Fiction France n°10 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Twenty new French ďŹ ction titlesÂ to be read and translated

foreword

Twice a year, Fiction France presents 20 excerpts in both English and French from novels and stories that are at the forefront of the contemporary literary scene in France. So far 200 authors have been represented since the first edition. More than simply encouraging foreign rights sales, this review has enabled publishers, authors and translators to meet, to interact, and to forge long-lasting links. A new aspect to this 10th edition is that from now on, we will provide a few lines highlighting the top reasons to discover each featured novel. As always, on page 109 you will find all the titles presented in previous editions of Fiction France and which have obtained foreign publishing rights. How can you take part in Fiction FRANCE ? 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.

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

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: 14th May 2012 Next publication date of Fiction France: 17th September 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. 14

Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian

Solange Bied-Charreton

The Colour of Angels’ Souls

Enjoy

Publisher: Robert Laffont Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

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

Benita Edzard bedzard@robert-laffont.fr Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@gmail.com

Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

p. 19

p. 23

Florence Chapiro

Kéthévane Davrichewy

The Favourites

The Separated

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton

Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

jguitton@swediteur.com Translation: Amanda Hopkinson

amandahopkinson@hotmail.com

p. 30

p. 35

p. 40

David Dumortier

Christian Gailly

Louis Gardel

Transvestite

The Wheel and Other Stories

The Scriptwriter

Publisher: Le Dilettante Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Claude Tarrène

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel

claude.tarrene@ledilettante.com Translation: Ian Monk

Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr Translation: Annette David annettedavid99@gmail.com

ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

froussel@editions-stock.fr Translation: Sam Alexander

samalex20@googlemail.com

p. 45

p. 50

p. 56

Nathalie Hug

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Antoine Laurain

Miss Tick-Tacks

The Postman of Abruzzi

Mitterrand’s Hat

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

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Farin

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

proussel@calmann-levy.fr

catherine.farin@mercure.fr Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

Translation: Louise Rogers Lalaurie

Translation: John Fletcher

j.w.j.fletcher@kent.ac.uk

fgiry@flammarion.fr lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

p. 61

p. 66

p. 71

Charif Majdalani

Karim Miské

Antoine Piazza

Our Glory Years, How Arab Jazz Soon They Ended

The Monogram

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

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Maylis Vauterin

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

martineheissat@seuil.com Translation: Will Hobson willhobson@hotmail.com

maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr Translation: Vineet Lal

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

p. 76

p. 81

p. 86

Raúl Ruiz

Alexandra Schwartzbrod

Philippe Ségur

The Spirit of the Stairs

Ariel’s Dream

The Lucid Man’s Dream

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Carole Saudejaud

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

Publisher: Buchet/Chastel Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager:

csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

Christine Legrand christine.legrand@libella.fr Translation: Georgina Collins glcollins@hotmail.co.uk

Translation: Paul Buck and Catherine Petit

paul@paulbuck.co.uk

vineet_lal@hotmail.com

p. 91

p. 95

Carl de Souza

Akli Tadjer

In Freefall

The Best Way to Love

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat

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

martineheissat@seuil.com Translation: Carl de Souza/Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

p. 100

p. 105

David Thomas

Carole Zalberg

I haven’t finished looking at the world

Missing America

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: February 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Solène Chabanais

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

solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Translation: Ros Schwartz schwartz@btinternet.com

Translation: Shaun Whiteside

shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com

Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian

The Colour of Angels’ Souls

Publisher: Robert Laffont Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Benita Edzard bedzard@robert-laffont.fr

Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@gmail.com

The latest book from the author of the internationally acclaimed ‘Tara Duncan’ series (more than a million readers in France already and seven million around the world). Biography

Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian was born in France on 24 August to a family of Armenian descent and grew up in the Basque country which supplied the tales and legends that have inspired her imagination. With the Tara Duncan series, Sophie Audouin-Mamikonian has become the most widely read author of fantasy fiction for young adults in France. Her second teenage saga, Indiana Teller, explores the myth of the werewolf along with that of time travel. She has also written a children’s series, Clara Chocolat, and her adult thriller La Danse des obèses is published by Robert Laffont. La Couleur de l’âme des Anges is her first project for teenagers and young adults in the new ‘R’ collection, and the first part of a two-book series. Publications Indiana Teller: Lune de printemps [Indiana Teller: Spring Moon], Michel Lafon, 2011; La Danse des obèses [Dance of the Obese], Robert Laffont, 2008 (republished by Pocket, 2010); the Tara Duncan series (nine books published between 2003 and 2011 by Seuil, Flammarion and XO Éditions); the Clara Chocolat two-book series, Toucan Jeunesse, 2007.

Jeremy, a young man of 23, is brutally murdered. He turns into an angel but realises that his struggle for survival is not over and he could die again in this new world. This is because angels will disappear if they do not feed on human emotions. Jeremy will soon be terrified to learn that he actually has to provoke these feelings, because the hunger of angels can only be satisfied by strong emotions, which turn their skin blue if they are positive and red if negative. In an attempt to discover why he was murdered, Jeremy shadows Allison, a 20-yearold girl in the world of the living, an involuntary witness to his execution. Staying close to this

beautiful, innocent young woman day and night, he eventually falls deeply in love with her. But Jeremy’s murderer has also set his sights on Allison and will do everything in his power to dispose of this unwelcome witness … Will Jeremy manage to save the life of the woman he loves while, in the world beyond, the red angels are also joining forces against him? With this first novel of an ambitious and absorbing two-book series, the author transports teenagers and young adults to the world beyond, a world that continues to fuel our greatest fantasies and excite the keenest curiosity.

Jeremy had just died. Beheaded by a samurai. In New York, in the 21st century. Stunned, swaying, he was standing over his body. Jeremy had always been considered quite brave but he’d never felt so afraid in his life. The fear that consumed him was unlike any other—primitive, absolute. Jeremy was startled by a cheerful male voice ringing out behind him. ‘Hello there, angel! Welcome to the dead!’ And that was when he’d realised. In a daze, he ignored the stranger and returned his attention to his body. A stream of blood was sluggishly trickling out of it. A puddle was already forming, congealing on the pavement like a large redcurrant ice cream. It was ridiculous but, just for a second, it made him feel hungry. Then the feeling lessened, although it didn’t go away completely. He tried to remember what had happened. Earlier that evening, he’d been interviewed by a major television channel and was on his way home. He was a young 23-year-old financier, a French-born whiz kid who had emigrated to New York. He’d passed the French baccalaureate at fourteen, started university at fifteen and wrote his first thesis examining an equation reproducing market fluctuations at eighteen. Enemies and friends alike agreed that he was a rising star in his field. He frequently made front-page news and experts congratulated him on his extraordinary intuition. He was nicknamed the new Warren Buffett. Jeremy lived very near the legendary Pierre hotel whose entrance, opposite

Central Park, was virtually next door to his, which made it a pretty safe location owing to the constant comings and goings of guests. This evening, though, this section of Fifth Avenue was completely deserted and dark because, strangely, it looked as though the bulbs in some of the tall white street lamps had been smashed. It was almost midnight. Recklessly, the young man hadn’t been walking on the building side of the street, but was strolling as usual along the edge of the huge park, delighting in the fresh scents of the tall trees. He was almost home when … A girl. There’d been a girl. Pretty, blonde. Frightened. She’d been walking towards him, a vague form in the darkness, holding a small white rectangle. And that was when he’d felt something like a heavy blow somewhere in the region of his neck and the most terrible pain. His head had fallen to the ground before his body. Although he’d been deprived of his sight almost immediately, he’d had time to glimpse the blade of a long sword sweeping in front of him. So did the girl. She had screamed. The murderer had speeded up and, in the darkness, had tripped over Jeremy’s head, sending it rolling into the gutter. This had given his intended victim a few seconds in which to escape. After that, he was really dead. Once he’d passed over from the other side, unable to understand what was going on, he’d been forced to watch what happened next, reeling with shock. A police car had turned into the road at that very moment and the murderer had sworn under his breath. He’d melted into the shadows of the park like a bad drawing being rubbed out. Jeremy just had time to glimpse the long samurai robe, worn over a stylish black suit, that had been pulled off before his killer ran away; the man had a slightly Eurasian face with a long drooping black moustache and eyes burning with hatred. Strangely enough, a name popped into his head. Genghis Khan. The man had the sharp features of the Mongols who, in the eighth century, had laid waste to half the world. Jeremy was petrified, unable to think straight or do anything. He looked around. The avenue was now amazingly bright. Everything glittered with a certain aura. He winced, the light was far too strong, and the sounds were too loud. As if, divested of his flesh and blood, the eyes and ears of his soul could perceive things more keenly. Terrified, he turned round to face the … the what? The other angel? ‘Mmmppfmmgmgggllmm,’ he said, his throat producing an unintelligible gurgle. ‘Ah,’ said the man lightly, as Jeremy abruptly fell silent in horror. ‘Don’t worry. There’s no air left in your lungs, give them time to re-learn how to breathe. You have to form words in your mouth without breathing out. Then they’ll come out all by themselves, you’ll see, it’s easy once you know how.’ Wide-eyed, Jeremy obeyed. Not without difficulty.

‘Wash hash … what has happened to me?’ The man had it all wrong, there was nothing easy about this. ‘OK, well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news’, announced the stranger. Jeremy looked at him blankly, impervious to any attempt at humour. ‘Mmm, I can see you’re still in shock … I’ll get straight to the point then. I was in the neighbourhood when I saw you were about to get your head chopped off, so I decided to wait. It’s quite a traumatic way to die and someone had to explain things to you. As I expected, you were killed. For that matter, in quite an original way—I haven’t seen that in a very long time. Anyway, let me inform you officially that you’re dead.’ ‘And wash … what’s the good news?’ asked Jeremy eventually, with difficulty. ‘That was the good news. The bad news is that you’re not alone.’ He pointed at the crowd around them and Jeremy suddenly realised there were thousands of people, ghosts, angels, whatever you called them, in the street. They were walking, laughing, crying, running, jumping … and flying in complete disarray. The strangest thing about them was their colours. Some were a lovely deep violet, like the colour of a summer sky just before twilight. Others were such a glaring red that it hurt to look at them. Between the two, there was every shade of blue, from light to dark, and every shade of red, from the pinkish white of the living to fiery orange. The man speaking to him was blue. Uncertainly, he looked at his own skin. Oh, it was light blue, with traces of pink and a hint of orange. Jeremy raised his head. The world looked different too. Above the sleeping apartment buildings, wherever he looked, he saw what seemed to be plumes of white or coloured smoke rising. And shapes clustered around them, as if warming themselves, dancing intricate pavanes with the vapours. Everything was sparkling and pulsating, like a huge heart beating slowly. And once again, he was struck by the clarity of his vision. Although it was dark, he could make out all the details of the buildings on Broadway several miles away, as if they were right in front of him! Realising he’d been standing there with his mouth open, he closed it. ‘Yes,’ laughed his companion, ‘I know it’s surprising. Let me run through the basic rules with you. Do you know how many human beings have died since we appeared on Earth?’ Not daring to rely on his voice, Jeremy shook his head. ‘Around eighty billion, if you also count proto-humans like Neanderthal man and so on. That’s a lot of people. But there aren’t that many of us. I’d say there are probably as many of us here as there are humans on Earth. A paltry six and half billion. As for me, I crossed over in 451bc’. ‘Crossed over?’

Sophie AudouinMamikonian

The Colour of Angels’ Souls

‘Yes, that’s what we call it when we get here. Crossing over. And when we introduce ourselves, we say: “Hello, My name is Decarus Pompey, but you can call me Flint, crossed over in 451bc”. That allows you to place people. What about you?’ ‘Jeremy. Crossed over, er, just now.’ Flint smiled and held out a friendly hand to him. Jeremy automatically grasped it. The hand squeezing his seemed very much alive. He could feel the bones moving under his fingers. Suddenly, he grabbed Flint and clung on as if his life depended on it. ‘Whoa there,’ said Flint, ‘feeling a little overwhelmed? There, there, it’ll soon pass.’ Jeremy’s eyes suddenly brimmed with tears and his knees gave way. Still gripping Flint’s hand, he sank to the ground. Flint had no choice but to go with him. He waited a moment, absorbing the young man’s distress in order to calm him down. ‘Um,’ he eventually said, ‘could I have my hand back now, please?’ But Jeremy had gone way beyond fear and was now in a place of absolute terror. Flint’s hand was the only thing that felt real to him. Letting go was unthinkable. ‘Why?’ he stammered finally, ‘Why? I’m too young, it’s not fair, I shouldn’t have died!’ ‘You were young. And what’s more, you’ll stay that way for eternity. You should see the state of most dead people when they get here! Believe me, you should consider yourself lucky to have crossed over at your age!’ Jeremy went to wipe his face and, realising he was still holding a hand in his, finally relaxed his grip, much to Flint’s relief. ‘I’m … I’m crying?’ spluttered Jeremy. ‘Yes, we can do all kinds of things. As well as cry.’ ‘Tears?’ repeated Jeremy, dumbfounded. Mysteriously, he couldn’t get his head round the idea that dead people could cry. Although they had every reason to. Flint sighed and offered him a handkerchief. ‘Take it, I’ll make another’. ‘Thanks’, replied Jeremy, still on autopilot. Jeremy blew his nose. He took a few deep breaths, and this kick-started his brain into action again. ‘Come again?’ he asked incredulously, looking at the folded tissue. ‘We’re angels!’ Jeremy shut his eyes for a minute. He was starting to feel afraid and dizzy again and it took all his strength to get a grip on himself. His ‘come again’ had called for a more detailed answer than Flint’s reply, which had been much too cryptic for his liking. ‘Angels. Who can cry. Use handkerchiefs. And?’

‘And we possess certain powers. The oldest angels can make a few things. The problem is they don’t last very long. I’ve already had this handkerchief for a few days, so I’d advise you to put it down.’ Jeremy obeyed. The handkerchief crumpled up and disappeared. Leaving behind a slight trace. Which eventually vanished. There was a blank look in Jeremy’s eyes again. Flint sighed. Even he hadn’t yet grasped all the rules of this strange world that had been his home for hundreds of years. ‘Only the living … or, at least, only people who die can cross over into this dimension. That’s also the reason why you’re naked.’ ‘What?’ It had all been such a shock that he hadn’t realised he wasn’t wearing any clothes. He immediately hunched over. ‘Stay there,’ advised Flint, ‘I’ll be right back. And, whatever you do, don’t let anyone come near you, that could be dangerous.’ Before Jeremy had time to yell that he didn’t want Flint to leave him, the man headed off in the direction of the sparkling mist emanating from the houses and apartment buildings. Suddenly, although he didn’t dare stand up, his mind processed the word Flint had just used. ‘Dangerous?’ What did he mean by dangerous? What on earth could be more dangerous than dying?

Sophie AudouinMamikonian

The Colour of Angels’ Souls

Solange Bied-Charreton

Enjoy

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr

Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

An acerbic, disenchanted first novel that genuinely gives voice directly to a generation of young people seemingly without a moral compass. A portrait of the worst excesses of a Generation Y intoxicated by social networking. Biography

Solange Bied-Charreton is 29, and lives and works in Paris. Enjoy is her first novel.

Charles Valérien is a young man on whom life seems always to smile. But this life has value only in the virtual world, on ShowYou, the world’s most visited social network, where you go to express yourself, to make yourself look good, or just to exist. More importantly, it’s on ShowYou that you win the respect of the people you want to impress. One day Charles meets Anne-Laure, a student at the Sorbonne, and the oddball members of her rock band. None of them is on ShowYou. So there is a world outside the internet after all, and it is with that world, and with Anne-Laure in particular, that the narrator falls in love.

Other characters include an androgynous dancer, an angry blogger, a grumpy old woman and—distorted image of the solitary Charles— an obese writer. Enjoy is a fable for our times, where entertainment at any price can never overcome boredom, a spectator of the lives of others can’t necessarily keep on top of his own, and the enemy always appears when least expected. It is a depiction of ‘Generation Y’, the net generation, eyes glued to their screens as their lives slip through their fingers, sincere because they don’t know how to be cynical, victims of aimlessness in a voyeuristic hell.

