time being they’ve asked her not to leave the hotel premises or the Book Fair. She is confident that just as soon as they run a few tests on her knife she’ll be cleared. It’s foregone that the lab won’t find anything but her own blood and maybe that of some pigs bled long ago by her grandfather, to whom the knife originally belonged, … It’s a switchblade for hunting wild boar, with a blade four inches long and stag’s horn handle … Only one hitch: she was ruthless in her deposition when it came to Ilse and Hermann, with words to the effect that they ought to be barred from book fairs that receive public funds. She tells me this at Willy’s, the hotel bar. Even with our lives turned upside down and those brutal deaths, so near and incomprehensible right now, we need some distance before feeling either sorrow or indifference, and so we can’t help touching one another, or stop stealing kisses that taste of the beer on our lips. Meanwhile, Fitz and Sandor await their turn with the police—Magda is in there at the moment. They are unshaven, haven’t slept, still the worse from drinks the night before. Now they join us in the bar, with its mellow atmosphere and brown leather club chairs beneath its molded ceiling and the circular bar counter with the Egyptian column in the center. Sandor is up to the minute on everything, his cell phone never stops ringing. He listens, shuts his eyes, mmm-hm, stone-faced, hangs up. The news has begun to spread through the hotel and among the exhibitors. A special newsflash has been shown on television: double murder at the Book Fair. A couple with their throats cut. Gossip is rampant. In Berlin, Hermann’s wife Rina has been brought in for questioning and it seems she has no alibi. She collapsed on learning not only that her husband is dead but also that he’d been having an affair with Ilse, the little slut who once upon a time voted left-wing. But to travel from Berlin to Frankfurt and back again so quickly, no, it’s impossible. The fact they found her at home on the Ku’damm so soon after the crime proves she’s innocent. According to Sandor, that’s as far the police have gotten. Which means it must be a crime of

passion: another mistress or yet another of Ilse’s lovers—she’s a very liberated single woman … Neither of them was exactly a cold fish—could you say they were hot? So that’s a first very plausible lead. Or it could be a political assassination. Hermann was stark naked when he opened the door of his room, then turned back to the bed before being murdered. So he knew his aggressor. A former member of the Red Army Faction back in business? Sandor believes that’s a more likely scenario, as do the police. Which is why they suspect Lena, for she’s never hidden her anti-npd opinions. But the investigators’attention could well shift onto him, because he used to support the Red Army Faction. And nothing has been stolen, not even cash … Final hypothesis, Fitz’s this time; he’s more of a doomsday preacher than ever. It was professional jealousy over the commercial success of a lousy idea. Not even chick-lit. Slut-lit is more like it. Any number of suspects fit that hypothesis. The reason was that Hermann owned the corporate name, and by the time Rina inherits and assumes control of his “Lilaserie,” the collection will be dead and buried … As for me, my thoughts keep circling back to my father, who died in Germany, assassinated by the Red Army Faction. Did he have a mistress?

Michel Quint

The Lovers of Frankfurt

Anna Roman

The Valley of Absinthe

During the 1980s, L., 40, married, with two children, decides to take part in a program that prepares prison inmates for a college entrance exam. The Algerian War, the France’s regime in Spain, and Latin American dictatorships have all taught her about political prisons. But she has never set foot in a French penitentiary. Now she meets with about twenty students in one. One of the “detainees” soon disappears, transferred to Clairvaux—the high-security prison and former abbey founded by the

Publisher: Éditions de l’Aube Date of Publication: September 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Marion Hennebert marion.hennebert@orange.fr Translation: Jeanine Herman jeanine_herman@yahoo.com

12th century saint, Bernard de Clairvaux, in the “valley of absinthe.” When he writes to her, she is surprised but readily recalls the quiet student. So begins a correspondence that becomes increasingly intimate and eventually leads to a romantic crescendo. An epistolary novel in which the ancient prison is itself the protagonist, laying people bare in every sense.

Prison

Biography

Anna Roman, a teacher and translator, lived in Algeria before returning to France. She is a specialist in Latin American cinema. This is her first novel.

She waits a long time in the wintry cold in front of the steel-plated door. Several people in uniforms or civilian clothes pass through it with no visible emotion. She sees the enormous black gate as it is raised like a drawbridge and lowered again for one of the trucks parked by the forest. She is alone at the entrance when finally she is allowed to enter. They search her bag thoroughly. She takes the metal items from her pockets, passes through the security gate, and finds herself in a fenced-in corridor that crosses an empty lot. Big black crows, as fat, she thinks, as those in the Tower of London, stand motionless in puddles of melting snow. The building as she approaches it seems to sink into the ground. She sees two hands stick out from barred windows, one groping for the other to pass along an object. It is the most desolate place in the world. She is cold and recalls the Napoleonic boarding school of her childhood, which suddenly seems cozy with its double gallery of arcades and its courtyard enclosed by a sixteen-foot wall. The plane trees grew beyond that wall, like trees of freedom, glorious and insolent. Here the forest has remained on the other side of the enclosure. She is directed toward long, underground corridors, closed off by highsecurity fences, leading to rotundas where guards and cameras keep watch. A futuristic nightmare, articulated in the shape of a star, punctuated by caged stairwells. She gets the sense that this enormous, motionless machine can