I’d called Anne-Laure the next evening, thinking a thirty-six hour delay would be enough to convey my indifference. In fact I was so indifferent I was actually calling her. Where did she live and where did she want us to meet? She had me crossing the Seine, no less. I took the 63 from Trocadéro and got out at Place Maubert, where she said she was a ‘regular’ at one of the cafés. On the bus I remember struggling to recall the details of her face. All I had left of Anne-Laure was a general impression: slim, white skin, grey eyes. If she’d told me her last name I could have found her on ShowYou, looked through her profile photos and, crucially, sent her a friend request. We could have gone on chat, told each other all about our passions and our favourite colours, found out what cities we’d been to in Europe and beyond, identified our allergies, our phobias and things that were against our religion. She’d have known, long before our date, that I didn’t smoke or take drugs and that I was born into a Catholic family but my own approach was more catholic with a small c—tolerant, in other words, rather than practising. And that I adored Lebanese food; that I had my moon in Aquarius and that I listened to all different kinds of music—even rap; that I thought a couple should tell each other everything; that I’d read The Arabian Nights in an abridged version; that I wanted to have three children, but not now. What about her? She arrived wearing a dress similar to the one she’d worn the first time, white with a blue and purple print, and a khaki jacket over her shoulders. She also had a fat book under her arm and a packet of cigarettes. I recognized her face and her pale, blonde girl’s skin. Her hair wasn’t really blonde, more of a chestnut brown, but

her eyebrows were. I took a good look at her before saying anything. I smelled her too. A citrussy perfume, apples, pears, ginger—I couldn’t tell. I told her my name, Charles Valérien. I hoped she’d tell me her last name, I was still thinking of ShowYou. But no, just ‘Anne-Laure’ again. We couldn’t hang around there for three-quarters of an hour, so I suggested that, if she liked, we could cross to the big brasserie opposite, under the plane trees. She liked—as long as we sat outside so she could smoke. ‘That was so nice of you to pay for my guitar. You really didn’t have to. Do you play music?’ ‘No, but music is really important to me. I listen to all kinds—even rap.’ No response. Strange. Luckily, just at that moment the waiter arrived. She asked for a decaf—‘I can’t do caffeine after four o’clock’. I asked for a beer—‘I can’t do coffee at six o’clock’. No, I wasn’t a musician, but she was. She answered a series of targeted questions that allowed me to establish some benchmarks, to encourage her to go along with my project of seduction. Twenty-two years old, studying modern literature round the corner at the Sorbonne. And a guitarist too, playing and singing in a punk band, ‘well not real punks’. As for star signs, she didn’t really believe in all that. She lived in the upmarket fourteenth arrondissement, not far from Alésia and Montsouris Park. Actually it was her grandmother who lived there, she had a room in her grandmother’s flat. Her parents lived in some backwater in southern Brittany, but she went there as little as possible because she didn’t really get on with her father. He was a history teacher, highly qualified, very senior, he no longer had to do much teaching and was just coasting towards retirement. She liked to go back home when he wasn’t there. She also had an older brother on the outskirts of Paris, in Dourdan, doing marketing for a major brand of toothpaste. He wrote questionnaires and emailed them to a consumer base of several thousand. The click and opening rates were optimal, he couldn’t complain. What kind of toothpaste do you use? With or without stripes? Dealing with bad breath, prioritizing the prevention of decay, do you generally use a mouthwash? How to stop thumb-sucking in small children, source of dental dysfunction and displacement, do you have trouble with the articulation of your jaw? How long do you spend brushing your teeth? How often? How do you move the toothbrush? Do you sometimes drink a fizzy drink before you go to bed? Click here for our full range of bi-fluoride products. ‘That’s amazing. What’s the book?’ The book was called The Closed Door, its author Rémy Gauthrin. She said he was her favourite writer because he was so much in conflict with his times. There was an author photo on the cover. The guy was balding, beefy, his expression was seriously smug. Anne-Laure asked if I read books. Not much, aside from the abridged version of The Arabian Nights. She looked annoyed and I suddenly felt inferior. I should have lied. When the waiter came over with her

decaf it turned out to be an aperitif—a Ricard. ‘I misheard you’ was all he could manage by way of apology. She thought it was funny—‘it makes a change to have a Ricard’. I was afraid this failure of communication would rub off on us, that we’d start talking about the weather, the arrival of summer and topics of that ilk. But no: we sat there a good two hours, telling each other all about our lives, what we liked, what we did, how we saw the future. Nothing like that had happened to me since I left school—getting on with someone as if it was all just simple and obvious. It was like in the films. And she kept the conversation going, I clearly interested her, though she did admit to being sorry I wasn’t more of a reader. Around eight o’clock she took her leave. ‘I’ve got a party in the eighteenth arrondissement and I still haven’t decided what to wear’. I gave her my number again, in case she hadn’t kept it when I’d called her before (it was displayed, all she had to do was save it to her contacts list). I explained that I was on an unlimited calls package and didn’t pay for calls between 7.30pm and 1am. If she wanted she could just let it ring once and I’d call her back. ‘I’ve got that’ she said. Then, as I was getting on the 63, ‘Hey! My last name is Bagnolet, like the metro station. b a g n o l e t (she spelled it out), Anne-Laure Bagnolet, since you want to know so much.’ Bagnolet. So she’d told me after all, but I still couldn’t find her on the net. There were several Anne-Laure Bagnolets on ShowYou—forty-six in fact, in seven different countries. But none of those Anne-Laure Bagnolets was my Anne-Laure Bagnolet. Maybe she wasn’t on ShowYou at all? Or maybe she was, but with a different name? Or maybe she’d lied, maybe her name wasn’t really Anne-Laure Bagnolet? After my fruitless search on ShowYou—no profile matches your search terms for 75014—I tried the online phone directory—it was less detailed and quicker. There was a Paule Bagnolet, her grandmother on her father’s side no doubt (I was in luck), who lived at 51 Avenue Reille, in the fourteenth arrondissement. I sat there stunned as the unlikely dawned: Anne-Laure Bagnolet, twenty-two years old, living in Paris, and she wasn’t on ShowYou? I couldn’t believe my own eyes, those eyes that never saw anything that wasn’t on a screen. Still, they had seen her. Why choose that kind of exclusion? Why choose not to exist online? How did she cope every day being teased and sidelined, in her social life, at uni, in her band? Had she been banned for not posting a video? The rules were strict, but no one played with fire. My eyes, which saw nothing, had met those of a girl who didn’t exist. […] As I didn’t have any events highlighted for that evening, I took the opportunity to make a ‘favourites’ list of videos posted by my contacts. Charlotte had made our mouths water with her tiramisu recipe on Monday. Théodore Zami had done a full striptease the Thursday before, while Perrine had been at home playing mum. She told us she didn’t know who the father was, she was still trying to decide between two guys, but both of them were claiming paternity, for reasons of pride. This was causing problems, particularly as Perrine’s

Solange Bied-Charreton

Enjoy

parents had started meddling and kept having a go at her for keeping the baby. There was a conversation between her and her mother on her ShowRoom page (her video from the week before): ‘My daughter’s at university, it really isn’t sensible. What do you think?’ You could post your opinion. Perrine had asked her contacts whether she should run an online poll to decide between the two candidates for the post of father of her child: ‘After all, maybe a poll would produce a better result than a paternity test?’ Meanwhile my sister Sophie had been out filming poor people, the Tuesday before, in a particularly disadvantaged area of Cairo. On leaving work she’d gone looking for these poor people and asked them questions, like some anthropologist. The conversations had been in Arabic (she could speak Arabic now) and she’d edited in some subtitles. ‘How many children do you have?’ ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have so many, given the living conditions in this neighbourhood?’ ‘Have you ever had a job?’ ‘Have you ever fallen ill from drinking stagnant water or eating rotten meat?’ ‘Have you ever seen a dead person?’ ‘Do you ever wash?’ ‘Do you think you’ll have a better life one day?’

Florence Chapiro

The Favourites

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr

Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

A new author burst on to the literary scene. ‘In this lively, occasionally caustic but also deeply moving novel, women, hurt and betrayed in love, snatch back the centre-stage’. (‘Page des Libraries’) Biography

Florence Chapiro obtained the prestigious agrégation teaching qualification from the École normale supérieure, and is the author of a doctoral thesis on passions in the classical age. She has written commentaries for works by Diderot and Voltaire published by Larousse. The Favourites is her first novel.

With a wife as despotic as she was invaluable, an enigmatic muse, a pupil about to surpass his abilities and a shameless young mistress, renowned painter Pierre could never choose between his women. Will his death decide between them? The four women have no choice but to meet in order to deal with his legacy, which is artistic and intellectual rather than financial. They need to sort and sift and determine what legitimately belongs to each of them. Grief, regrets, jealousy—everything points towards mounting tension. And yet, to the amazement of the old and bold of Paris cultural life, there is no dreaded settling of accounts

at the funeral. Quite the opposite, in fact: a sort of complicity emerges, one that is both soothing and a subtle transgression. Could the love they once each bore for the same man morph into a new form of friendship? This first novel is a reflection on inheritance and the very particular turn it takes whenever art, talent and aesthetic sensibilities are involved; but it is primarily a portrait of four women who leap off the page—or the canvas! Wrong-footing the reader by avoiding a classic confrontation scene, Florence Chapiro turns instead to a palette of finely nuanced psychology.

“Pierre’s dead”. She spits the words out, before taking a breath. Did Camille hear it from Dorothée? Surely not, they haven’t spoken for years. The master is dead. A distant, distorted echo of the days when I used to walk to the studios on the rue Pavée with my portfolio under my arm, sometimes feeling it slip from my hand if I walked too quickly. I can remember the perfume Camille used to wear, the sort you would associate with an elegant lady, a disguise, warmed by the sun coming through the glass roof, and mingling with a slight smell of cigarettes. Camille would take us in her arms when a painting was finished. In her enthusiasm she forgot she was naked, and held us to her bosom, boys and girls alike. I don’t know what to say, I hesitate, embarrassed: “Thank you for letting me know”. This death is bound to have an effect on me, to assume some substance later, and perhaps I’m making a concerted effort to cry. At least sketch something on paper first before deciding on the perspective, Pierre would say curtly, pushing up the sleeves of his black sweater. What matters is really knowing how to look and judge quickly and precisely at first glance. He’s the only person who could have helped me put this death in its rightful place. If I put it somewhere it doesn’t belong, it will get lost in the landscape of memories. He bullied us and was sometimes downright cruel: If you don’t know how to look, if you can’t give the world its true weight, then forget it, you’ll never get anywhere. A slap in the face. Particularly with the boys, because he expected more of them. Irony towards his female pupils; paternal discipline with his future peers, men. For a long time he didn’t believe I was up to the challenge.

Am I sad he’s dead? We’d lost touch. I can’t pretend I’ll miss him every morning over my coffee. Would I like to have seen him one last time, acknowledged what I owed to him? Listened to his faux-modest pronouncements: I’m just an imposter. Or heard him claiming yet again: I made you, and don’t forget it. No one could exasperate me the way he did, he was always so confident he was right about everything and he loved in such an all or nothing way. One day you would be wonderful, his favourite pupil, then he would suddenly change his mind, stop you dead half way through your training, and you would have to go and find someone else to teach you. So he died before I ever saw him again, even from a distance, because I’ve avoided the rue Pavée, even if it meant long-winded detours. After slamming the door to his studio ten years ago, I went to his rival, Henri Dunois. I knew Pierre would never forgive me. I don’t know who told him I was living with Henri, maybe he just heard by chance, at some dinner. I’m not as assertive as Pierre. I’m indecisive, I leave letters and pictures that I don’t know what to do with on the hall table. I don’t go to the trouble of throwing them away or sorting through them. It all piles up. So, for now, I’m going to do the same with this death. I thanked Camille inanely. “That’s it then, Pierre’s dead,” the words come out of nowhere. At the moment it’s just news, almost flavourless. Should I tell Henri straightaway, when I hang up? He’ll find out anyway. It won’t be long before there are tributes, retrospectives, ceremonies, announcements in the papers. Camille doesn’t like dawdling on the phone. “I’ll see you at the funeral. Actually, no, let’s have coffee, tomorrow, at three, on the rue Pavée,” she suggests, to bring our conversation to a close. Before she hangs up I just have time to hear a man calling to her from somewhere in her apartment. Camille has had a lot of men in her life, and if you were to see her you would know why. A coveted woman, but her sense of propriety gets in the way. Which makes them want her all the more, pursuing her just as Pierre did for so long. And yet she’s a loner who likes the freedom of waking to an empty apartment. Tackling her day on her own. She makes you want to say: “Don’t hang up, just for a minute.” Camille goes against the current. Your love isn’t a pleasure for her. It stifles her. She didn’t falter for a moment on the phone. She masked her sorrow perfectly. Pierre would have given everything up for her, including Dorothée. But Camille got scared, vanished as soon as she realised the painter couldn’t live without her. Everything changed at the studio after she left, a glum Pierre who no longer showed any cruelty towards his pupils, no longer produced the swell of pride that galvanised us. That was when I left the rue Pavée. When Pierre was broken, world-weary, left to his own devices. He tried emotional blackmail to get me to stay in spite of everything, because for a while I’d been the favourite. You can’t do this to me. You owe me everything! He’d taught me enough about my failings for me to recognise their significance. And in a way I’ve painted against him ever since, to prove to him that I’ve overtaken him. He let me down, this

Florence Chapiro

The Favourites

mentor of mine. A whole era came to an end in a matter of days. He must have thought Camille was his last chance to start again. That’s what it was like at the studio, close-knit and heated, we couldn’t feel anything beyond our love of being together, the unity of it and the arguments that went on till dawn. Nothing changed. And, in such confined circles, not a breath of fresh air. Pierre sometimes dazzling, but more crushing than a cathedral. He flew into jealous rages, incapable of disguising his hostility towards Henri Dunois or the man who lived with Camille. I still remember his decline. Although she was fragile and discreet as ever, Camille did make a confession earlier. A habit she must have inherited from her strict, Catholic mother. You have to picture Camille blushing easily, like a little girl caught with her hand in the biscuit tin, polite to a fault, horribly tortured by the world but more frivolous than you would believe. She was the one who stole the dark blue robe when she left the studio. She whispered that it was the only souvenir she’ll keep from the rue Pavée. “Do you think Pierre held it against me?” I now have to ring Dorothée, Pierre’s wife, the only one to stay faithful to the end. She was all set up to announce the master’s death to his women when the day came. To her, whether models or pupils, they were always the others. But it was Camille’s beautiful androgynous voice that gave me the news, with an early morning breathlessness. Yet again one of the others got there before the wife.

Kéthévane Davrichewy

The Separated

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com

Translation: Amanda Hopkinson amandahopkinson@hotmail.com

A powerful subject that is rarely tackled, approached in an elegant and precise style. Two modern and delightful heroinesleading complex emotional lives. An astonishing story in tune with the times in which we live. Biography

Khéthévane Devrichewy was born to Georgian parents in Paris in 1965. Her childhood was marked by the experiences and memories of her grandparents’exile. Following studies in modern literature, film and theatre, she worked for a number of magazines, and began to collect Georgian tales for the children’s publishing house, l’École des Loisirs, with whom she went on to publish several books. She also wrote screenplays for the cinema. The Separated Ones is her second novel for Sabine Wespieser. Publications A first novel Tout Ira was published by Arlea in 2004. Le Mer Noire, [Sabine Wespieser, 2010, re-issued in paperback, 2011] won the Prix Landenau des espaces cultures Leclerc and the Prix Virgin Femina.

The novel opens on 10th May, 1981, when Alice and Cécile are sixteen years old. Thirty years later the pair of friends, so inseparable in childhood, have lost touch with one another. Alice, sitting in a café, lets her mind rove free, endlessly attempting to understand the reason for the rupture in their friendship, something that also plays on other sources of her bitterness. For her part Cécile, deep within a semi-coma, writes imaginary letters to Alice in her mind. Weaving together a double skein of decades gone by, the voices of the two young women knit their story together. From the time they met, they shared everything: their first emotional awakenings, their families, their

passion for literature, the sound-track and the high-points of “the Mitterand years”. They even dreamt of a shared professional future. If Khéthévane Davrichewy excels at evoking the spirit and the joy of this symbiotic friendship, if the portraits of those Alice and Cécile loved illuminate her book, she also writes with great subtlety of the complex of emotions and allows the atmosphere of mistakes, misunderstandings and secrets in which the inevitably loveless fall-out would flourish to be exposed in its pages. For it is quite simply the subject of this novel on the loss and the end of childhood, composed as a duet in two voices, that rings so true.