never be heated; it exudes iciness. Barred doors slam shut, voices cry out. She rings and explains herself to a guard who accompanies her to a room where twenty students are waiting. “Aren’t you afraid?” he asks. The question seems out of place. No, she only feels inspired. A few hours later, back at home, she stands impatiently in front of the door, which is blocked by her daughter playing Chinese jump rope. Excited and rosycheeked, Lena dismantles the barricade, crying, “Mama, mama, I made a new friend! The teacher was telling us about King François I and Bayard. We looked at each other and went pfft, like we were sneezing. We laughed. We went down the same steps pushing and shoving a little, and we laughed. Tomorrow, I’ll find out where she lives.” And she goes back to her game with renewed vigor. Seated at her desk while Lena continues to laugh and play, she rereads the list of names, lingering over the signatures. She did not dare ask for enrollment sheets or photos from those the administration calls detainees. She organizes the various texts she has prepared, smiles as she rereads the lines by Francis Ponge, offered as a footbridge to help start a dialogue in that frigid classroom, poorly lit by high transoms. “Suppose every painter—the most delicate, Matisse, for example—had only one big pot of red, one big pot of yellow, one big pot of etcetera to make his paintings, the same pot that every painter since antiquity, and not just every painter, but every concierge, every construction worker, every peasant, dipped a brush in, and you painted with that. They’ve stirred their brushes around, and here Matisse comes and takes this blue, this red, sullied, let’s say, for seven centuries … He has to give the impression of pure color … ” The guards keep coming over to peer through the window. Annoyed, Yazid— she latched onto his name immediately—burst out sarcastically: “We’re the ones who’ll protect you here. They’re jealous. You don’t have that prison visitor look. They’re going to ask for classes, too.” She wants to be close to them but not complicit. It’s too easy to begin by making fun of the guards. Francis Ponge again: “ … Poetry is within everyone’s reach. If everyone had the courage of their tastes and their associations, if everyone had the courage of their ideas and expressed that honestly! All you have to do is wait … find the living thing … Words are so dusty.” They started to talk about the words they liked, the meaning of words, words that had lost their clarity. One of them observed her silently. Under his dark curls, he looked like a Greek wrestler escaped from a Dionysian fresco. Dionysus in chains, she said to herself, trying to avoid his somber, overly insistent gaze.

She looks for an old volume of the Alpina encyclopedia, purchased at the flea market in Vanves, its pages as brittle as the ruined frescoes of Pompeii it reproduces in black and white. At dinner, her son wants to know everything about her new “college” and what her new “students” did to end up there. What were their offenses, their crimes? Why would she know? She’s no judge. But she admits to the same curiosity. What do they say about them? Nothing special but that makes their situation all the more upsetting. Prison is not a concentration camp but it’s still unbearable to be locked up twenty-two hours out of twenty-four, sharing a cell with one, two, or three people you haven’t chosen. As a result of sense deprivation and infantilization, you find yourself turning into a robot. What does she think of the institution? She responds with banalities—that society is protecting itself, that it builds prisons more likely to punish than reeducate. But do we seek anything to replace them?

Anna Roman

The Valley of Absinthe

The prison, during these first months, occupies her more and more. In this place that strips you of everything, where the desperate need for authenticity eliminates small talk, each word, each look, has weight. She wonders if every person who enters a prison as she does, assured of the ability to get out again, feels the same uneasiness. This big institutional machine provokes archaic states of mind, contrasting omnipotence with impotence so unsettlingly that even a mere visitor does not come out unscathed. Everything calls for the creation of another space, a space for reflection but also for freedom and indeed imagination. And so one day she finds herself telling fairy tales. Yazid said that he’d been intoxicated when he read A Hundred Years of Solitude. She talked about “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” evoking the García Márquez of the sixties when he was an unknown drifter in Paris, rounded up in all the raids because he looked like a door-to-door rug merchant, even though he didn’t speak a word of Arabic. Against the gray rationality of subterranean prison walls, she talked about Tardieu, Gaudí, the Baroque, color, invention, and Cortázar’s cronopios crunching the great violet-rose of time at the heart of the artichoke-clock. Her new students are courteous, warm, notably attentive. They hand in rambling papers in which their semi-self-taught trains of thought disconcert and delight her. If he had been born in Neuilly, Yazid would have been at Polytechnique instead of in jail. She is sure of it. He writes: “I want to consider this period of my life a season in hell, to become stronger, more attentive to others … My life has never been something of my own choosing. Until now, I’ve pretty much just endured it. Now, whatever it is, I will be the one to choose it!” In a single year, he will assimilate the entire high school mathematics program; and he will work with passion, in spite of his upcoming trial. He has decided to become a computer scientist.

Marianne Sluszny

The Brother of the Hanged Man

One day the Greek wrestler is gone. He had been “extracted,” she was told. (As the Littré says: To extract: To pull something from a place, from a body in which it is formed or inserted. To extract stones from a quarry, a thorn from a foot. To extract a bullet, a tooth. By extension: To extract a prisoner from prison for an appearance in court, in order to be transferred, etc.) Where was he taken? The question was not allowed. She realizes she misses his silence, his rebellious air, his gaze. The Mediterranean warmth he brought to the freezing classroom. She thought he was Tuareg. In fact, he is Armenian.