It was five years since the two women last saw each other. Since their last lunch together. It was now eight o’clock in the morning and Alice was just emerging from the shower when the phone rang. She gave the screen a hurried glance, hesitating over whether to pick up, when she saw an unfamiliar number on display. “Alice? It’s Cécile.” She was no longer saying: “It’s me”, only “Cécile”. It was a name that had been removed from her address book. Would she have answered had she known who was calling? “I absolutely have to see you, and speak to you, it’s very important. Well it is for me at least. Today, if you can spare a moment”. “Whatever’s happening? Is it really that serious? I can’t do today.” “Can’t you manage to fix it?” Alice fixed it. They had agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant of Cécile’s choosing. Alice felt quite calm on her way to the restaurant and was surprised at herself. She had been unable to avoid phoning her sisters, as if telling them somehow made light of the meeting, making it just one of the series of her anecdotes. She did not, however, inform her husband. David had already left for the office and would have advised her not to go. He was in the habit of saying that: “When a relationship is over, you have to learn to accept it.” In addition, Alice was curious and a little troubled. What could be so very urgent that Cécile needed to speak to her that immediately? She allowed herself an instant of fantasising about an emotional reunion, a sharing of the blame, a family drama that would bring them closer together again. Why? Tragedy only

leads to the hard graft of excavating gaping holes. They had already had enough experience of this. Cécile arrived in front of the restaurant and parked on a delivery bay. Alice took the opportunity to study her through the window, and to compose her expression into one of confident disinterest while Cécile manoeuvred, cramming her car into a gap too small for it. “So you haven’t given up on having a car in Paris?” Alice enquired without preamble. “No,” replied Cécile. “And I know I’m on a delivery bay,” she added, as if to discourage her from pursuing a conversation already in the air, but which hadn’t actually got underway. It would have seemed incongruous to discuss parking tickets. Their previous conversations never seemed to come to an end. Alice had no idea what they would find to talk about today. Cécile extricated herself from her car, affording a glimpse of the piles of papers on the back seat, a box of cakes, a crumpled map of the district, an apple core. Alice now found grubby what, years ago, had seemed to her merely a benign disorder. Cécile slammed the door and punched the automatic locking system into her key. Then she looked up at her, her face expressionless, before reassuring herself that she had locked it properly by pressing the button again. Alice bit her tongue. Cécile had always had certain neurotic tics. She didn’t look at Alice. Nor did they embrace. “Hello lovely,” said the waiter, giving Cécile a kiss. “I hear you’re on your way back to Brazil. You never stop!” They sat down facing one another. Cécile’s telephone began ringing with the sound of an angrily-pressed doorbell. She mimed her apologies and answered on the hands free kit, which she kept constantly fiddling with. “Did you get home okay? Did it all go all right?” The sweet and considerate voice she had used for so long now seemed saccharine, the tone of voice Cécile had adopted irritated her. Not with jealousy, not at all. With exasperation. Cécile was wearing an incongruously sophisticated suit, and her fingernails were painted blue. Before now she had never been in the habit of painting her nails. Alice had refrained from dressing herself up, and the informality of her outfit affirmed her intended look of fidelity and integrity. Cécile watched her and observed everything. Alice felt vulnerable. Neither of them was nervous. Mechanical more like. The waiter brought their menus, and cracked a joke to which neither woman responded. They buried themselves in their menus. “Are you all right?” asked Cécile. “You’re wearing your hair long now. It suits you.” “You haven’t changed at all,” said Alice. She didn’t know why she had put it like this, since Cécile’s looks were so completely altered, something exacerbated by her every move.

Kéthévane Davrichewy

The Separated

“Are you all okay? Nothing’s happened?” enquired Alice. “No, everyone’s just fine. What about you?” “Yes, us too.” Using the formal “vous” form mitigated against any form of intimacy. “What about the agency? Are you all staying afloat? It seems to be a very difficult time”. “No, I’ve no idea who told you that, it’s all going pretty smoothly,” answered Cécile, “very smoothly, even, and we’re definitely about to launch a major new project.” Alice didn’t ask what sort of project she meant. She had noticed that it was all the same to her. “You too, seems it’s all going fine. Your stuff is on show everywhere. Is this all you do now, or do you still work at Intervalles?” Cécile didn’t offer to discuss her work, and wasn’t pausing for answers. Presumably she was indifferent to that too. “Why did you want to meet me?” Cécile swallowed, put her fork down on her plate, and sipped a mouthful of water. As Alice waited patiently, she noted a few white strands in among Cécile’s brunette hair. “People have been telling me what you’re saying about Philippe and I,” said Cécile, “and I need to ask you to put a stop to it.” “You and Philippe?” “You’re giving yourself the right to interpret what’s happening in our relationship. If indeed you ever loved me, I’d much rather you forgot all about me.” Alice had also heard various rumours she would have preferred to ignore. All kinds of little irritating insinuations that had persisted in rattling her. “Is that why you wanted to see me? It’s been a long while since I gave up talking about you.” “One has to abide by certain rules,” said Cécile. Had Alice been capable, she would have broken into an inappropriate and loud laugh, like an over-the-top actress, and put paid to this absurd conversation. Racked with hilarity, she could have made the table rattle, upturned the glasses, emptied whatever was on the plates onto Cécile’s satin dress. Laughter as the one and only recourse. “A telephone call or an email would have been enough,” she said calmly. “It was important for me to see you, to let you know how deeply you’re wounding me.” Laughter could have been her metamorphosis. Her skin lined, her nose broken, her cheeks wrinkled. Cécile smoothed her hair methodically, an acknowledgement of her fragility that once upon a time used to touch Alice. Now she decided it was no more than an affected gesture. The stray white hairs disappeared.

“Don’t you conceal your white hairs?” “I haven’t got any,” Cécile said. “You lighten your hair a good deal, don’t you?” “I’ve always been fair-haired.” Cécile pursed her lips doubtfully, crossed her arms in front of her on the table, letting her hands rest on her wrists. Delicate hands with fine, trimmed nails. Alice’s were larger, appeared like those of an ageing woman, with flat fingers. How many times had she taken those frail hands in hers, shocking Cécile. The bright blue of her nails jarred with her finesse. “Yours is less curly than it used to be,” remarked Cécile. Alice stayed silent. “I saw David on TV the other day,” she continued. “He’s going grey, and looks a bit weird.” “Yes, it suits him really well.” “As to me, I respect you,” said Cécile, “and I keep quiet when I’m told about David’s double life.” “Do you want a dessert? We’ve made another tiramisu for you, my lovely,” the waiter informed Cécile. “No, thank you,” replied Alice, “and you?” “Just a coffee. You’ll have one?” Alice nodded. “Two coffees.” Cutting laughter would have annihilated Cécile. A puff of wind could have blown away the table, the chairs and her whole body, as light as a feather, to the other end of the room. “Basically,” Cécile continued, “we were talking about ourselves, and I said that so that you’d understand.” Understand. When would they give up trying to unravel the indecipherable? They drank their coffee, made an effort to exchange a few more pleasantries, finish with the meal, brush lips on cheeks just next to the car. A familiar waft of scent came from Cécile’s skin. Alice left without turning back. Did Cécile observe the silhouette taller than her own, with its rounded hips? Alice choked back her laughter. They didn’t see one another again. “The bitch!” said Salome, “David’s double life, what on earth was she talking about? “And you didn’t say anything back?” “What did you want me to say to her?” “The whore!” said David. “That’s sad,” said Nine. “She must be feeling really bad. I miss her sometimes.” That night Alice dreamt about Philippe. Something which hadn’t happened to her in years. She saw him again as he was at the age of twenty, his hair tumbling around his face, his eyes staring fixedly at her, the mark on his left pupil. Then the image faded.

Kéthévane Davrichewy

The Separated

Little by little, the lunch became a mirage, then disappeared altogether. Her resentment went with it. It left behind a grating snicker. An unidentified childhood fear. A sense of alienation concealed in the shadows. Defiance. Years superimposed themselves, Cécile was no longer around, but remained wrapped in her own inner meanderings. Alice opened her magazine: the abolition of the death penalty, Badinter’s speech, the 39-hour week. She ate her pain au chocolat. It was hard to savour, as hard as appreciating the explosion of spring. She withdrew into an absence, her own life escaped her. She became its observer. Hours, minutes and seconds came and crashed against an invisible and unbreakable window. * Dear Alice, my Alice, Alice. What shall I call you from now on? It doesn’t matter much since this letter isn’t one that will ever be sent. It is just a brief epigraph murmured into the solitude, without actually uttering a word. I seem to be stretched full length but I can’t feel any contact with the mattress. Do I still have a body or am I nothing more than a thing stripped bare in which the soul yet keeps watch? Those around me ask if I am still all there. “She’s in a coma” they tell one another. The rage that erupted when I thought of you no longer chastises me. Its place has been insidiously taken by an impervious and violent flood. I am speaking to you free of all sense of emotion. Has my rage now turned back on itself? I had longed for a disaster to strike you down, terrified by the force of my feelings. What a cruel irony of fate. Did anyone succeed in warning you? Do you need to be here? Should I anticipate your arrival? Or perhaps you’re already here, in among all the others? Would I be capable of identifying your voice? The boys, my mother, Eric, are they all really in the room? I watch your steps, and Philippe’s. Would you come running if you knew? Would you be able to grasp what I am struggling to clarify to myself with what remains of my lucidity? I can neither move nor speak. My eyelids are closed and my eyes opened inwards onto my memories. No light and no tunnel. That dress made of handknitted wool I wore on the first morning at nursery school when a shared spirit seemed to propel us towards one another. The sensation of the mesh beneath my fingers, your fingers fiddling with your gold ear-rings. There was no disappointment in our mutual waiting. After leaving nursery school, I underwent an operation. They called it “open heart surgery”. It was not the phrase that terrified you the most but the idea that my heart would be unable to continue beating and so you would be bound to lose it. What did they tell you when I went back to school in a different town? A few postcards, a few more drawings, then

our mothers stopped writing we were too young to continue alone. I didn’t replace you, instead I invented an invisible friend, my double with whom I could share my loneliness. I spoke to her aloud, which worried those close to me. My imaginary sister looked just like you. I recognised you instantly when our looks crossed as we arrived in the sixth form. A teacher took the register, the pupils in rows behind him. I was entirely certain we would end up in the same class. You no longer saw the little girl from the nursery school in me, but you told me you’d chosen me. We went into the classroom together, and sat down next to one another. We didn’t exchange a single word in the course of the day, yet every minute brought us closer. Exaltation united us. My first breath was taken then, the last failed me there, on the schoolgirls’bench. I shall never be alone again. Given such certainty, the upsand-downs of a love life mattered little, any more than the terror that escapes and leaves me panting for breath, unfulfilled. Your friendship was my bulwark. Mine used to satisfy you.

Kéthévane Davrichewy

The Separated

David Dumortier

Transvestite

Publisher: Le Dilettante Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Claude Tarrène claude.tarrene@ledilettante.com

Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

What do men hide behind their clothes and other forms of concealment? An autobiographical account that obliges us to look more honestly at our own selves. Biography

David Dumortier was born in 1967 and spent his childhood and adolescence in Charente, north-west of Bordeaux. As an Arabic speaker, with a degree from inalco, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations), he has lived in the Near East. He now lives in Paris. His writing provides things and events with a meaning that resonateswith the life of Mankind. He has published numerous writings (books for young people, poetry, stories, etc.) with Éditions Cheyne as well as Éditions Motus, Le Temps des cerises, Paris-Méditerranée, Rue du monde, l’Atelier du Colophon, Al-Manar, Bayard, Sarbacane, etc. Publications His most recent books for young people include 20 poèmes au nez pointu, Ed. Sarbacane, 2012; Les bateaux qui parlent, Cheyne, 2010; Ma famille nombreuse: 76 poèmes et un éléphant, Rue du monde, 2009 (Prix Bib de rue, ville de Sartrouville); Yi et Yo, Motus, 2008; Cligne-musette, Cheyne, 2008; Mehdi met du rouge à lèvres, Cheyne, 2006 (Prix de la ville de Ballon 2007).

David Dumortier is a poet, mystic and transvestite. Hellishly lyrical and a bitch in bed, ‘Sophia’ varies her life between the solidarity of sex and a sophisticated sainthood. It all began violently on the family farm. His father is oppressive, violent and wants his son to be a pork butcher, before finally leaving; his mother bears the brunt, first mistreated, then abandoned. In his dreams, the child pictures himself taking over the bodies of the daylabourers on the farm. Sent to boarding school, before finding work as a waiter, he reaches Paris where he at last finds fulfilment in the art of transvestism. It is an art of cosmetics and love that he practises when in contact with the strong bodies of Mourad, Ali, Adib and Karim. A besotted delivery-man, students, bus-drivers,

asylum-seekers, French, Africans, Syrians. A succession of names, muscular, roundshouldered men, violent or tender, fleeting encounters—but paradoxically in greatest freedom. Occasionally, this adventure becomes spiced with humour. David turns himself into a public letter-writer, a literary critic and a university lecturer. Having welcomed so many passers-by into his mouth, having prayed so long in the name of the Son and talked on the phone of having ‘become a degenerate’, the author of Transvestite reaches the ecstatic certainty that ‘The genitals of a pauper are sacred’ and ‘if you seek revenge for the evil that someone might have done to you, become a prostitute’. So be it.

After my national service, I moved to Paris. Life became sweeter at once. I was earning more than I had ever done. A Senegalese guy who was in love with me and kept me in comfort. He knew of my love of seafood and Sauternes, and would invite me to dinner on the boats on the Seine, or sometimes to eat at Androuet, while every other evening he cooked for me himself. We ate Senegalese food such as mafé, thieboudienne, pout-piat, excellent foutou, fried bananas … all deliciously spicy delicacies. I never criticised him about anything, but I started seeking refuge more and more frequently in the bathroom for a breather. Terrible anxieties seized me whenever he talked to me. I wanted to be alone with a book, to hear resonant, vibrant phrases, to find rhythms that would put me touch with the world of metaphors. Tales of his daily life exasperated me. They took me back to the ordinary sadness of human beings and their incurable despair. He was there for me, too much so during my everyday chores, during each day’s little pleasures and irritations, everything that I vehemently rejected. So I left him and moved into a flat. Alone. At last I could read and make love to men without having to put up with their distress. All I took from them was the flesh of the fruit, they found the husks when they left. One day, I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged man in the lift of my block of flats. He was a poetry reader. That was his job. He read at embassies, poetry societies in village halls, anywhere that would pay him. We clicked at once and swapped phone numbers on the landing. His name was Yves. He had just sculpted, trimmed and polished like a diamond-cutter everything I had been waiting for since praying to the Virgin Mary. He invited me round to his

place to see his book collection and gave me the addresses of all the serious poetry reviews and publishers, as well as a list of everyone with whom a poet should be acquainted—Michaux, Ghérasim Luca, Frénaud, Guillevic, Louis Bertrand, Michon … I didn’t know any of them. Now I’d have my work cut out for the next sixty years. The Virgin Mary had answered my prayers. I was on the right track … Inside each person there is an arrow whose tip never deviates from its direction. I confirmed that once again last night. A former lover called me at two in the morning from Lampedusa. He’d been extradited from France after a seven-month sentence for various forms of trafficking. As soon as he got to Tunisia, he set off back again via Libya. From there, he boarded a people-smuggling boat for Europe. He had ended up on the Italian island of Lampedusa. The North is a basket of eggs attracting spermatozoa from the South. Deaths are frequent because the boats are overloaded, or because there’s a fight, because there are too many tough guys, because they are fed up to the back teeth, because asylum-seekers sail in cockleshell craft, because the sea is hungry and it has enough salt in which to cook the drowned … He had risked his life several times on makeshift rust-buckets and came back again propelled by his own strength, by following his arrow … At first, I couldn’t make a living from my writing. At first, my work appeared mainly in reviews that had a print run of three hundred, then I was published by rather obscure publishing houses. Little by little I gained a reputation, or a voice, as they say. Paid invitations started to arrive and, today, most of my income comes from my books, especially my books for children … But it was a slow start. I dragged my heels for ten years before my first major publication. It was Claudia who passed all of her transvestite know-how on to me, who allowed my writing to find its style. To write, you have to experience the worst. I needed a diving bell, a wet suit, a helmet and armour to plunge deep into the depths of humanity. My protection was wigs, lipstick, nylon stockings and black lace. I saw everything, heard everything, and now I’ll tell you about my days and nights … Writing fed my transvestism, and transvestism my writing. They were intertwined. A poet was another. This particular other is made-up, disguised, masked, gaudy, bedizened, and can at last speak another language. A rare language, a language that has long been distilled, a language that savours only pure extracts, the quintessence, the twenty-four carats of the earth, the sap of the night-flowering poppies, the star that lights up for three seconds in the eyes of a man as he tumbles into the void, the dew on a miraculous petal … I pay my debt to Yves throughout the year by transmitting my experience as a writer to the children or adults who attend my writer’s workshops. I never jealously keep my cookery recipes secret. “What isn’t given is lost,” said the gypsy poet Alexandre Romanès. I’m of the same opinion. You even have to add flowers to dresses if you don’t want the gypsies to lose their souls.