Publisher: Éditions de la Différence Date of Publication: August 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Frédérique Martinie contacts@ladifference.fr Translation: Pascale Torracinta pascale_torracinta@hotmail.com

First Contact One day she receives a letter. Hello, I’m letting you know I was parachuted into Detention Center C. I hope you’re not too surprised I’m writing you. I thought you were very nice. You listened to us. You didn’t refuse to understand us. Your classes were my only moments of pleasure. Here I feel a bit lost. I’m not complaining; I knew the rules of the game ahead of time. I played and I lost. Lost three years of my life, which I would have preferred spending with my son. Those are the risks you take. For all these reasons, I’m writing to you. But don’t feel obliged to reply. I would find it normal if you didn’t. I’m far from depressed. With people like you on the other side, it’s reassuring for the future. In friendship, V.

I was touched that you wrote me. Your sudden transfer, so close to the exam, surprised us all. After your trial, they could’ve given you some time in custody to take it. We didn’t know where you were. We asked if you could take the exam if you wanted, and I’ve just sent your address to the other instructors. Do you feel less lost? You were the silent one I imagined crossing deserts more readily than sitting in a cell… I’m sending you some texts and a reproduction of snowy Mount Ararat, under separate cover, as a greeting from the land of your ancestors. (The traces of jam on the snow are the work of my daughter, just now. Please excuse her.) L.

She responds immediately with a card.

Biography

Marianne Sluszny lives in Brussels. For the last twenty years she has worked for rtbf (Radio Television of the French Community of Belgium) as a producer of cultural programs and documentaries. She is a professor of philosophy at the National Institute of Higher Education of Visual Arts of the Cambre and she has also taught at the National Institute of Higher Education of Theatre Arts (insas). The Brother of the Hanged Man is her second novel. Publications Toi, Cécile Kovalsky, published by Éditions de la Différence, 2005. It won the prize for First Book in the French Community of Belgium as well as the Lucien-Malpertuis Prize from the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature in Belgium.

Marianne Sluszny’s first novel, Toi, Cécile Kovalsky, described a family legend and the hardship of certain members of the Jewish Diaspora who had emigrated to Brussels—who were less integrated than they thought. Marianne Sluszny revisits the same themes in The Brother of the Hanged Man. Thomas, a young movie director devastated by his breakup with Rivka, the daughter of Orthodox Jewish

parents, discovers a series of notebooks in a safe that tell the life of the grandfather of his ex-fiancée, a man called Meier, born in 1880 in Siedlice, Poland. He becomes fascinated with the life of this man who was in perpetual exile, appalled by the hanging of his brother Saul by the Cossacks in 1905, and he decides to make a movie about the man’s turbulent fate.

“The Farce of the Dead Man Keeping Watch” By Myriam Feldman Brussels, November 1963 I, Meier Kovalsky, a stateless Jew born in 1880 in Siedlice, Poland, a town then under Tsarist occupation, have taken my last breath. I died twenty-four hours ago, but I am still here keeping watch, although nobody knows it, defying fate to achieve one of my dearest dreams: attending my own funeral. I have always been a good actor and I hope that no one will be able to tell the difference between an authentic corpse and me. Having worn these boots for many years as I traveled the roads of Europe, I am hoping that Mother Nature will be kind enough to grant me a few more hours. I am appalled by the idea that a dead man cannot attend his own funeral. Why deny this pleasure to someone condemned to never enjoy anything else? I have kept my childlike curiosity, and it is without malice and with a twinge of sorrow for the grief of my partner Hélène, my children and my grandchildren, that I am thrilled at the thought of watching my family and friends mourn my departure for the eternal world. I have always loved acting and this gift has allowed me to slip through the net many times. I enjoyed making people laugh. This shared happiness softened the scars that History engraved in my heart. In the old days, in Poland, I was active in Yiddish theatre with my circle of young agitator friends. Then, in the Diaspora, with small companies, I produced and acted in plays by Shalom Aleichem, Shalom Asch, and Shalom

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An-Sky1. As you can see, there has been a lot of Shaloms in my artistic career… me thumbing my nose at the century’s turmoil! At this point, my cadaverous mask displays—although nobody notices—a mischievous grin. It is decided, I will play the part of the great organizer on the day of my funeral. Since Hergé has created a talking dog (I can still see him turning round and round with his Tintin, on the sign that hung above an apartment building near the Gare du Midi, a neighborhood where I spent the last thirty years of my life), why can’t I take my mind off the gloomy atmosphere of the funeral parlor by imagining myself as the master of ceremonies of my own farewell? A play in which I will act the main part, ramrod straight in front of the tearful crowd and sporting the indestructible grey coat that gives me, according to some jealous friends and those who have a sharp tongue, the look of an apparatchik from the Soviet Communist Party. Ideally, a movie director will film my performance as an actor from beyond the grave. No doubt that I will have as much stage presence as Louis Jouvet, Pierre Fresnay, Michel Simon, or Raimu. My head high, encircled with the halo of my splendid white mane, my fiery gaze looking towards the infinite, my left hand curled inside the hand of the Grim Reaper, while the other remains free to thank those—and especially those women— who will give me the pleasure of their company until the final goodbye. As I have just hinted, I was very fond of women, and despite the fact that I lived in an era of great modesty, I enjoyed their smiles as much as their backsides, their ethereal souls as much as their moist depths. A quick thought here for the sensual ones who would wake up a dead man: they should not hesitate to come forward and congratulate me before the curtain comes down. Too bad that Maria Walschots, the mother of my two sons, dead after suffering a heart attack in late fall of 1944, cannot be here to attend this performance. Born into a working class family in the seaport of Antwerp, she was really Flemish. I had met her at the beginning of the century in the workshop of a diamond merchant where we both worked, polishing the stones. How beautiful she was with her dark hair and silky curls, her sparkling brown eyes, her soft skin and dark complexion that made one want to lose oneself in the mounds and curves of her voluptuous body! Shortly before dying, this woman who had shared my bed pronounced these terrible words: “I don’t want to be buried with the Jews.” What a slap in the face! I was grief-stricken, consumed by remorse at the sound of those unexpected words. This woman with the Brueghelian physique and a temperament prone to excess but no taboos, what hard times I must have given her, for her to refuse to be eaten by philo-semitic maggots! So Maria was buried in Christian soil and I have decided to join her there. In fact, my space has been reserved in Anderlecht’s communal graveyard. I delight in the reading of the letters and telegrams of condolences that my children have received, above all when Fernand, a brilliant politician of

1. Better known as Samuel Rappoport.

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The Brother of the Hanged Man

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2. In Yiddish, the word has a pejorative connotation and refers to a non Jewish woman.

3. Unleavened bread traditionally eaten by Jews during the week-long Passover holiday. 4. A type of aspirin.

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the Socialist party, forwards to Saul a letter from Arthur Gilson, the Christian Social Secretary of the Interior. Still, despite this brief moment of glory, anxiety tickles my mortal remains. I fear that the Orthodox Jews will come and create havoc by making sure that I obtain against my will the privilege of decomposing in the soil of Moses’law. Which shows that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and that bearded men, like other zealots, are determined to save the souls they think have gone astray. I have always been a bad Jew in the eyes of religious people. Beside my union with a shiksa2 and the two illegitimate children who came out of her unholy womb, I have deserted the synagogue and spent the best part of my life chatting away in the streets, advocating the mixing together of human cultures and the abolition of private property. Why would religious people want to claim my corpse? Has my behavior these last few years given them a glimmer of hope? The source and the mouth of the river of life? I confess that in my old age I have allowed myself a kind of regression back to the amniotic liquid of my childhood traditions, enjoying the primeval bath as the foam of the patriarchal waves rose to warm my lonely man’s carcass. Once again, I became close to those who were more attached to traditions than I was and I covered my skull with the kippa to share Passover and Rosh Hashanah meals with them. At the table, I, the frail old man, felt my heart warmed by the ancient sharing, and exaltation as I listened to the sacred texts. But let’s return to my plans for the future. My desire to go beyond my duedate is especially strong since I believe that I have been deprived of my last moments. No later than five days ago, I was striding down Fiennes Street in Anderlecht to get my newspapers and run some errands. After some reading, a short nap, and talking politics with my neighbors, I felt the urge to switch to a higher gear around seven in the evening. I had eaten my Matzo 3 bread with butter and salt, noisily sipped my tea and lemon with my shaky lips (my way of playing the old fogey … ), had chewed my apple, swallowed the five pills of Veganine 4 I was administering to myself with particular determination since I knew it worried my family. All I was thinking about then was to get back to my den, my printing house, my world, my pride. Aware of the sudden acceleration of my personal chronometer, I knew that there was no time to waste. Leaving the apartment where Hélène, my partner since 1946, had tried to hold me, I hurtled down the stairs of the building to get back to the store. There, I turned the lights back on, plugged in the machines, and felt a sense of relief at the thought that Abraham Sade, the associate who never leaves me alone for a single second—as if I had relapsed back into a second childhood— was no longer getting in my way. After looking affectionately at the printing fonts and cases, I thought about my typographer friends with whom I had tried to change the world, and got back to work. What a job it was to print the announcements for the wedding of Lenin’s daughter and Zinoviev’s son, and

the invitations of the nobodies—those people who live in obscurity but still radiate the authentic light of mankind. My job was to announce weddings and births, but I did not care about the rules trapping men in their pitiful clannish and social enclosures. Thanks to my tools, my technique, and my artistic sense, I presented the union of the daughter of Fienkelstein, the furrier, with the son of Beyer de Rilke, the businessman; I announced the birth of the the DupontLipschitz’fourth child and organized an exceptional party to welcome the baby, with a priest humming Yiddish tunes, a rabbi declaiming Baudelaire, a secular counselor reciting a Surah, and a minister singing the Internationale … Hélène would appear at the village hall at regular intervals. Why do women have this killjoy attitude? As the hours went by, her face would change: her features would droop, her hair would hang loose from her bun and her robe would be buttoned the wrong way. Despite myself, I felt ashamed comparing her shabby figure with the cheerful faces and beautiful clothes of the dancers twirling around me. Invariably, around four in the morning, I would surrender and agree to go home to bed. In any case, I had done my job; it was time for the revelers to go home, to go back to their cocoons, to calm their emotions. I don’t usually bear grudges, but I resented Hélène’s behavior. Not so much her intrusions or her sighs, but the way she would look at me sideways or from over her glasses, as if she mistrusted me or no longer loved me. I would take my revenge wrapping myself up resolutely in the duvet at night, waiting for her to wake up with a cold ass; then I would act out the next scene, the one in which I would let my old carcass slide down to the floor. I would re-focus the attention on myself, yet I still felt unsatisfied. The concern of the beloved does not replace her passion … I had not fully realized the consequences of my behavior. After a few weeks, my children decided to send us both to a convalescent home. It was the beginning of the end. How can an able-bodied man spend his time in such a confined space, outside the hustle and bustle of daily life? Can we get better in the antechamber of death? Isn’t convalescence only for sick people? Recess, for children? Vacations, for fools? Even though I don’t forget that it has been obtained through years of struggle, to me this idle time conjures up nothing but boredom—a deadly boredom opening onto an infinite sleep. These are the reasons why today I resist the ineffable.