As for Claudia, I repay my debt to her on the flesh of men: I keep alive the fragile flame that she once lit in the snow. I met her during a special political period. At the time, I was living with Ali, a Tunisian who, like many young immigrants, didn’t have a resident’s permit. His clandestine situation pained me and his voice started to sound increasingly like a child looking for protection. When the Socialists promised to regularise several thousand cases, he decided to submit an application to the police. A friend, a councillor at the Ministry of the Interior, and a homosexual, informed me of his intention to intervene so that things would run smoothly. Ali was ordered to go once, then twice to the prefecture, but without greater success; we’d reached six notifications to attend when his application was finally rejected. Seeing Ali’s distress, I devised another strategy: that of lodging an appeal to the Ministry of the Interior. The battle hadn’t been lost yet, but my friend the councillor was increasingly ill-at-ease when meeting me in his ministerial office. The criteria for regularisation were based on being able to prove residence in France for at least seven years, and applications from married people were almost all accepted, as well those from immigrants living with unmarried partners but who had children. (Immigrants not only have to work hard but also honour the country’s women. Instead of whom?) Ali was single and had problems proving how long he’d been in France, so the request he had made to the Ministry had no chance of being accepted. I’d heard of an association of homosexual illegal immigrants that had just been set up, so I got in touch with its chairman. Initially, Ali refused to submit any application that mentioned his homosexuality. He was afraid that this would appear on his passport, that everyone would know, that he’d be extradited and that this piece of information would then be communicated to the Tunisian authorities. The chairman of the association took him in hand and told him that if he went to war alone, then defeat was certain, but if he argued that he lived as a homosexual couple, then he would have a good chance of success.

David Dumortier

Transvestite

Claudia lived in a large flat, which she had divided into two simply with a set of doors. In this way, she received her lovers on one side, under the protection of her Cameroonian friend, an illegal immigrant, who lived in the other part of the flat. She, too, had joined the association, while keeping her distance and often being opposed to our strategies. She preferred the diplomatic way, sending regular letters to politicians and discretion rather than adopting more ostentatious initiatives. I agreed with her on that point, having always thought, like Emir Abd el-Kader, that the pen is mightier than the sword. When we first met, she looked at me with her beautiful smile. I must point out that she was dressed as a man that day, in fact she never left home as a transvestite. She then told me that I had a very attractive face, very fine, as she put it. I sensed that this was not an attempt at seduction, that she wouldn’t try anything on except

observe me and perhaps imagine me with a few more enhancements. So she invited me to her place one evening, to discuss the association and ask my opinion on certain matters. Her voice gave off a special kind of warmth and her way of speaking to others was as if she was always complementing them and finding something beautiful about them. It was exactly that, you felt beautiful at her place, ready to take on the world and climb mountains. She fixed some drinks then walked towards the window that overlooked the boulevard. From her first floor flat, you could see a bench, just beneath her window, on which a boy sat alone, doing nothing. Michel turned to me. ‘You know, I’m a transvestite. You see that boy down there, sitting there calmly? All I’d need to do would be to change clothes and he’d come up’. ‘Do you know him?’ ‘No, no, but you know I’m used to it, you see, you can always offer something to a lad who’s alone and bored. To begin with, he’ll be surprised, and then he’ll think, why not? So long as no one else knows. Getting a blowjob isn’t so bad, after all. Honestly, I see hundreds of boys a year, with huge penises, I’m very demanding about the size of a dick. As you can see for yourself, just as a man I’d never stand a chance.

Christian Gailly

The Wheel and Other Stories

Publisher: Éditions de Minuit Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Vercruyce direction@leseditionsdeminuit.fr

Translation: Annette David annettedavid99@gmail.com

‘Six short stories, each as dazzling at the last, yet with an impressive economy of style. Or indeed, due to it’. (‘Le Monde’, 13 January 2012) ‘Tackles the theme of fictional creation, but using a new narrative logic’. (‘L’Humanité’, 12 January 2012) Biography

Christian Gailly was born in 1943. He received the 2002 Prix du Livre Inter for Un Soir au club. Publications With Éditions de Minuit, some of the most recent works include Lily et Braine, 2010, Les Oubliés, 2007, Dernier amour, 2004, Un soir au club, 2002 (Prix du Livre Inter 2002) (republished in the collection « double », 2004) and Nuage rouge, 2000 (republished in the collection « Double », 2007).

Repairing a wheel. Wondering about a birthday present. Making a cake, etc. In short: to keep loving a woman. Not breaking up immediately. Attempting to find her again before it becomes too late.

It was very hot, 35 degrees under cover. I didn’t say in the shade, I said under cover. I half suspected it, actually, it didn’t surprise me. By sheer dint of living, of course, one’s used to it, judging the air temperature. Down to one or two degrees, one knows somehow, one’s able to tell how hot it is. I myself was thinking 32 or 33, right until I went to check. I didn’t go there especially for that. I couldn’t care less knowing exactly how many degrees. It was when I went to fetch the hammer that I read 35 on the old thermometer hanging in the shed. The toolbox was on the workbench, below the thermometer, and so I looked. Not that it made me feel any hotter. It was a big hammer that I never use. Moreover, I haven’t had to use it, my own strength has been enough. I say my own strength, talking about my strength as if insinuating, but no. Rather modest, my strength, for a man my size, but nevertheless superior to hers. In any case sufficient, ‘cause even being superior it might not have been sufficient. It was sufficient. But I wasn’t to know. So I went to fetch the hammer that the woman had asked me for. She rang my doorbell to ask for it. You wouldn’t have a hammer, would you? she said. She was hot, with her hair in her eyes. Her beautiful gloves were covered in dirty grease, it gave her a courageous look, I thought, I don’t know why. She hadn’t been worried about getting them dirty. That’s brave. And then actually wearing gloves in this heat, her concern with old-style elegance, I say concern with, I should say desire for—I liked that. At the same time I imagined her to be quite ill tempered, because of her slightly turned up nose. But when I think of it, it was more her gaze, a pale look that struck me as being hard, or let’s say stern, anyway, something resolute in her eyes.

I should have one among my tools, I said, what is it for? She looked at me. My question irritated her. I was wasting time. She was short of it. And clearly refrained from saying: Doesn’t matter what it’s for, it’s none of your business, just lend me a hammer. Now me: If I’m asking you, I say, it’s because hammers come in different sizes, all depending on what one intends to use them for. Her: I need a big one, have you got that? Me: Yes, but for doing what? Because you see, I explain, there’s big and big, if it’s a sledgehammer you need, you must say so, and then again, there are sledgehammers and sledgehammers—what is it for? She turned round. Let her gaze sweep the landscape. She wanted to see if she had a choice. She didn’t. I was the only one in the area. She looked at me again. She was hot. So was I. We were talking in the full sun. She was tired. The lock of hair in her eyes annoyed her. She didn’t dare to touch her brow with her gloves all smeared. With the risk of irritating her even more I brushed the lock away with my fingertips, provisionally—it was windy. It made her smile, my audacity, and I saw her front teeth. She relaxed and told me: I’ve got a flat front tyre. I see, I said, and you can’t undo the nuts. That’s right, she said, but maybe with a hammer, do you have one you could lend me? Wait here, I said. I led her into the garden and put her in the shade. Then I went to look for the hammer. I found one, and came back with it. I could just as well not have found one. Let’s go, I said. Now her: I don’t need you, only the hammer, don’t trouble yourself, I’ll manage. It’s very heavy, I say, let me at least carry it. She sighs. What, I say, you don’t want me to help you? Is it that painful? She shrugs her shoulders. Her car was on the road, waiting, two hundred metres from my house, surrounded by fields. Over the weeks the harvest had turned a uniform ochre colour, the plants were scorched, let’s say burnt, it didn’t rain and everything was getting parched, not a drop of water in three months, the earth cracking, the animals dying of thirst. Me too, I was thirsty. I went to the kitchen to have a drink and while drinking I put my head under the tap. Then I dried myself with the towel but not too much so as to keep the coolness in my hair. I was rubbing my head as I looked though the window. I saw the car stop, a section of it, the roof I think. Little did I know. Everyone has the right to stop. Even in this back of beyond. Stupid though. I personally would have accelerated, anyway, I went back to work, without much enthusiasm, my story was dragging. Half an hour later, having not made any progress, I was interrupted by the garden bell. It hangs above the gate. It’s enough just to pull the cord, that shakes it, and it rings. Someone was tugging on it, it rang. Lily mocks me about that bell. Lily’s my girlfriend. She says that, really, I could: Honestly, you could put up an electric doorbell, couldn’t you! Yes, no doubt. But I like my bell very much. It has a nice sound, not too deep not too

Christian Gailly

The Wheel and Other Stories

sharp, not loud not weak, pleasant, just how I like it. And what’s more, it’s far away from the house. I don’t get startled when I’m working but hear it as if it were a vague call, from a distant church. I say to myself: Ah, there’s the postman. Or: Ah, here’s my sweet Lily. I recognize her by the way she rings the bell. The postman too. The postman had already been. With the phone bill and a letter from my publisher, asking me to, well whatever. As for Lily, she was due to arrive a little later. Who is it? I wondered as I got up from my work. Not unhappy to leave it. I was bored with it. Anything would do to distract me. Any excuse coming this way, I’d grab it. I crossed the burnt garden, watering was no longer allowed, opened the wooden gate fully—I had to open it if I wanted to see anything—and there was this woman with her white dirty gloves and her hair in her eyes, blond, wearing a yellow suit. The rest we already know. So, off we went. She walked on my left. The big hammer was dangling from my hand. This woman’s stylishness bothered me. Next to her, in my work clothes, I looked like an oaf, in a shirt and a pair of grubby jeans, it was the end of the week, I change once a week, Lily takes care of my washing, in that way it makes less work for her, but I didn’t want it, it was she who wanted it. The hammer was weighing down my arm. I put it on my shoulder. I now looked like a workman, a real one, a bloke that works, I mean genuinely, not someone like me who doesn’t know how to use his hands, who’s only good at writing. My plot was not going anywhere. I was bored. I was only hanging on so as not to despair. We walked along the road, she and I. Country roads are all the same. Slightly cambered, tarmac in the middle, stones on the sides, from the gravel they scattered onto the still hot asphalt when they redid the road, small stones that have come unstuck little by little and then been chased towards the sides by the cars, lorries, tractors and other agricultural machinery. All this is to say that the woman was walking along the edge of the road. Her soles and heels made a crunching noise on the gravel. Luxury shoes, they were, very slender and light. I wondered whether the gravel hurt her. The flint especially must have been biting into the soles of her feet. I imagined her poor feet, the only part of her body that I let myself look at, walking with my eyes downcast. Why don’t you walk on this side, you’ll be more comfortable, I said, leaving her my place in the middle of the road. More at ease she began to walk faster, reminding me that she was in a hurry. Me too, I quickened my steps, I had no choice. The road sloped up gently. False flats are killers in this kind of heat. And then this aching shoulder of mine! The hammer was hurting me. I lifted it up and let it hang again from my hand. I even think I swung it in a pendular fashion, to reduce the weight, in any case it helped me, encouraged me.

The car was there, quite close, on the corner. I turned round, thinking: if I, a minute ago, were able to see a section of the car from my kitchen window, I should now be able, if I turn round, to see part of the kitchen, I thought. And, in fact, from where I stood, close to the car, I could see my kitchen window, and once more I drew the banal optical conclusion: from the spot one can see, one can be seen. Then, I heard. Someone was talking. Not to me. The words weren’t addressed to me, couldn’t under any circumstances be addressed to me, otherwise I would immediately have turned round and abandoned the view of my house with its kitchen window, where I’d been just before being here, and where I wasn’t any longer seeing that I was now here—dramatic observation. Anyway, it wasn’t me being spoken to, but I heard talking, and so I turned round and saw who the woman was speaking to. A man in a shirt, his tie undone, dark, holding a handkerchief, white and stained with dirty grease, his jacket lying next to him on the grassy ditch, himself sitting in the shade, his back to the field, on the bank, with his legs in the ditch. He was no doubt saying to the woman: You took your time! He too was wearing his Sunday best, oddly, something a little more than just a Sunday outfit, for a celebration of I don’t know what, a baptism or a wedding, or a first communion, maybe. And no doubt the woman answered him: Next time you can go yourself, that’ll be quicker. The man too had dirty hands. He rubbed them with his handkerchief, now so dirty that he no longer dared to wipe his brow with it, he must have tried as well to undo the nuts on the wheel, I gathered. Are you a mechanic? he asked me with the cantankerous look of an impatient, arrogant snob, without as much as getting up from that ditch of his, he was all right there, in the shade, examining us, me and my heavy hammer. No, I said, I’m a writer, stuck at the moment, counting on you for some ideas. A writer? he said. Very interesting, what’s your name? Paul Cédrat, I said. My name didn’t mean anything to him, not surprising, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody, so I couldn’t be a writer, at least not an important one, a writer one doesn’t know cannot exist, surely. I told myself: That’s a perfectly defensible point of view, and the woman looked at us, as if she were saying: Perhaps you’ve finished, you two. She had just discovered my name, my profession. From that moment her look became different. Of what nature was this change? I don’t know. I seemed to intrigue her. It’s always like that, one intrigues, even as an unknown, by simply announcing that one writes. And they suspect you of enjoying I don’t know what kind of pleasure. Poor them, if only they knew.

Christian Gailly

The Wheel and Other Stories

Louis Gardel

The Scriptwriter

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr

Translation: Sam Alexander samalex20@googlemail.com

In these subtle variations on the themes of morality, love and happiness, this ‘scriptwriter’ sweeps the reader away with his novelist’s vision. An amused look at the literary and cinematic milieux of Paris. Louis Gardel’s own character as a writer, publisher and screenwriter takes centre stage, notably in Régis Wargnier’s ‘Indochine’. Biography From Fort Saganne (winner of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, 1980)

to Beau rôle, from L’Aurore des bien-aimés [The Dawn of the Beloved] (awarded the France Télévisions prize, 1997) to La Baie d’Alger [The Bay of Algiers], Louis Gardel has constructed a rich and singular body of work, whose depth is often hidden by his feeling and love of the romantic. With Le Scénariste, he opens a new door and brings us a novel about morality and love. Publications His most recent novels include: La Baie d’Alger, 2007 (awarded the Prix Méditerranée, 2008); Grand Seigneur, 1999; l’Aurore des biens aimés, 1997 (awarded the France Télévisions prize, 1997). All were published by Editions du Seuil and are available in paperback as part of the Points collection.

François is a novelist. He becomes a screenwriter following, what appear to him, a series of chance circumstances. He is not someone who gives his life direction. He makes do with whatever comes along. The novel is set in the worlds of literature and filmmaking. The young woman with whom François falls in love works in publishing in Paris. In order to live with him, she brutally cuts short a liaison with an older writer, who is almost driven mad by being abandoned in this way. But François will always ignore blackmail and threats. Algeria also features in the story, since it is where François was

born and spent the first years of his life with his mother. She settled in Algiers after independence to work for the new nation. He never knew who his father was, but is resigned to it being kept a secret. François has a real appetite for happiness. He puts any suffering into the stories he writes. These are not transpositions from real life, rather an attempt to write about what may have happened or what could have happened, a sort of parallel world. In daily life, François does not try to work out anything. He lets himself be carried along by his desires and by chance. Life isn’t serious. What he invents is serious.