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Claire Wolniewicz

The Weeping Lady

Rita and Adam live together with their young son, Félix. Adam is a painter whose “off the beaten path” artwork is highly regarded by his gallery owner. After being away a few days, Adam returns home devoid of desire, energy and emotion; feelings of love and inspiration have inexplicably faded away. Around this time his grandmother, Joséphine, dies. At the funeral, he is reunited with Joséphine’s childhood friend, Marthe, who gives him Joséphine’s few mementos—photos, letters, several other possessions … Strange things start happening: Adam comes across pictures he does not remember

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: April 2011 Foreign Rights Manager: Maylis Vauterin maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr Translation: Tanyika Carey info@tanyikacarey.com

painting, artwork that doesn’t reflect his usual style. Images showing the back of a woman, scenes depicting various stages of a murder … More and more paintings appear, and Adam finally recognizes the recurring figure he has apparently been painting: Joséphine as a young woman. He later questions Marthe and tries to find witnesses to a long ago affair … Who was Joséphine? And who is he? … The Weeping Lady introduces the reader once again to Adam Volladier—a character from Ubiquity—and sheds light on the origins of his bizarre “non-personality,” while at the same time demonstrating how much family secrets can influence a person’s destiny.

Adam is a painter who finds himself lacking inspiration. Physically drained, he asks his neighbor Alice, an osteopath, to unblock his back and arms, thus bonding them in friendship. Adam and Rita are now separated. Félix, their six-year-old son, lives with his mother.

Biography

Born in 1966, Claire Wolniewicz is originally from Poland. She splits her time between the city and the country. Publications Terre légère, Viviane Hamy, 2009; Le Temps d’une chute, Viviane Hamy, 2008; Ubiquité, Viviane Hamy, 2005; Sainte Rita, patronne des causes désespérées, short stories, Finitudes, 2003.

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Morning, soft knocking on my door. The night before, I’d stretched out on the sofa and allowed my mind to drift after looking at the paintings of Joséphine. Sleep eventually overtook me and I was carried off, far away from my thoughts, questions, Marthe’s comments and my worries in general. Drowsy and disheveled, I answered the door. Alice was standing there, without her dog. “Hi, I’m not disturbing you, am I?” “Not at all, would you like to come in?” “No. I have a favor to ask of you. I thought that maybe …” She hesitates, embarrassed. “Go ahead.” “Would you mind looking after my dog the next couple of days?” “You won’t need him?” “Someone is taking me to the train station and then a friend is picking me up from there. She already has a dog—a male, like Hector. It could pose a problem … Another friend was supposed to take care of him but something came up at the last minute.” “Sure. You just want me to walk him?”

105

“Uh, not exactly … I wanted to ask you if … he could stay with you … He’s not used to being alone.” I’d never particularly cared for dogs but I wanted to be nice. “Of course, I’d be happy to.” “Really? Are you sure?” “Yes.” We went back to her place and she explained Hector’s routine, what he ate. “Do you want me to talk to him?” “You can if you want, but you don’t have to …” “When are you leaving?” “Right now.” “In that case …” I grabbed his bowls, dog food, mat and leash while she explained to him how long she’d be gone and who she was leaving him with. Simple, reassuring, sentences—she could have been talking to a child. With that, her friend charged in out of breath, urging her to hurry because she was double-parked. Alice bid Hector and me goodbye, then dashed out with her friend. The dog didn’t move as he watched her disappear from view, then turned to me as if waiting for my lead. I walked along briskly, tugging on the leash more than necessary. Hector wasn’t used to this pace or roughness. When I pulled too hard, he turned and looked at me inquisitively; I felt a pang of remorse. I apologized, but then five minutes later, I did it all over again. (…) My cell phone rang. It was Rita saying Félix had agreed to spend the night. I’d proposed the sleepover, counting on the dog to alleviate the tension between us. My son was dying to have a pet but we hadn’t given in yet. I stood there imagining my son’s joy as I watched Hector sniff a female Dalmatian … It was lunchtime, I had the whole afternoon to get organized. Buy a mattress, sheets, a nightlight—Félix was still afraid of the dark. A toothbrush, pajamas? No, Rita would pack a knapsack with all of his things. But I still needed to get milk and cereal, clean the loft, and buy a small chair—I ate at the coffee table, so Félix would need a lower chair. I stopped by some stores on the way home. At a bazaar, I found some star-shaped nightlights. I chose red, a stimulating, not exactly sleep-inducing color, but the only other color they had was green, and it was a dreadful, ghostly green at that. I also bought the sheets there. At another shop, I found a footrest that would place Félix at the same level as the coffee table. At every stop, I tied Hector to a pole or fence and made it a point to explain to him what I was doing. The dog not only listened but sat down immediately before the explanation as if he’d guessed my intentions. I didn’t

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bother to tie him up in front of the store where I bargained for the twin-sized mattress. I asked the manager if his salesperson could help me carry the mattress to my studio, a hundred meters away. When I asked him to watch the dog in my absence, the man leaned out to look at him. His face lit up: “Oh it’s Hector!” “You know him?” “Of course. He’s that lady’s dog, the blind lady. No problem. He’s a very good dog.”