They’re operating on his throat. He’s naked under the sheet that a masked nurse has used to cover him from feet to shoulders, having first asked him to remove his briefs. Why his briefs for neck surgery? He doesn’t ask. He has put himself in the hands of the healthcare professionals. He is their patient. He is being patient. Of the medical personnel milling about the table he is lying on, he only recognises the surgeon. She is a very nice red-haired woman. She can’t be much more than forty and runs the ent department authoritatively. He has seen her twice. The first time she sent him to the hospital to redo the tests he had already done in town - she telephoned her colleagues to make him an appointment - and the second time, she confirmed the diagnosis given by François’ gp. His hypertension is being caused by an excess of calcium in the blood. One of the tiny glands around the thyroid that control calcium levels isn’t working properly. ‘We’ll remove it and everything will settle down.’ On entering the operating theatre, followed by her trainees, her red hair concealed under a pale green surgical cap, she greeted him with a cheery smile as if they were about to go off on a trip together. The masked nurse delineates the surgical field, draping something over his face that has the same soft texture as the sheet over his body. He can’t see anything now. Above him, the surgeon’s voice rings out brightly: ‘All right? Shall we get going?’ He doesn’t know if she’s talking to him or to her team. Anyway, the sheet over his face stops him replying. He isn’t feeling at all apprehensive but he must be nervous because when the powerful light comes on above him an absurd question pops into his head. Should a female surgeon be addressed as

‘madame le chirurgien’ or ‘madame la chirurgien’ or even ‘madame la chirurgienne’? In unpleasant situations, François invents little thought-bubbles for himself. A man’s voice, the anaesthetist, is warning him that he is going to have an injection and then drift off to sleep. Sure enough, a needle pierces his vein and he loses consciousness. He comes round almost immediately or at least after a length of time he cannot gauge but it can’t have been long, because he hears the surgeon asking someone to help her on with her gloves. The operation has not yet begun. He doesn’t panic straightaway. He panics in the next few seconds when he realises that he cannot speak or move. He has no means of letting them know that he isn’t asleep. He can hear everything - the nurses’ quiet chatter, the metallic clang of the surgical instruments they’re handling and, in the foreground, the voice of the surgeon giving her junior doctors a step-by-step summary of the operation at hand. He has never experienced, nor even imagined, the powerlessness to which he has been reduced - he is incapable of uttering a sound or contracting a single muscle. Yet his will to do so is intact. He concentrates it into his right hand. If he can manage to wiggle a finger perhaps someone will notice that he isn’t asleep. No good, he can’t. His only hope is the pain. When the scalpel cuts into his neck he’ll leap up, he’ll scream. But the blade is touching his skin, slicing into it. He can feel everything, except the pain. He is going to witness his own operation. Paralysed. His neck is open, the instruments are poking about inside. He follows their movements: opening, pushing, moving deeper into him. The surgeon is giving a running commentary. She flags up the pitfalls to be avoided when operating on such a delicate area. He interprets the medical terms as best he can. He learns, in real time, that the scalpel is sliding against his jugular. That it’s easy to make a fatal mistake, especially if there’s a lot of blood. ‘Swab! I can’t see a thing.’ He doesn’t feel the blood flowing from his throat. The sensation of the swabs being applied and removed is dull but strong enough for him to visualise the gurgling crater his organs are drowning in. He is terrified. Doomed by his total inability to react. He’ll suffocate if he doesn’t move. He tries to activate his muscles with all his might, concentrating so much that he no longer feels the tugging of the retractor around the wound, nor the scalpel working inside his neck. ‘There, got it,’ says the surgeon, with the air of someone who has just accomplished a mission. The operation is finished. The mental exertion he vainly forced himself to keep up is no longer necessary. He lets go. Perhaps he can sleep at last. But the surgeon is saying something else: ‘We’ll explore a bit more, I think. You don’t see everything on the mri.’ He hears those words just as distinctly as he feels the instruments dig into

him, pushing against the skin inside his throat. Relief gives way to distress, then rage. He can’t bear it anymore, being delivered up like a piece of meat. Can’t they bloody well leave him alone? Doesn’t matter if there’s a tumour hidden behind the thyroid, they can leave it there. The surgeon is taking short sharp breaths, then her breathing becomes inaudible. She must have stood up, ‘He’s clean, no point probing anymore. And this chap’s going to wake up soon.’ She is handing over to her assistants to finish the job, the stitching and dressing. Her voice is moving further away. This time it’s over, really over. He doesn’t feel relief anymore, just a surge of deep joy. Delivered from the hell he has just been through, he wonders how he would have reacted if the surgeon had announced she’d found a nasty cancer. That must happen. What do you do? Drop dead? Go mad? But if you can’t move or speak how do you go mad? He’s toying with these questions. It helps quell his impatience. He’s sure it won’t be long now, he’ll get back the use of his muscles. The nurses who wheeled him to the operating theatre earlier will put him on a trolley and take him to the recovery unit. Only, the trainee who has begun to sew him up - it’s a girl, he can hear her voice - is having trouble. She is drawing attention to her failures, plaintively. He hears everything, feels everything: she is pushing the needle into his skin, taking it out, pushing it in again. ‘I can’t do it.’ The boy she’s confiding in encourages her. ‘Yes, you can. Start a bit higher. Lift the forceps up a bit.’ He would strangle the two of them if he could, the dozy cow who’s practicing ineptly on his open throat and the sadist over there who, instead of intervening, is saying: ‘Stop shaking. Start again.’ How many times is she going to start again? It’s unbearable. Something is going to explode, it has to. If he doesn’t scream in the next second, if he doesn’t tear himself from the operating table, things might get freakish, the unthinkable might happen. He has never experienced such a feeling of outrage, all the more violent because his fury is having no effect on his body, no effect on anything. But something new is happening in his neck. It’s faint, vague. It takes him a moment to realise that his sense of pain is coming back. The needle the girl is sticking into his skin is piercing his numbness. The effects of the anaesthetic are wearing off. The nightmare is ebbing away. The big toe of his left foot contracts downwards. He puts all his energy into this area of mobility. He doesn’t

Louis Gardel

The Scriptwriter

try to control the twitching in his toe. That he cannot do. What he can do, is make it bigger. Soon his whole foot is jerking. His calf shakes, then his thigh. Restlessness is winning. His muscles lash out. He feels like a worm cut in half, like a damned soul in the devil’s grip. People are panicking around him. The surgeon comes over. He hears her voice up close: ‘What’s going on? … Is the dressing finished? … Hold him down, will you?’ Hands seize him by the arms and ankles just when, twisting this way and that, he’s about to succeed in tipping himself off the operating table. François stops reading and places the sheets of paper beside him on the sofa. On them, since returning from hospital the day before yesterday and in between two convalescent nights’ sleep, he wrote the account of his misadventure. The scar on his throat throbs. Before answering the door a moment ago, when his visitors rang, he had slipped a scarf around the collar of his dressing gown to conceal the dressing obstructing his neck. Thierry is his publisher, Nathalie Sécor, the press officer who will deal with his novel when it comes out on 20 August, two weeks from now. They are sitting opposite him, Nathalie sunk in the old armchair in which François’ mother spent her final days and in which he found her dead one evening; Thierry on the edge of the other armchair that, when François was a child, no one ever sat in. It was reserved for a father who did not exist. ‘It’s a brilliant piece,’ says Nathalie. ‘Listening to you, I felt like I was having your operation.’ ‘No,’ says Thierry, ‘François’ text isn’t realistic, it’s false realism. It’s metaphorical.’ Nathalie and Thierry find common cause in flattering authors, though they go about it in different ways. François doesn’t believe in their compliments but he likes them both, especially Thierry, his friend and collaborator ever since he published his first novel. ‘A metaphor for what?’ François asks. ‘For being on earth, in a way. We tell ourselves we’re active in our lives, we believe we are, and then we notice that, fundamentally, it’s out of our hands. Right François? You’re like that, aren’t you, my friend?’ François smiles without replying. He’s tired. He’s wondering why he gave in to the desire to read what he had written. Was it a need to prove that, although weakened by the operation, he’s still a writer? Thierry crosses his legs. He isn’t wearing any socks. His jeans ride up over his bony ankles. ‘In any case,’ he says, ‘you should use it in your next novel. “They’re operating on his throat.” That would make a good opening.’

Nathalie Hug

Miss Tick-Tacks

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel proussel@calmann-levy.fr

Translation: John Fletcher j.w.j.fletcher@kent.ac.uk

An extraordinary story from a little-known period in the history of north-eastern France, along the German border, told through the eyes of an adolescent. Incisive, elegant writing. A sublime and inspiring ending. Biography

Nathalie Hug lives in eastern France. She has written several books with Jérôme Camut. After L’Enfant-rien, published by Calmann-Lévy in 2011, La Demoiselle des Tic-Tac is her second solo novel. Publications With Calmann-Lévy éditions: L’Enfant-rien, 2011 (republished in paperback with Le Livre de Poche, 2012); Avec Jérôme Camut, Les Murs de sang, 2011; Les Yeux d’Harry, 2010 (republished in paperback with Le Livre de Poche, 2011); Trois fois plus loin, 2009 (republished in paperback with Le Livre de Poche, 2010) and Les Éveillés, 2008 (republished in paperback with Le Livre de Poche, 2010).

Rosy and her mother left Ludwigshafen in 1937 for a better life in France. But in this little Moselle village no one has forgotten the annexation of 1871. Few people reach out to them. It is true that Mutti admires Hitler, despises priests, Jews and civil servants, and that Mein Kampf is her bedside book … But for Rosy, aged ten, everyday life is not much fun.

When war breaks out and Hitler takes over this part of Lorraine once again, things change. But not for long. Between November 1944 and March 1945, while the Allies pound the region, Rosy and her mother take refuge in the cellar. To survive, Rosy clings to her memories. She has scant provisions and for sole company a little hen and funny spiders with very fine legs which her uncle Edy, whom she loved like a father, called “the tick-tacks”.

1 Mutti tells me to stuff all I can in my bag: abandoned apple-cores, mouldy swedes covered in sand, scraps of cloth and bits of wood, while she fills the pockets of her apron with leek tops and bruised potatoes. When she grabs my hand our palms are damp with fear. “Come along, Rosy”, she says, “come quickly.” The church bells are ringing the tocsin and if I don’t run with all my strength now I will never be able to run again. I stumble in the middle of panicking legs, legs which know what I know, that we must run or perish, and I fall headlong. With her arms grabbing me under my armpits my mother picks me up, she saves me from all the bodies ready to trample me underfoot so long as they get to the shelter; we all want to reach it. Some people I know, and others I don’t. They jostle each other, smash the flimsy stalls, grab things by the handful, wolf down damaged vegetables and swallow eggs as if their lives depended upon it. But it’s not much use having a full stomach when bombers darken the sky: what matters is to get under the ground. We still have about twenty yards to go when the first bombs whistle past us and explode with a deafening bang. Flames shoot up, houses rumble, then shake against each other, some collapse like cheap toys and others are swallowed up in a dark cloud that rushes towards us and makes us choke. The shelter is there, within reach, at last. We shout for joy. A frenzied sense of relief fills our hearts and nearly makes us fall over. But just as we try to cover the last few yards, tall shapes loom up, blocking the only route to safety, and our mad dash is halted by three stern-faced men.

Gasping for breath, we are pulled up short. I stare fixedly at Mutti’s shoulders, then at her face. Her eyes shine strangely, she straightens up, smoothes her apron and tidies her hair. I hear her voice and I gather that she is begging these strangers to take me with them - after all, she says, I’m only a kid. She is determined, even if she has nothing to offer, even if I don’t agree with her. But the shelter swallows up the last of the lucky ones and the heavy door slams shut, leaving us stuck on the pavement. Gripping my arm, Mutti pants as she surveys the deserted streets, the bits of paper blowing around in the black smoke, the silhouettes of people running away, the shutters hastily banged to. My ears are filled with her sobs, with the roar of fires burning, with the cracking of roof timbers, and with the din of bricks exploding in the heat. My mother and the houses around groan in unison and their sad moaning paralyses me with fear. Prisoners of the ambient madness, we cling to each other and huddle against the door which has rejected us. I feel Mutti’s heart beating against my cheek; her clenched fingers grip my arms so tightly it hurts, but the pain is nothing in comparison with the hurt inflicted by the words the men hurled at us: we were both filthy Krauts and death would be too good for us.

Nathalie Hug

Miss Tick-Tacks

When the planes fall silent at last, leaving behind an ash-grey sky, we quit our place of refuge and scuttle along the facades towards our house. Ghosts among other ghosts, we cling to the smoking walls of a district we have difficulty recognising. The ironmonger’s belonging to Monsieur Colson, our landlord, lies in ruins, and all the even-numbered dwellings in the street look like houses of cards flattened by the wind. Here and there splashes of colour can be seen, the petals of crushed roses, asters spilling out of a broken flower-tub, an abandoned yellow bicycle. Around the houses a strange silence reigns, and behind each blackened window malevolent shadows seem to be watching us as we pass. Mutti hurries along, dragging me behind her. We tread carefully between the craters and the rubble, I step over a torn-off arm, I let my mother’s hand go, I stare at the arm, scarlet and grey, its fingers gripping the burned fabric of a German uniform, and the gold band shining on its wedding finger. The rest of the body is missing. I walk on, thinking of the cruel things I do to my doll Lila, and wonder what happened to the other bits. When we get to the top of the Rue du Soleil my legs are trembling and my heart is in my mouth. I trip over the body of a child. The flames have scorched his head and the top of his body, which lies at a funny angle from his legs. His fingers clutch a small cloth bag from which a handful of pebbles have spilled out. Andy. My heart is gripped by an icy hand. Mutti pulls me towards her. I resist,

howling that I want to say goodbye to my friend. My mother throws herself upon me, shouting that it is not him, my legs give way, I shout in my turn that she should stop lying, I am not afraid of dead people, I only want to pick up the pebble bag. In Andy’s memory. Mutti promises to go and get it later. Without letting go of my hand she pushes the house door open with her shoulder, holds the leaf back with her elbow to let me in, then turns left and drags me into the stairwell.

2 My mother and I moved into the cellar on 26 August 1944. When it was put about that Paris had been liberated and that the Americans were going to crush Hitler, my grandmother—nicknamed Oma Chouchou for reasons unknown—declared that it was no longer seemly to have Krauts in the house even if they were family. She would agree, grudgingly, to hide them in the cellar provided they only came out at night. Apart from Andy and the landlord, who’d been let in on the secret, no one in the area bothered about us. Everyone said it was time for the Krauts to go back where they came from. Living in the cellar was at first an adventure. Now I have only one wish: that Hitler wins the war so that we can get out of this hole. The Americans are pounding the region without let-up. The days drag by, then the weeks. Summer is gone, autumn comes along, November arrives, and we’re still holed up. The stomach pains that made us sweat last month are followed by nausea and terrible headaches. Flu has not passed us by either. It’s the fault of that damned river, Mutti declares, it’s bad for your health when water flows under a house. When the snows melt, or after a storm, the river, which flows from a chalybeate spring upstream, becomes a raging torrent that turns the ground into a sea of mud. But such floods are not alone responsible for our misfortunes. It’s colder and colder here and, what with the battles raging overhead, we‘re having difficulty finding anything to eat. To keep us dry, my mother has laid the ends of oak slats, ripped from the loft, on bricks lined along the walls. But this shaky flooring does not cover the whole of the cellar. Squelching about is not what bothers me the most because in winter the ground is hard almost everywhere. Walking on loose planks, or sitting or lying on them, now that is agonising, because I can easily imagine all the creepy-crawlies teeming underneath, the noisy ones with claws, the rats and the dormice, and the quiet ones, the tick-tacks with webs that stick to your fingers. The most disgusting spiders are not the blackest or the hairiest, I hardly ever see those, they hate human company and rarely venture near us. But the tick-tacks, those things with bodies in two parts and long thin legs, which invite

themselves into every nook and cranny, near our bed and between jars or my books, and which become white skeletons with lumps on their feet: they are the ones that disgust me. My mother has constructed some raised boxes on which she has laid our beds, and she has put in shelving above them, but I can’t get my books or toys down without encountering one of them. So, to rummage in the darkest corners—the favourite hiding-places of those horrid tick-tacks—I wrap my hands in a cloth. That makes Mutti laugh. When the first bombs fell on the railway station, I first thought we were going to die, then I prayed for the Wehrmacht to drive the Americans out as quickly as possible. Mutti, for her part, was quite relaxed about it. She assured me that it was just propaganda and that Hitler was going to put on a magnificent firework display for his enemies. Today, even if the enemy is struggling to push our Führer’s army back, our victory is uncertain. In the village, people are muttering that these bombs are going to pulverise us Krauts and that we’d do better to clear off before we get thrown in jail. How I’d love to be loathsome, mean, or worse, completely mad, like Oma Chouchou! Then I’d have every excuse for plucking out the eyes of those French pigs. But I was given an excellent education, first from the nuns and then in the Jung Mädel and the bdm1, where we learned to carry our heads high in all circumstances. I hate lowering my eyes before anyone, even the headmistress, the burgomaster or the curé, but Mutti is keen that I do—don’t look at them like that, Rosy! You’ll get us into trouble—and I do as I’m told, raging inwardly. The fact remains that those French bastards have short memories and are behaving very hypocritically where we’re concerned. Since 1940 they’ve all been considered one of us, they are part of Germany, they are Germany, and if they’ve never liked us, their seeming indifference suited us fine. Now that the Americans are coming to their aid that indifference has turned to hatred, but Mutti and I haven’t changed. Go back home, you filthy whore! And you, Gretchen, go and lick Hitler’s boots! “Gretchen”, that’s me. Their hatred of us terrifies me. By night, by day, in the village or at home, nowhere do I feel safe. It’s only in the cellar that I can breathe freely. During the bombardments the walls shake, the door and the beams creak, but I’ve set up my desk, far from walls, far from people.

Nathalie Hug

Miss Tick-Tacks

1. Bund Deutscher Mädel, the equivalent of the Hitlerjugend for girls aged between 14 and 18. For girls aged 10 to 14, there was the Jungmädelbund, the female branch of the Deutsches Jungvolk. Membership was compulsory in the annexed zone from 1941 onwards.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

The Postman of Abruzzi

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Catherine Farin catherine.farin@mercure.fr

Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

An author already translated into more than 14 languages. A powerful story exploring intense and passionate characters. An invitation to visit an exotic world. Biography

Vénus Khoury-Ghata, a novelist and poet of Lebanese origin, lives and writes in Paris. She has published around twenty novels, and as many poetry anthologies. She is a member of the judging panel for the France—Quebec Prize and for the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie. Mercure de France has already published some of her poetry anthologies and two novels. She received the Grand Prix de Poésie from the Académie Française in 2009 for her entire poetic works. Publications Her most recent novels include: La fille qui marchait dans le désert, Mercure de France, 2010; Sept pierres pour une femme adultère, Mercure de France, 2007 (reprinted in paperback, Gallimard, in the Folio collection, 2009); La Maison aux orties, Actes Sud, 2006 (reprinted in paperback, Babel collection, 2008); Le Moine, l’Ottoman et la Femme du grand argentier, Actes Sud, 2003, (Baie des Anges prize), (reprinted in paperback in the Babel collection, 2004); Privilège des morts, Balland, 2001.

Laure is the wife of Luc, who died ten years previously. Luc was a geneticist who took a special interest in Malaterra, a village in the Abruzzi inhabited by the descendants of Albanians who had crossed the Adriatic a hundred years earlier to find refuge in Italy. When Luc returned from his expeditions, he would give Laure the task of sorting out his notes and his research findings. But Luc never returned from his last journey to Malaterra … leaving Laure a widow and in some way ‘incomplete’. To be able to mourn Luc, Laure must meet the people with whom he spent so much time far away from her and understand the fascination that this group of people held for him …

It is an inhospitable corner of the world. Laure is a foreigner who is regarded as an intruder. Fortunately, Yussuf the postman initiates her into village life and tells her the stories of its inhabitants. Apart from some shared genetic characteristics, all these individuals have strange, often tragic, destinies. Laure will have to win them over and gain the confidence of the village women who view her with suspicion. In this enclosed and isolated world, Laure’s presence disrupts the usual course of events. Tongues are loosened and some secrets resurface. And Laure discovers a different Luc from the person she thought she knew.

‘It’s a village carved into the rock, the very image of Eboli where Christ stopped according to Francesco Rosi’s film, the last village after the last railway station, it’s as far as the train can go. It begins with the letter M’. Luc’s explanations were always vague, but as she would pretend to understand … Her geneticist husband had forgotten the name of the village in which his heart had cracked, despite having made three visits and brought back hundreds of test tubes of blood, urine and saliva from its inhabitants. The Albanians who had settled in Abruzzi in Italy a century before shared the same blood group and Rhesus factor: O negative. After he returned dead, his friends stepped over the samples stacked up in the entrance of their flat to offer Laure their condolences. Six crates and a hundred pages of notes to decipher and write up. This is what Laure always did and would have done once more if Luc had not had the terrible idea of dying. Copying up his notes felt like travelling with him in the countries for which he would leave alone to discover the people he would tell her about on his return. They included Newfoundland Eskimos, Alaskan salmon fishermen and the Albanians she would get to know when he made his next journey. At least that was what he said. There was no next time. There would never be another journey. With the last comforters having disappeared, while waiting for Luc to stop being dead so that he could come back home, not a day had passed without her thinking of the Albanians in the Abruzzi. Ten years later, as Luc was still

missing, Laure took the train to Italy from the Gare de Lyon and to this village with the name beginning with the letter M. The file on the Albanians and her typewriter were added to her suitcase at the very last minute. ‘I’m the wife of the doctor who put a needle in your fingertips and got you to urinate into test-tubes’, she would tell them, and they would open every door to her. * The villagers who had a view over the mountain watched intently as she made her way from the station up to the house rented for a week. The other villagers who overlooked the valley noticed nothing and went along with the opinion of the former, having no reason to contradict them. Her arrival at exactly midday in August when the sun was blazing down on them was no surprise, but they found it very strange that she had not stopped at the cemetery or at the café, even to drink a glass of water before starting the climb up the hillside. ‘It’s the last house on the left, at the foot of the ruins’, the lady from the agency had explained to her. ‘And take good care not to get lost; there’ll be no one to give you directions, the villagers move down to the valley in the summer. They leave the summit to the vultures and the snakes’. The key in her hand weighs a ton; it’s as heavy as her legs now that she is attacking the slope. The lady in the distance is waving her arms around at her as if she were skipping with a rope. ‘The key’, she shouts, ‘is just for the sake of form; there’s no lock on the door any more, and you’ll have to go back down the hill for your food supplies’. ‘Everything is down there’, pointing her finger towards the ravine. ‘Is there a stationer’s?’ ‘What for? The old people who knew how to write are all dead and the youngsters have left the village—unless you want to try your luck with the old Kosovar; he opens on Sundays after Mass. And your name?’ she realises before walking away. ‘Laure’, Luc’s wife calls over her shoulder without turning round. The sweltering August heat slows her pace and slows her thoughts. She no longer knows exactly what it was that drove her to this hillside village and its inhabitants who speak a language that only they understand, a mixture of Italian and Albanian. Is it because it looks so like Eboli or to close the circle of mourning that she has travelled all through the night? Studying the genetics of men and women who live in a closed environment, who only married each other and who had crossed the Adriatic to change their lives has cost Luc his life. Samples taken in the daytime and analysed at night, notes made between dawn and nightfall, deciphered and written up the next day.

Luc’s writing is as tortuous as the slope she is struggling to scale. The same houses carved into the cliff, the same rusty frontages. The sun and snow of Malaterra are causing the stones to bleed. Caves instead of houses, with blocked windows. The only open shutters belong to the house she has rented in a few seconds. Lined up on the doorstep are five honey-coloured kittens that seem to be watching for her arrival. They lead her to their mother, slumped on the crocheted bedspread. The mother cat, who is recovering from giving birth, yawns so widely as to dislocate her jaw, then watches with concern as Laure goes back and forth between the open trunk and the shelf on which she places two dresses and Luc’s file. Tomorrow she will read the pages full of messily jumbled illnesses, immune deficiencies, marriages between relatives, incestuous marriages—the father who got his daughter pregnant with the mother’s mute complicity, sometimes the brother who has moved far away and stopped sending his news. Tomorrow she will put some order into the biologist’s hastily written notes. Ten years have passed between the time he came to Rome in a blinding snowstorm and his return to Paris in an air ambulance that carried a man in a coma, on the verge of death. Two ironed shirts sent on one month later by someone called Helena had retained his smell. Touched and sniffed as she tightened her eyelids for fear that her tears would dissolve the sweat, the two shirts hanging in a cupboard were filled out by the dead man’s presence at the slightest draught. From the balcony that overhangs the void, Laure can make out a clock, a square, a tree with shortened branches and the red brick of the rooftops. The evaporated water from the lake masks the houses, but not the ravine, the gaping womb—one of the seven gates of hell, according to a railway notice. Why did Luc choose this village and its inhabitants for his investigations? Are a blood group and Rhesus factor shared by the whole population worth so many years of research and visits to the inhabitants that ended with death? And who is this Helena who returned her husband’s two shirts washed and ironed by her own hand? No address or telephone number; just an acrid stalk of lavender.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

The Postman of Abruzzi

* A man is talking to the cats on the doorstep. He is advising them to eat properly and not to quarrel or Yussuf will get cross. He pushes at one side of the door without knocking and, unsurprised by Laure’s presence, throws himself down on the only chair, wipes the sweat from his brow with his cuff before telling her in a sorrowful tone that he does not have any post for her but that he will come every morning whatever the weather even if no one is writing to her or thinking about her, even though he does not know her name or where she is from,

so that he can give the cats some milk, as the mother has none. ‘Difficult birth’, he explains in a strained voice. ‘The poor thing nearly died, the kittens were in the breech position, Yussuf had blood up to his wrists’. Then this advice: ‘Don’t move her from the bed’. Noticing the typewriter, he asks if her she writes books and whether they talk about her in the newspapers and on television. ‘I’m just writing up the material’. ‘You mean you’re copying what someone else thought before you? Someone important, a minister or a president of the Republic? He put down his thoughts on bits of paper, you’re correcting the mistakes, unless the person is no longer alive—the dead can’t re-read what they’ve written’. He seems to take her silence to mean assent. Putting his hand to his heart, the postman offers her his condolences, still rooted to the chair, exhausted by the climb. He goes to pour himself a glass of water from the tap before continuing his round in the valley even though his pannier is empty. The young people don’t send any news and they hardly ever return, except to bury a parent or in a coffin; a fall from scaffolding for some, scores being settled for others. The mafia is a big recruiter. ‘The Albanians of Malaterra are scattered all over Italy’, he says sadly, ‘only your neighbour chose Australia. Deflowering Helena’s daughter made his house fall down. The walls crumbled after the poor girl committed suicide; the same illness afflicts stones and dishonoured daughters’. ‘Do you know if Australia is in America?’ ‘Next to it’, Laure replies casually to avoid being lowered in his esteem. ‘To its right or its left?’ ‘A bit lower down’. ‘Or higher up as the earth turns’. The postman definitely has the last word. With one foot over the threshold, he explains to her gently that he cannot guarantee he will be able to come the next day. ‘All Malaterra goes to the Sunday Mass. The right-hand pews are reserved for the parents of the victims, the left-hand pews for those of the killers. The blood debt divides the families’. Yussuf is the only person to have distanced himself from this barbaric practice imported from Albania. Rebibia turned him into a civilised human being. Laure assumes this is a woman but the postman is referring to a prison. ‘Three years, then six more, Rebibia has transformed me’. He did not kill anyone, as people might think, but he built a school that collapsed on the pupils. The sole survivor, the teacher, was away that day. His cow was giving birth. After leaving there and not knowing how to do anything but put stones on top of each other, he started again and built a low wall

that collapsed on a goat even though he had used plenty of cement. Second offence—so double the punishment. He used the time to learn to read. Having returned to Malaterra, the mayor gave him a pannier and promised to buy him a donkey although a bicycle would have fared better on the slope. Yussuf talks about the bicycle as if it were a woman, calling the handlebars the arms, the wheels the feet, and the seat the backside. She groans at the bends, screams with pleasure when she is made to spin, and sighs when he puts on the brakes. Despite his age, Yussuf the postman has a sensual memory, whereas Laure’s memory is aggressive. ‘Who is Helena?’ ‘A woman who killed herself when she believed she was killing her daughter’. ‘Is Helena beautiful?’ ‘Helena is the least ugly woman in Malaterra’. ‘Is Helena young?’ ‘She is as old as the bear of the Abruzzi’.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

The Postman of Abruzzi

The postman has left the door ajar; the house that belonged to the man who left for Australia can be seen through the doorway. One standing wall, some scattered stones and a tree in the middle of what must have been a bedroom. A few bare, sickly, black branches. More like a broom upturned on its handle. ‘That’s where he raped the girl’, said the postman. ‘The tree is eating its own fruit for shame’. Laure watches closely as some birds fly over the only wall. Not one of them settles on it. Hurrying home, they sharpen the air with their keen wings. She is going to eat the bread and the thyme-flavoured cheese bought near the railway station even though she is not hungry, sleep although she is not feeling sleepy, and push away the cats coiled up in their mother so that she can slide into the bed. The wind blowing up from the valley wakes her in the middle of the night, and the door banging with a loud slap stops her from getting back to sleep. The wind of the Abruzzi does not like strangers, she says to herself, burying her head under the pillow. Tomorrow she will call out a locksmith. Tomorrow she will write up Luc’s notes on the Albanians of the Abruzzi.

Antoine Laurain

Mitterrand’s Hat

Publisher: Flammarion Date of Publication: 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Florence Giry fgiry@flammarion.fr

Translation: Louise Rogers Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

‘A charming legend, spirited though tinged with nostalgia’. (‘Livres Hebdo’) ‘Le Chapeau de Mitterrand’ [Mitterand’s Hat] is currently shortlisted for the RTL-Lire Prize. Antoine Laurain is the author of four novels, among them ‘Ailleurs si j’y suis’ [Elsewhere if I’m There] (‘Le Passage’), winner of the Drouot Prize in 2007, and ‘Fumer tue’ [Smoking Kills] (‘Le Passage’, 2008), which has been translated into Italian. Biography

Antoine Laurain was born in Paris in the 1970s. He studied film-making and made several short feature films before turning to writing. Mitterrand’s Hat is his fourth novel. Publications Carrefour des Nostalgies, 2009; Fume et tue, 2008; Ailleurs si j’y suis, 2007 (winner of the Prix Drouot), all published by Éditions Le Passage.

One evening in Paris, Daniel Mercier, a lowly accountant, dines alone in a brasserie, consoling himself while his wife and son are out of town. His exceedingly ordinary life is transformed when an illustrious fellow diner takes a seat at the next table: none other than François Mitterrand, enjoying a platter of oysters in the company of two friends. His meal over, the President forgets his hat, and our exceedingly ordinary Frenchman decides to keep it as a souvenir. But the celebrated black felt homburg is no mere trophy. Talisman-like, it quickly turns the humble salaryman into a smooth corporate strategist. Has Daniel unwittingly discovered the secret of supreme power?

For two years, the iconic item of headgear plays with the lives of the men and women who wear it, revealing them to themselves and to others in equal measure. Antoine Laurain’s brilliantly-orchestrated tour captures entertaining portraits of a rich gallery of characters. The witty fable takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through the heart of French life during the Mitterrand years—its hit songs, TV shows, fashions and mores, even its perfumes … Shot through with a delicious, wicked sense of humour, Mitterrand’s Hat—part fairy-tale, part novel—is a vivid re-creation of the everyday life of an era.

In his account of the evening, Daniel allowed himself just one slight alteration—the seafood platter now featured no more than 24 oysters, half a crab and a few winkles. He knew that if he gave the full details of his sumptuous dinner, there was a danger that Véronique would concentrate solely on the cost. Comments such as ‘Well, you certainly look after yourself when we’re not around …’. or ‘I see … dining in solitary splendour!’ would interfere with the retelling of his adventure. In Daniel’s version of the story, the arrival of the Head of State assumed near-biblical proportions, and the phrase accompanying the vinegared oysters—‘As I said to Helmut Kohl last week’—rang out like a divine commandment from the cavernous halls of Heaven. ‘Still, I’m shocked.’ ‘Shocked? What about?’ said Daniel. ‘That you stole the hat. It’s not like you.’ ‘I didn’t steal it as such’, he objected, irritated by the observation, which he had already made to himself, of course. ‘Let’s just say I didn’t give it back.’ The argument seemed to have hit home. He managed to convince Véronique that he had, in fact, done the right thing by holding on to the hat, because the moustachioed maître d’hôtel would probably have kept it for himself. Worse, if he hadn’t spotted it, another customer might have taken it, unaware of the identity of its illustrious owner. The evening meal dispatched, and Jérôme in bed, they returned to the sitting-room. Gently, Véronique picked up the felt hat, caressing it with the tips of her fingers, as if seized by a sudden melancholy. She regretted that Daniel hadn’t been quicker to spot that François Mitterrand had left it behind: he could have called after the President, and presented it to him with a smile.