Claire Wolniewicz

The Weeping Lady

Animals opened the doors of communication in an extraordinary way. Walls tumbled, mouths dropped open. Even children didn’t spark that much attention. Was it just Hector in particular? A dog bearing the name of a Trojan hero was bound to be more than a dog. I started seeing Hector in a different light. By six o’clock, I was ready. A Schubert quintet was gently playing in the bleachscented studio. I’d gone a little heavy on the bleach, but Rita expected her son to sleep in a relatively clean environment, so I knew she’d find the smell reassuring. The loft was practically wiped clean of all germs and the bed was adorned with clean, bright sheets. The red star lay next to the pillow and a mobile with huge, graceful, multicolored dancing elephants hung from the ceiling. The cupboards and fridge had milk, orange juice, cereal and jam. For dinner, I’d planned to let Félix have whatever he wanted. In short, I’d thought of everything. When I answered the door, Rita didn’t rush in to inspect the loft or the food in the cupboards. She stayed on the stoop. She looked at me but didn’t lower her guard as she held out Félix’s backpack. “It’s all there—his pajamas, t-shirt, underwear, clean socks, toothbrush and toothpaste. His solfège notebook is also in there, the class is at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. I’m warning you—he’s tired.” Tired meant that right now, Félix would be grumpy, whiny, and taciturn, and later, he was going to be a real pain. But the child who was dragging his feet toward me without even looking up, suddenly stopped in his tracks. “A dog! You got a dog!” “No, he’s not mine.” “You borrowed him?” “Not exactly. I’m taking care of him for a few days.” “Whose is he?” “A neighbor,” I said quietly, fearing Rita’s reproach. “He’s beautiful!” And with those initial questions answered, he rushed over to the dog as his mom left.

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Félix didn’t notice the loft, the mattress or the fresh sheets either, nor did he see the red star casting light on the flying pachyderms’bellies—all he saw was Hector. Hector with his thick, black fur, long tail, and floppy ears—“They’re so soft!” He inspected his paws, gray pads, nipples—“He’s got so many!”— and the red leather collar adorned with an orange bone. He studied the dog’s sparkling, chocolate-colored eyes, then went on to his eyelashes, gums, and teeth—“They’re really pointy!” The dog lay on his back and let Félix touch him all over, allowing the boy to blow in his ears and feel his muzzle. Fearing Hector might retaliate, I stood close behind Félix, ready to pounce at the slightest baring of teeth; but there was none, no annoyance, nothing. Félix was transformed. His fatigue was gone and he was brimming with enthusiasm. We quickly decided on dinner, then the three of us left and walked as long as our dinner schedule permitted. Luckily, our favorite takeout place, the Lebanese spot, was also the farthest away. Our nighttime outing was absolutely wonderful. Félix strode along proudly, Hector’s leash in hand. “Can I bring him home with me tomorrow?” “I don’t think your mother would like that. Besides, his owner left him with me.” “Daddy, I want one.” “Félix, we’ve already talked about this.” “Yeah, I know,” grumbled the little boy, “you and mom don’t want one, and I always will.”

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

Gallimard

Actes Sud

The Pathfinders u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Russian [Gelos]

Benchetrit Samuel

A Heart Outside Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (simplified characters)

Abecassis Eliette

Sephardi

Albin Michel

u Castilian [Les Esfera de los Libros]

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

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]

u Greek [Livanis] u Russian [Ripol]

Astier Ingrid

Quai des Orfèvres Gallimard

u Italian [Bompiani]

Aubry Gwenaëlle

No One

Mercure de France

u Croatian [Disput] u English [Tin House

Books, United States] u Hungarian [Joszoveg] u Italian [Barbès Editore] u Korean [Open Book] u Rumanian [Editura Univers] Bassignac Sophie

Back to Back JC Lattès

Honecker 21

u Turkish [Everest Publications]

Chalandon Sorj

My Traitor

Grasset & Fasquelle

u Castilian [Alianza] u Chinese (complex

characters) [Ten Points]

[Shanghai 99 Readers] u Dutch [Uitgeverlj Arena] u German [Aufbau Verlag] u Hebrew [Keter Publishing House] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Russian [Astrel Publishing House]

u English [The Lilliput Press, Ireland]

Berest Anne

Calmann-Lévy

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

u Italian [Mondadori]

Constantine Barbara

Tom, Little Tom, Little, Little Man, Tom u Castilian [Seix Barral] u Catalan

[Grup 62] u German [Blanvalet]

u Hungarian [Könyvmolyképzo Kiado] u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Korean

[Munhakdongne Publishing] u Russian [Center of Literary Production Pokolenie Publishers] Dantzig Charles

Hachette

My Name Is François

u Vietnamese [Nha Nam]

u Arabic (world rights) [Arab Scientific

u Italian [Nottetempo]

Besson Philippe

The Accidental Man

Grasset & Fasquelle Publishers]

Darrieussecq Marie

Julliard

Clèves

Verlag] u Korean [Woongjin] u Polish [Muza]

u German [Carl Hanser]

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch

Bizot Véronique

Prize Day Actes Sud

u German [Steidl Verlag]

Blas de Roblès Jean-Marie

The Midnight Mountain Zulma

P.O.L

u italien [Ugo Guanda Editore] u English [Text Publishing,

United Kingdom and Australia]

u Swedish [Norstedts]

Davrichewy Kéthévane

The Black Sea Sabine Wespieser

u Dutch [Meulenhoff] u German [Fischer] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Swedish [2244]

u Chinese (complex characters) [Morning

Star, Taiwan] u Czech [Host] u Dutch [Ailantus] u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian [Frassinelli] u Romanian [Trei]

u Russian [Azbooka Atticus]

108

109

Decoin Didier

Dugain Marc

Is This the Way Women Die?

An Ordinary Execution

u Castilian [Alianza] u German [Arche

u Bulgarian [Fakel Express] u Catalan

Grasset & Fasquelle

Literatur Verlag] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Korean [Golden Bough Publishing] u Russian [Geleos Publishing House] Delecroix Vincent

The Shoe on the Roof Gallimard

u German [Ullstein] u Greek [Govostis] u Italian [Excelsior 1881] u Korean

[Changbi] u Rumanian [RAO] u Russian [Fluid] u Spanish [Lengua de Trapo] Des Horts Stéphanie

The Panther JC Lattès

u Greek [Synchroni Orizontes] u Italian [Piemme]

Desarthes Agnès

In the Black Night Éd. de l’Olivier

u English [Portobello, United Kingdom

Gallimard

[Pages] u Dutch [De Geus] u Greek [Kedros] u Hebrew [Kinneret] u Italian [Bompiani] u Japanese [Kawade Shobo] u Polish [Sic !] u Portuguese [Ambav; Record, Brazil] u Rumanian [RAO] Énard Mathias

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants Actes Sud

u Bulgarian [Prozoretz] u Castilian

[Mondadori] u Catalan [Columna] u Chinese [Shanghai Translation Publishing House] u Croatian [Profil] u Czech [Albatros] u Dutch [De Arbeidespers] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Korean [Bada Publishing] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote, Portugal] u Russian [Atticus] u Serbian [Geopoetika] u Turkish [Can] Énard Mathias

Flipo Georges

Guyotat Pierre

The Commissaire Is Not a Poetry Fan

Coma

u English [Felony & Mayhem, United

u Italian [Medusa] u Russian [Société

Mercure de France

Éd. de la Table Ronde

u English [Semiotexte, United States]

States] u German [Blanvalet] u Italian [Ponte Alle Grazie] u Russian [Pokolenie]

d’études céliniennes]

Garnier Pascal

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye Zulma

u English (worldwide rights)

[Gallic Books] u German [BTB Verlag] u Italian [Isbn Edizioni] Garnier Pascal

The Panda Theory

Haddad Hubert

Opium Poppy Zulma

u Spanish (worldwide rights) [Demipage]

Hane Khadi

So Hungry It Hurts Denoël

u French [NEAS, Senegal]

Hesse Thierry

Lapeyre Patrick

Life is Short and Desire Neverending Delta Entertainment] u Castilian [Destino] u Catalan [Aleph/Empuries] u Chinese [Sichuan Literature and Art Press] u Croatian [Skolska Knijga] u Czech [Euromedia] u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English (worldwide rights) [Other Press] u German [Karl Blessing] u Hungarian [Mandorla] u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore] u Korean [Minumsa] u Lithuanian [Baltos Lankos] u Russian [Azbooka/Atticus] u Serbian [Akademska Knjiga]

u Vietnamese [Les Éditions littéraires

u Castilian [Duomo, Spain] u Italian

Christian Bourgois

Germain Sylvie

[Fazi Editore] u Norwegian [Agora] u Ukrainian [Tipovit]

u German [Amman]

Albin Michel

Joncour Serge

The World’s Beauty

Flammarion

u Italian [Fazi Editore]

[Gallic Books]

u German [BTB Verlag]

The Unnoticed u English [Dedalus Limited, United

Éd. de l’Olivier

How Many Ways I Love You

In Memoriam

Le Bris Michel

Grasset & Fasquelle

and Commonwealth] u German [Droemer Knaur]

Zone

Kingdom] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing]

Descott Régis

u Castilian [Belacqva/La Otra Orilla,

Ghata Yasmine

u Ukrainian [Tipovit]

Enough About Love

Librairie Arthème Fayard

Khadra Yasmina

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 Spanish [Grijalbo/Random House]

Caïn & Adèle JC Lattès

u Spanish

Despentes Virginie

Apocalyspe Baby Grasset & Fasquelle

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Czech [Host] u Danish [Tiderne Skiften] u Dutch

[De Geus Uitgeverlj] u English [Serpent’s tail Ltd] u Finnish [Like Publishing Ltd] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Hungarian [Nyittott] u Italian [Einaudi Editore] u Portuguese [Sextante Editora] u Romanian [Trei Editura] u Swedish [Albert Bonniers Förlag] Deville Patrick

Equatoria Le Seuil

u Castilian [La Otra Orilla] u Italian [Galaad]

Diome Fatou

Our Lives, Unfulfilled Flammarion

u German [Diogenes]

110

Actes Sud

Spain] u Catalan [Columna, Spain] u English [Open Letter, United States] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Greek [Ellinika 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] Fargues Nicolas

You’ll See P.O.L

u Hebrew [Babel] u Italian [Nottetempo] u Russian [Azbooka]

Faye Éric

The Man With No Prints Stock

u Bulgarian [Pulsio] u Slovak [Ed. VSSS]