‘There would have been an understanding between you,’ she remarked, sadly. ‘Yes, but he was quite a long way away already,’ Daniel pointed out. He still preferred the real-life version of the story, the one that ended with him wearing the presidential hat on his own head. * ‘I don’t share your point of view at all, Monsieur Maltard’, said Daniel, shaking his head. Delicately, his finger brushed the hat, placed in front of him on the big conference-room table. Jean Maltard, and the ten other members of the Finance Department, summoned to the eleven o’clock meeting, stared at him dumbfounded. Daniel allowed a few moments of silence to pass, a sphinx-like smile playing on his lips, then heard himself refute, point for point, the arguments put forward by the new departmental manager. With unheard-of confidence, he watched himself negotiate the complex layers of diplomacy with the ease of a dolphin leaping through the waves. When he had finished his exposition, a great silence fell upon the room. Bernard Falgou stared at him open-mouthed. Michèle Carnavan ventured a small cough, then—despairing of her spineless male colleagues—spoke out. ‘I think Daniel has summarized our concerns perfectly.’ ‘Brilliantly’, added Bernard Falgou quickly, as if prodded by a tiny electric shock. Maltard gazed impassively at Daniel. ‘You’re a cunning player, Monsieur Mercier’, he announced icily. Jean-Bernard Desmoine, Head of Finance, had travelled up specially to attend the small gathering, putting the finishing touches to the sogetec corporation’s new objectives for the Paris-Nord département. He kept his eyes fixed on Daniel throughout his intervention, scribbling just a few notes when the latter explained with perfect clarity—and the figures to back him up—that they could not, in all honesty, split the department into three, but rather into two separate hubs at the very most. ‘Thank you for coming, everyone’, said Jean-Bernard Desmoine. ‘I’ll let you get back to your desks. I’d like a word, Monsieur Maltard.’ Maltard acquiesced with a meek, insincere smile, then shot a glance at Daniel. Only Bernard Falgou caught the look of cold hatred directed by the new departmental manager at his subordinate. As soon as they had left the conference room, Falgou took Daniel by the arm. ‘You slaughtered him, you slaughtered Maltard!’ he said. ‘Oh no, not really’, protested Daniel, eyelids fluttering. ‘But you did!’ insisted Françoise. ‘He’s out on his ear, no doubt about it. That’s what Desmoine’s about to tell him. You demolished every one of his

arguments. They gathered round him, hugely excited to discover in their colleague a man of quiet strength, capable of defending their interests better than the most radical union representative, the best, most articulate lawyer. They praised his calm demeanour, his air of assurance, the incredible way he had of speaking the unspeakable, cloaked in the utmost tact. ‘True class’, said Michèle Carnavan. Back in his office, Daniel settled into his swivel chair, stroked his hat, which he had placed on the desk in front of him, and savoured the quiet of the room. He closed his eyes. At no point had the bouts of nameless anxiety he had known since early childhood manifested themselves. On the contrary, he had experienced a sense of serene calm. Just a few days ago, the very idea of a confrontation with Jean Maltard would have sent his blood pressure rising and brought on an attack of heartburn with the last bite of lunch. Tense as a bowstring, he would have played back their exchange over and over again in his mind, castigating himself all afternoon for some clumsy phrase, some word or point that had, unquestionably, caused him to lose his hand to Maltard. Daniel would have emerged ashen and drained at the end of the day. Not so now. He felt fine, as one might at the seaside, walking in the sand, late on a summer afternoon. This new state of affairs came as no great surprise. It was as if the real Daniel Mercier had finally stepped out into the light of day. The earlier model was just some unfinished prototype—a working drawing. He raised the Venetian blind on his office window to let the winter sun stream in, and immersed himself in his sogetec files once more. It was well past seven o’clock when Jean Maltard pushed open his deputy’s glass door, without knocking. ‘Staying the night?’ he asked, drily. ‘No overtime for deputy departmental managers …’ Daniel looked at him, unruffled. ‘I’m just finishing the sofrem dossier, then I’m going home. ‘You’ll finish it tomorrow’, Maltard cut him off. ‘Day’s over. Department’s all cleared off home. You do the same.’ Without a word, Daniel put the top back on his Parker pen, engraved with his initials—a present from his wife for their fifth wedding anniversary. He got to his feet, switched off his computer, snapped shut the keyboard on his Minitel terminal, donned his felt Homburg. A hat confers authority on the wearer, he thought to himself. Sure enough, Jean Maltard suddenly looked a great deal smaller. He even seemed to be shrinking before Daniel’s eyes. A bug shrinking down until it was no higher than the pile of the carpet, buzzing with rage to the tips of its wingcases; Daniel had only to cover it with the sole of his shoe … ‘This isn’t how it’s going to be!’ said Maltard, suddenly. ‘You’re waiting for a call from Desmoine, aren’t you?’ he added, with a venomous smile. ‘He’s already called, actually.’ This produced something akin to a minor state of shock. Maltard stopped

Antoine Laurain

Mitterrand’s Hat

speaking and stared at Daniel. ‘Desmoine has called you?’ He pronounced each word slowly and carefully. ‘Yes’ replied Daniel evenly, putting on his coat. ‘What did he want?’ demanded Maltard. ‘Breakfast. Friday.’ ‘Breakfast with you’, said Maltard under his breath, as if the words formed some kind of cabbalistic spell, not to be spoken aloud for fear of unleashing disasters in Nature. ‘Yes, that’s what he said.’ Daniel bent down to slip a folder into his briefcase. There was a long silence, then he shut the clasps, the metallic snap signalling that it was time to leave. The two men rode down in the lift without speaking, and parted in front of the entrance without shaking hands. Maltard watched as Daniel walked away, then entered the nearest café and ordered a double rum. The silhouette of his deputy in his coat and black hat haunted him for a good part of the night.

Charif Majdalani

Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat martineheissat@seuil.com Translation: Will Hobson willhobson@hotmail.com

Our Glory Years, How Soon They Ended

Publisher: Éditions du Seuil

This is the third volume in the Lebanese saga that began with ‘Histoire de la Grande Maison’ [Story of the Great House] (2005, Machrek, Italian, German, Greek and Arabic rights sold), and continued with ‘Caravansérail’ (2007, German, Greek and Catalan rights sold). We can trace places, characters but more than anything a literary, even picaresque taste, an acute eye for detail, anecdotes, the ‘Arabesque’ taste for digression and a very visual, down-to-earth style. Biography

Charif Majdalani was born in Beirut in 1960 and teaches French Literature at the city’s St Joseph University. An admirer of the baroque and cultural cross-fertilisation, he defines himself, first and foremost, as Mediterranean. Publications Histoire de la grande maison, 2005; Caravansérail, 2007 (Prix Tropiques, Prix François-Mauriac de l’Académie française), both published in paperback in the Points collection.

It’s1975, midway through the decade leading up to the Lebanese civil war. The novel’s narrator, son of bankrupt cotton mill owners, won’t rest until he has revived his family’s fortunes and, in the process, won back the woman he loves, Mathilde, known as ‘Monde’, whom he is too poor to marry. A stint as a draper’s assistant is followed by one as a businessman’s secretary. He bounces around from one unpredictable love affair to the next, tries an array of colourful schemes to make his fortune, rubs shoulders with chancers and the souks’ complement of crooks. None of his business ventures amount to anything until he’s offered the chance to secretly remove the machinery from a textile mill that has been sequestrated in Aleppo in Syria.

The milling machines, once installed in his family’s run-down mill in Beirut, soon make him a wealthy, influential figure. He tracks down Monde who becomes his mistress. But the first shots in the Civil War have already rung out. The cotton mill and the family home, both of which he has restored, suffer massive damage in the fighting. No matter, because as the fighting rages, he simply dismantles the machinery for a second time and transports it to the mountains in the hope that one day ‘the future and happy children’ will once again be a possibility.

1 Here, sit in this chair facing me, you’ll have a view of the mountains as the morning light lazily rolls down them, it’s quite a sight. It will suit this story of destitution, triumph and pride that I’m going to tell you. Not that you don’t seem pretty familiar with it as it is, but still, a fair amount of what I’m about to say should be new, and I’m sure we can fill in all the blanks in this mad tale that you’re going to write instead of me (if you actually go through with it one day as you say you will; I’ve never managed to, no matter how many times I’ve tried) and that your visit won’t have been entirely unproductive. But first try one of these figs; they taste of honey and incense, don’t hold back, help yourself, they’re from the plot of land you passed on your way here, the one behind the old walnut trees. That was one of the first plots I bought when success had finally begun to smile on me—even if somewhat distractedly—after so many years of poverty and helpless despair. I started spending my summers up here, buying up pieces of the mountains for next to nothing just for the pleasure of it, for the autumn colours of the tall plane trees that line the streams, like flags signalling the start of the hunting season, for the brilliant blues of the peaks in summer. That was two years before the war, before I left Ayn Shir with the remnants of the famous cotton mill, the mill I dismantled and carried off like a wife or a harem twice in ten years, that I carted over hill and dale like some fairground tent twice in ten years, for goodness sake. It made me my fortune, though, just as it had made my father’s before me, as you know. But

let’s not get everything mixed up, because there are some things that repeat themselves and others that only happen once and others that are never more than a strange mirage. So let’s begin at the beginning, and, before we go any further, help yourself to the figs, or to one of those apples they’ve just brought out. No? Later? As you like. I’ll cut one into slices, share it with me if you want, but otherwise listen to what I have to say, since that’s why you’re here. I’ll begin, paraphrasing a famous line, by saying that I’m from one of the oldest families in Beirut. Old, though, not in the sense of illustrious or aristocratic so much as a long-standing member of an occupation or a guild—it needn’t even be particularly illustrious: market trader, café owner, undertaker. In the case of the Cassab family, it was the building trade, which has always been something that craftsmen from Marsad—where we’re from—excelled in. Apparently, my grandfather was brought up to go into this trade, since he and his brothers built many of the houses in Marsad, Ashrafieh and Zkak ElBlat and laid the stone flags on their floors. He seems, however, to have been the last of the line to do so, since my father, Halim Cassab, who probably had to compete with his cousins, who were older than him, refused to accept the scraps usually thrown to the youngest son. Around 1910, he gave up the trade and left the neighbourhood. He went to Ayn Shir, on the other side of the Pine Forest, and offered his services to Wakim Nassar, one of the most powerful men in the region. Working for the Nassars, who were famous citrus planters, he learnt how to grow orange trees. In 1915, he went off to war with the Ottoman army and, on his return, helped Wakim in his desperate attempts to rescue his groves, which had been devastated during the fighting. At the same time, he started working with a seedling salesman he’d got to know, and the rapid transformation of Lebanon’s economy was perfect for him. All the planters were stripping out their mulberry trees and he had seedlings or trees to offer as replacements, orange, lemon or medlar trees. He made a fortune, bought land west of Ayn Shir on the outskirts of Ghbayreh, planted his own groves, then bought an old silk farm, a long, narrow building like a stone ship stranded among the kitchen-gardens within yards of the rows of dunes stretching down to the sea. At a time when silk mills were falling like dominoes, putting an end to the cultivation of silkworms in this country for good, he invested all his money in a textile mill importing cotton from Egypt and turned the silk farm into a modern industrial plant. In about 1930, he built the house we’ve lived in for a long time, a beautiful building that, inevitably, highlighted the dilapidation of the Nassars’ mansion. The Nassars had entered a seemingly irreversible decline by then. One by one, Wakim’s sons had set off for Egypt, leaving the Great House in the hands of their married sisters, their brothers-in-law as well as my father. Thanks to him, the Nassars’ years abroad marked the Cassabs’ hour of glory. And yet even with his fortune, his mill and his land, even with his family

Charif Majdalani

Our Glory Years, How Soon They Ended

and dependants—servants, workers, foremen—Halim Cassab always had an impetuous streak that prevented him from settling down and acting the part of local dignitary. He was a volatile, expansive character, always ready to get into a fight or set off on an adventure, happiest when surrounded by abadays, the neighbourhood enforcers, a regular of every Beirut café, mad about expensive cars—all of which meant that in the industrialists’ and socialites’ drawing rooms, where he was only to be seen after he married my mother, Catherine Habib, he had a reputation as a high-class hoodlum or a romantic gangster, because, apparently, he was good-looking. His blue eyes were clearer than a mountain lake and he had a famously powerful, manly voice, which he used to good effect in speeches, arguments and—above all—in the art of seduction, since he liked women and, to his wife’s great displeasure, they returned the compliment. The fact that he was friendly with some of Beirut’s most notorious Orthodox and Maronite abadays made him, to a degree, someone to be reckoned with, as a well-known story shows. It features the Bishop of Beirut, no less. Powerful though he may have been, this figure had apparently become embroiled in a dispute with Halim about land around the Convent of Saint Elias that lay in the dunes, or maybe it was about land that was under threat of sequestration in the Marsad district. It was a murky business, I don’t know all the ins and outs, but what is certain is that the dispute turned nasty. Several attempts at mediation came to nothing, then the bishop started bad-mouthing my father in his sermons, so eventually one morning he felt compelled to send three of his henchmen to give the prelate a beating. The story is famous to this day because the beating took place, so it is said, in the middle of mass on Saint Nicholas Day. I still find it hard imagining the brazenness of those three thugs marching into the holy of holies through the three doors of the iconostasis, one for the Father, one for the Son and one for the Holy Ghost, carefully closing the gold-fringed purple curtains behind them as if they were entering the confessional, and turning on the cleric, abusing him and slapping him until, I’m sure, he started cursing and swearing back at them. Alerted by the shocked exclamations and indignant shouts of the archimandrites and other abbots, the congregation overcame their misgivings and rushed forward, profaning the altar, but the bishop had already seized a three-lobed Byzantine cross— presumably a sign that his respect for Church treasures stopped where his instinct for self-preservation began—and started using it like a sword, whirling it around his head, blindly lashing out and, eventually, slicing off the ear of one of his three assailants. Naturally the affair created a huge stir. Halim felt rather proud of it, all things considered, and his pride rubbed off on his men, in particular the fellow with the severed ear who served the Cassabs for a long time and made a point of sporting his scar like a glorious war wound. Nonetheless, these sorts of incidents were bound, sooner or later, to bring my father bad luck, and he was murdered one summer evening in 1948 under

obscure circumstances, probably something to do with a dispute that had been settled violently, as Palestine was falling to pieces and thousands of refugees were ending up in Beirut. They walked from Galilee, Haifa and Acre, coming up the coast, and settled in the dunes not far from the sea, a few hundred yards from Ayn Shir. Halim felt compassionate towards them and he would often take me and my sisters with him to see them so he could teach us the nature of poverty and misfortune. He would load us with little presents to give to the children, and he’d also shuttle back and forth from the cotton mill to the camps on his own, in his Pontiac, or his Plymouth, laden with clothes, bedding and food. They say it was on his way back from of these charitable missions (what was he doing in the refugee camps at night though? maybe it was dusk), that he was caught stepping out of his car in the mill yard; a volley of bullets left him dead, his torso flung back inside his Pontiac, or his Plymouth, his legs sprawled out in the dust. What with everything that was happening at the time, the wars and forced migrations, the rewriting of the region’s entire geography and history, this crime, which has never been solved, passed more or less unnoticed. Over the next few years it became apparent that our father had blithely worked his way through the fortune he had amassed, so that, although we still had the mill and adjoining land after he died, we didn’t have anything to run it with. His bitter rivals pounced. Levant Textiles and the Lebanese Wool Company picked off every bit of his business they could and left us ruined, a gaggle of little children dependent on our mother, our fortune reduced to the memory of past glories which the abadays from Marsad and the old city, my father’s most loyal men, would remind us of when they came to visit my mother. The only other remnant of all that faded splendour was the huge family home that stood as erect as ever, raising its head high above its windows as it surveyed the sea of orange trees at its feet.

Charif Majdalani

Our Glory Years, How Soon They Ended

Karim Miské

Arab Jazz

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: March 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Maylis Vauterin maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr

Translation: Vineet Lal vineet_lal@hotmail.com

This first novel from a new writer was immediately welcomed into the legendary ‘Chemins Nocturnes’ crime collection (alongside Fred Vargas, Dominique Sylvain and Antonin Varenne). A perfectly orchestrated thriller highlighting the networks of drug-traffickers and the religious ties between Paris and New York. The author directs film documentaries (many of them award-winning) and is hoping to direct an adaptation of his novel. Biography

Karim Miské was born in Abidjan in 1964 to a Mauritanian father and a French mother, and grew up in Paris before leaving to study journalism in Dakar. After returning to France, he spent twenty years making documentaries on a range of subjects including bioethics, deafness (for which he learnt sign language) and neo-fundamentalism in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. His films have been broadcast on Arte, France 2, Canal+, Channel Four and many other television channels throughout the world. In 1997 he contributed to a volume of collected works, Le Livre du retour (‘The Book of Going Back’, published by Autrement). His narrative was an account of his discovery of the Arab world, Africa and Islam during his first trip to Mauritania at the age of fifteen, as well as his complex relationships with the different elements of his identity since then. He has also written numerous articles since 2010 on the increasing racial divisions in French society for Rue89 and Le Monde. He currently writes a blog, ‘Chronique des années dix’ (‘The 2010s Column’), for Les Inrockuptibles. Arab Jazz is his first novel.

Paris: in the cosmopolitan 19th arrondissement, Ahmed, a daydreamer addicted to thrillers, is horrified to discover his neighbour’s body hanging from her balcony. The crime scene has been laid out for gruesome effect: alongside the corpse, with its savagely mutilated genitals, someone has placed a bloodstained joint of pork. Symbols that label her, in the eyes of the local residents, as a ‘woman tainted by impurity’. Rachel Kupferstein and Jean Hamelot— she, a fiery Jewish woman, he the son of a rationalist communist—are put in charge of the investigation. Are they dealing with a religious crime, carried out by a fanatic

from the Lubavitch or Salafist communities? Should they listen to idle tittle-tattle from a neighbourhood barber who points the finger at Ahmed? What should they make of Laura’s strange family, Jehovah’s Witnesses whose influence extends as far as New York? Is this act connected with the appearance of a particularly powerful drug in the area? Laura’s closest friends—Rebecca, who is Jewish and has left to marry a Jew in Brooklyn, and Bintou and Aïcha, sisters of the local Muslim leaders—will be key to solving a gigantic puzzle linking drug traffickers and religion all the way from Paris to New York.