Filhol Elisabeth

The Power Station P.O.L

u German [Edition Nautilus] u Italian [Fazi Editore]

u Swedish [Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag]

The Târ of My Father u Castilian [Siruela] u Dutch

[De Arbeidespers] u German [Ammann Verlag] u Greek [Melani] u Italian [Feltrinelli] Giraud Brigitte

A Year Abroad

u Chinese [Phoenix Publishing] u Korean

[Wisdom House] u Russian [Riopl]

Olympus of the Unfortunate Julliard

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

[Bizâncio] u Spanish [Ediciones Destino] Kiner Aline

Le Tellier Hervé

JC Lattès

Stock

The Game of Hangman

Lesbre Michèle

[Guanda] u Portuguese [Platano Editora]

u German [Ullstein]

Sabine Wespieser

u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian

Guenassia Jean-Michel

Liana Levi

La Peine Bertrand (de)

The Incurable Optimists’ Club

Soundtrack

u Castilian [RBA Libros] u Catalan

u Spanish [Pasos Perdidos, Spain]

Albin Michel

[Edicions 62] u Croatian [Vukovic & Runjic] u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English [Atlantic Book Grove Atlantic] u German [Insel Verlag] u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Mauri Spagnol/Salani] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Norwegian [Forlaget Press] u Swedish [Norstedts Forlag]

Éd. de Minuit

Lalumière Jean-Claude

The Russian Front Le Dilettante

u Castilian [Libros del Asteroide]

Zulma

u Italian [Piemme] u Polish [Albatros]

u Albanian [Toena] u Bulgarian [Altera/

Lê Linda

u English (worldwide rights)

Garden of Love

P.O.L

Demon

Zulma

Malte Marcus

A Huge White Lake u French [Héliotrope, Quebec only]

Lindon Mathieu

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough P.O.L

u Dutch [Ailantus]

Luce Damien

u Spanish [Paidos] u Turkish [Pupa]

du Vietnam]

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] Minghini Giulio

Fake Allia

u Italian [Piemme]

Monnery Romain

Free, Lonesome and Drowsy Au diable vauvert

u Catalan [Rosa dels Vents] u Castilian

[Grijalbo] u Dutch [Nijgh & Van Ditmar]

Monnier Alain

Our Second Life Flammarion

u German [Ullstein]

Nahapétian Naïri

Who Killed Ayatollah Kanuni? Liana Levi

u Dutch [Querido] u Spanish [Alianza] u Swedish [Sekwa] u Ukrainian

[ECM Media]

NDiaye Marie

Luxemburglar

Three Strong Women

u German [Droemer Knaur]

2009 Goncourt Prize: 28 contracts signed worldwide

Éd. Héloïse d’Ormesson Majdalani Charif

Gallimard

Caravanserail

Ollagnier Virgnie

u Catalan [La Campana] u German

Liana Levi

Le Seuil

The Uncertainty

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta]

u Italian [Piemme]

111

Ovaldé Véronique

Ravey Yves

Schwartzbrod Alexandra

And My Transparent Heart

Kidnapping with Ransom

Farewell Jerusalem

u Albanian [Toena] u English [Portobello,

u German [Kunstmann Verlag]

u Croatian [Hena Com] u Hungarian

Éd. de l’Olivier

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

Childish Hands P.O.L

Éd. de Minuit

Reinhardt Éric

Cinderella Stock

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

u German [Verlag Klaus Wagenbach]

Révay Theresa

Page Martin

Belfond

Perhaps a Love Affair Éd. de l’Olivier

u English [Viking, United States]

u German [Thiele] u Greek [Patakis]

u Italian [Garzanti] 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 [C. Bertelsmann] u Italian [Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore] u Japanese [Hayakawa Publishing] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] 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 [Eest Raamat] u Russian [Text]

Ravey Yves

Bambi Bar Éd. de Minuit

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion

Editura]

112

All the Dreams of the World 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 Chinese (simplified characters)

Stock

[Ulpius Haz Könyvkiado] u Italian [Leone Editore] u Turkish [Can] Seksik Laurent

The Last Days of Stefan Zweig Flammarion

u Chinese [Shanghai 99 Readers] u German [Karl Blessing Verlag]

u Hebrew [Hakibutz Hameucad]

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

[Shanghai 99 Readers] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Italian [Barbès] u Portuguese [Sextante]

The Truth About Marie

Rolin Jean

u Chinese (traditional characters)

A Dead Dog After Him P.O.L

u German [Berlin Verlag]

u Polish [Czarne] u Russian [Text]

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]

Sansal Boualem

The German’s Village

Éd. de Minuit

u Chinese (simplified characters)

[Éd. d’Art et de littérature du Hunan]

[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] Varenne Antonin

Fakirs

Viviane Hamy

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]

Gallimard

u German [Wagenbach]

u Catalan [Columna] u Danish [Turbine]

u Spanish [Acantilado]

u Bosnian [B.T.C Sahinpasic]

u Dutch [De Geus] u English [Europe

Editions, United States ; Bloomsbury, United Kingdom] u German [Merlin] u Greek [Polis] u Hebrew [Kinneret] u Italian [Einaudi] u Polish [Dialog] u Serbian [IPS Media II] u Spanish [El Aleph]

u Italian [Neri Pozza]

Winckler Martin

The Women’s Chorus P.O.L

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