1 Ahmed is gazing at the clouds in the sky, floating clouds, magical clouds. Ahmed likes poetry, although he only knows a few scraps, words that come back to him fleetingly like bubbles rising to the surface of one’s soul. Often these lines turn up on their own, without author or title. This time they remind him of Baudelaire, a tale of faraway lands, of freedom, some English thing. Baudelaire was his favourite writer back then, along with Van Gogh and Artaud. Later on there was Debord. And then he’d given up reading. Well, almost. Nowadays he buys Le Parisien, on those mornings when he comes down. Along with vast numbers of identikit Anglo-American thrillers: Connely, Cornwell, Cobain. The feeling he’s forever reading the same novel is so strong that, with very few exceptions, he mixes all their names up in his head. But that is just what he seeks. Losing himself, absorbing the whole universe inside an unbroken narrative written by someone else. He stocks up at the second-hand bookstore on Rue Petit. A tiny little shop from days gone by that, remarkably, has managed to survive in between the Lubavitch school complex, the Salafist prayer hall and the evangelical church. Perhaps because M. Paul, an old Armenian anarchist, fits into none of the categories of oddball who now share the area among themselves. And he sells his secular literature by weight, making him more of a grocer than a dealer in Shaitanic works. From time to time, the bookseller adds another text to the pile without saying a word. An Ellroy, a Tosches, a newly-published Manchette. Ahmed gives him a barely perceptible wink. Grateful to his supplier for preventing his total degeneration. He remembers those authors.

He hasn’t been out today. He still has a frozen baguette, a packet of ham tortellini, a salmon and spinach quiche, enough butter for three slices of bread, the remains of some strawberry jam made by his upstairs neighbour Laura (he’d have lusted after her, had he still known how to lust), a multipack of Évian, a bar of Ivoria dark chocolate with hazelnuts, five sixty-six centilitre bottles of Tsingtao, half a seventy-five centilitre bottle of William Lawson, three bottles of wine—red, rosé, Monbazillac—and six cans of Almaza non-alcoholic beer, abandoned in cowardly fashion by his cousin Mohamed before leaving for Bordeaux six months ago. Not to mention a packet of Tuc, half a dried saucisse, two-thirds of a Valençay cheese, seven crackers, half a litre of skimmed milk and some leftover Leader Price muesli. Plus, of course, those tins of gunpowder green tea and Malongo percolatore. Enough to keep him going until he’s got through the three point seven kilos of books bought from M. Paul the day before. For the time being, Ahmed is dreaming. He stares at the wonderful teatime clouds and he dreams. His mind is leaving the district where he ceased to live five years ago. The detachment he longed for then is getting closer. Cloudwatching, reading, sleeping and drinking when evening falls. Bit by bit, he has managed to give up television, and screens in general. Books are colonising his brain, he’s aware of that, but he still can’t do without them. Too soon for Ahmed to confront his demons alone. Other people’s horrors, and their sick imaginations, allow him to restrain the monsters lurking deep within his skull. Slowly, his mind takes flight, heading for the far-off encampments of his ancestors. His impossible origins. His outbound journey is as straight as an arrow, without mishap. From a height of ten kilometres he barely glances at the fields, mountains, water, pebbles, finally there’s sand. A hundred dunes or so from the edge of the desert, he begins to descend towards the great blue erg. Suddenly they appear: camel-hair tents, men, animals, slaves. That biblical race, desirable and horrifyingly cruel. That insane world which is himself and his opposite. That aporia. Ahmed maintains a cautious distance and, as on every trip, makes do with flying over his distant cousins’ campsite at a sensible height. He is content to drift, incognito, among those guard-dogs of the desert, the mighty-winged vultures who always acknowledge him as one of their own. The man-vulture circles in the cloudless sky and observes what has changed since his last visit. The atmosphere is different, more dense. In this hazy zone peopled by rebels, where national borders meet and men are to be found, there are four-by-fours kitted out for battle, fatigues, Kalashnikovs. Nothing new there. But what is different is the length of some men’s beards; a sermon following communal prayers facing east; and expressions that betray, in a disturbing sequence, fever, certainty, anxiety, elation and unfathomable suffering. The tragic irony of desert warriors has given way to existential angst, as thick as

tar, which unites them in a sense of self-loathing—dark or radiant, depending on their character. It has replaced the air they once breathed. Ahmed is already inhaling this odourless, noxious gas, and starting to feel its effects. Yet he refuses to give in, to say farewell to his secret garden, his own patch of dunes, his internal purity. He lingers, he loiters, he dawdles. And then, behind a tent, the ultimate vision, a caricature of what he is refusing to contemplate. A strange black shape is crouching there. It has neither beginning nor end. A kind of ghost. Something human, something female, turning her head skywards, her gaze concealed by the blackness of a veil. The shroud-woman bores her invisible eyes into his, blasting him with pure horror and abject despair. The man-vulture wobbles. He is overcome by inertia and plummets towards the ground at top speed, unable even to express his desire not to fall. His winged companions are watching. They know that those veiled eyes have shattered the traveller’s fragile immunity. Summoned to their duties once more as gatekeepers of the frontier between worlds, the celestial scavengers throng around him, forcing him to soar upwards again.

Karim Miské

Arab Jazz

higher! higher! higher! further! further! further! don’t look back! Swiftly escorted back to the fringes of their aerial domain by his ex-comrades, Ahmed knows that from now on he is banished. He is free to explore Siberia or Patagonia. He is no longer welcome here. Laghouat, Aïn-Ben-Tili, Meroë, Tiris, Tassili. Goulimine, Cyrenaica, Sicily, Ibiza, Olbia, Bonifacio, Valetta. It’s always the long way round, getting home. This time more than ever. Ahmed needs to take it all in, to string out the return from that demented world, back here, to himself. Directly above Valetta, a minor setback results in a brutal injection of reality. The sort you might find in a poem in the style of Desnos: Vertically over Valetta, a tempted Templar took a tumble. Forget that, move on … In any case, he wouldn’t mention it in his statement. Besides, there wouldn’t be any statement. And who would understand it anyway? So it is at Valetta, seven-five-zero-one-nine Paris, that he senses the first drop on his face, his half-closed eyes turned towards the sky. The second splodges onto the pristine sleeve of the gallabiyah he was given by cousin Mohamed. Ahmed looks down and watches the scarlet stain as it expands on the white cotton fabric. This is not rain. A third teardrop hits the end of his nose. He tastes it: blood. Then his eyes lift again, as if they knew what they would see. A motionless foot is hanging two metres above him, forming a bizarrely wide angle with the ankle, which is adorned with a geometric henna tattoo. At the tip of the big toe a new drop is taking shape, ready to fall onto his forehead. He

moves away, letting it blot onto a white lily, the sole decoration on his balcony. Laura’s blood leaves its mark on the spotless flower. And Ahmed returns to the here and now. A glance at the wall clock, a green circle ringed by metal that only displays the number four. Nine-fifteen pm. It’s been a long journey.

The walls of his studio are lined with the novels he has read. No bookcase, he stacks them up. His living space is gradually shrinking as he reads. He’s keeping count: two point five tons of thrillers, all bought from M. Paul. When he gets to five tons he’ll stop. According to his calculations, he will then have just enough room to move between his mattress and the front door. When that day comes Ahmed will slam the door shut, drop the key in the letter-box and leave without looking back. Because of the peculiar angle, he realises at once that Laura is dead. His reading has taught him a few rules to obey if he’s in a tight corner: make sure no-one spots you, don’t leave any prints. Etc. Something else seems obvious: they want him to carry the can. This certainty springs from a zone at the very edge of his consciousness where a collection of tiny, almost indefinable signs has built up: snippets of words heard in passing, uttered by unknown voices. A smile from Sam, the barber, that transforms itself, burning into the nape of Ahmed’s neck when his back is turned. A knowing look exchanged between two allegedly implacable enemies on the periphery of his field of vision. Little things like that, unsettling things, which he now sees have a retrospective meaning cast upon them by Laura’s death—but what? Having no wish to become the prime suspect, he won’t run away, yet he must find out more, work out what they’re plotting and why they want to implicate him in it. Laura is still bleeding, it’s not long since she was killed. Clearly, the murderer wants to incriminate his victim’s neighbour, but it’s likely he’ll try to put some distance between them before calling the police or the papers. Ahmed has a key to the young woman’s two-room apartment. He goes upstairs. The half-open door is creaking in the wind. He nudges his way inside with his shoulder, taking care that his skin touches nothing at all. He has to see for himself. To feel. Straight ahead, in line with the corridor, the window is wide open, allowing an ominous breeze to enter. The grey sky has suddenly become overcast, black clouds rolling in from the Parc de la Villette. Muffled rumbling. Get on with it, quick. In the centre of the main room the table has been carefully laid for two. An uncorked bottle of Bordeaux, glasses two-thirds full of wine. In a white china dish, a raw joint of pork lies in a pool of red liquid, a black-handled kitchen knife plunged right through the middle.

Antoine Piazza

The Monogram

Publisher: Le Rouergue Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr

Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

A vibrant tableau of life in twentieth-century France, as traced through the story of the author’s family. For all who love this country, its history, its landscapes and its truculent inhabitants. The theme has universal appeal: every family has its little secrets and scandals and builds its own image by means of a private mythology. The sixth novel by an author famous throughout France for his brilliant style, his precision and his sense of irony. Biography

Antoine Piazza was born in 1957 and lives in Sète, where he is a primary school teacher. All his books, starting with the very successful Roman Fleuve, have been published under the “La Brune” imprint. Le Chiffre des sœurs is his sixth novel. Publications Éditions du Rouergue: Un voyage au Japon, 2010; La Route de Tassiga, 2008 (pocket edition, Actes Sud, “Babel” series, 2010); Les Ronces, 2006 (pocket edition, Actes Sud, “Babel” series, 2008); Mougaburu, 2001; Roman fleuve, 1999.

The “monogram” refers to the interlaced initials the author’s grandmother used to embroider on her children’s underclothes in the early years of the twentieth century. Anabelle, the eldest, holds court in Maillac, a small industrial town where people have always played rugby (golf only recently) and whose post-war prosperity and subsequent decline in the early 1980s the author describes. Anabelle’s sisters have become a nurse, a nun and a piano teacher, and with her they form the colourful quartet of this family chronicle. Bankrupt cousins and criminal sons-in-law, photographs of Marshal Pétain put away and forgotten in an attic, medals awarded for deeds done in the Resistance, car journeys to Spain

and cruises to the far North … In this detailed portrait of his nearest and dearest, Piazza offers more than the domestic epic of French people caught up in momentous historical events and then enjoying the good life of the first post-war decades, so that we feel we are reading a work of literary fiction. Piazza’s close, sharp observation, kindly but never sentimental, is well served by his writing, which is plain but exact. In twelve chapters whose chronology has the randomness of human memory, he draws us into situations depicted with a keen sense of irony, the “time regained” of a France that has now disappeared.

4 Aire-sur-l’Adour, 1944 My maternal grandfather had asked me to go with him to visit an old comrade before the man’s illness carried him off to a grave as cold as the trenches in which they had spent four years together, and he said nothing about it to my mother, who avoided like the plague the dialect the two soldiers spoke together, not a single word of which had she ever brought herself to pronounce. To persuade me to accompany him, my grandfather showed me a portrait of himself that his friend had scribbled on the flyleaf of an almanac between two enemy onslaughts, and the paper-knife on whose blade the two of them had scratched a date, 1916, and the name of a village in the Oise, where the frontline had been. The cleaning-woman opened the door of a huge, dark dining-room where a man dressed in clothes that were too big for him was sitting, swallowed up by a worn, smelly, leather armchair that creaked the way my Aunt Alice’s armchair would later creak, in her sitting-room in Nice. My grandfather sat down beside his friend while the cleaning-woman, who was reluctant to take me over to the chair, sat me down at the table with a glass of cordial and some biscuits. She took paper and coloured pencils out of a sideboard drawer and left the room when I got down to drawing. I don’t remember much of the conversation between the two old combatants because even though they spoke impeccable French, their epic contained expressions I had never heard before, either from my parents or my aunts, or at school, and because the mud, the gunfire and the deafening noise of the War were as unknown to me then as the Black Death or

the revolution of the planets. Now and then I turned round to look at the shafts of light that forced their way through the closed shutters, the massive sideboard pushed to the far end of the room, the other pieces of furniture, barely visible in the darkness, my grandfather’s chair, and in the wide armchair, his friend’s limp, outstretched form. At the end of the War, he had been wounded and had lost a limb. Held steady on the floor by its rubber tip, a wooden leg trembled when the rest of the man’s body moved, and his wide trouser-leg flapped round it like a slack sail. After a long silence, our host seized a stick hidden under his chair and stood up with difficulty. But after taking a few steps he lost his balance and, leaning on the table for support, tipped the glass of cordial over my drawing. To my grandfather and the cleaning-woman—who had immediately come to his aid, each catching him by one arm—he said with a grunt that he was tired of using his stick to stand up, and then went off by himself towards the more brightly lit room next door. When our visit was over, I asked my grandfather for a Petit Larousse, which I opened at the section for proper names. The alphabetical arrangement and the great number of entries meant I had to hunt around and, on my way from Argonne to the Chemin des Dames, from Clemenceau to Foch and Joffre to Verdun, I came across royal figures covered in Carolingian jewels and given extra height by their wigs and crowns, as well as portraits of Robespierre and Napoleon that I had seen before in history books. That’s how I learned that Adolf Hitler, a German politician born in Austria, Reich Chancellor, born in 1889 and illustrated by a face with soft, melancholy features, wasn’t dead. The dictionary was dated 1936, and my grandfather never opened it except to check the spelling of a word when he was writing letters. He had kept his parents’ Petit Larousse, a 1896 edition in which Bismarck was still alive, and his parents had probably dumped in the dusty attic an even older one in which the lexicographer Pierre Larousse himself could have appeared. Later on, thanks to our first television set, which my father had bought recently, and the old film clips ortf used to broadcast to mark important anniversaries, I saw them come to life, those characters that the 1936 dictionary had hidden away in its tiny grey illustrations. The Reich Chancellor with the soft, melancholy features had turned into a ranting orator, shouting and waving his fist. Because of that fist, the whole planet had shifted even more than in 1914, and because the cinema had made staggering technical progress between the century’s two great conflicts, and because I would be glued to the tv set the minute they showed pictures from the archives, I soon knew more about the Second World War than I had learned about the First by picking my way through the pages of the Petit Larousse. But that knowledge had been acquired too quickly for it not to be confused and full of gaps, and while I understood that France had not carried the same weight in the second conflict as in the first, and knew that my maternal grandfather had survived four years of trench warfare, that my

Antoine Piazza

The Monogram

paternal grandfather’s younger brothers, only just freed from the constraints of an austere, harsh education, had fallen near the Marne before the end of the summer of 1914 and had left their names inscribed on the war memorial at Pérignère, I didn’t yet know that when the Second World War had laid waste to the world, it had also affected my own family Sometimes, when the news showed General de Gaulle on the steps of the Élysée Palace, my father would come up close to the set, touching the screen with his finger to point to a member of the Republican Guard, and would do his best to make out on the stony face, where the chinstrap met the blade of the sword, the features of one of his old schoolmates from Chambéry, a former gendarme whose remarkable physique had taken him all the way to the presidential palace. But since the General was even taller and still more imposing, despite his sober, plain two-piece suit, and because the sequence lasted barely a few seconds, and the cameramen’s job was to film the head of state, not the figures in the background, no matter how smartly rigged out, the Republican Guard would vanish from the screen before my father had a chance to recognise him. By paying more attention to a guard standing rigidly to attention, about whom he knew little more than his name and age, than to a head of state in civilian clothes, ageing but alert, who had been the first Frenchman to reject the armistice in 1940, my father seemed to be saying he preferred ceremonial soldiers to the giants who make History, or that to him the glories of the French Republic were no more than a game My aunts, amazed to see me in thrall to the proper names section of the Petit Larousse or captivated by broadcasts that weren’t intended for children, revealed to me that the dictionary and the television, by describing the great theatres of war and the most spectacular military operations, were not telling the whole story, and that utterly anonymous people everywhere had behaved in admirable ways. They added that my father had belonged to the Franco-British Expeditionary Force that had fought the Germans in Norway in April 1940 and that on his return to France, during the battle of the Somme, he had pulled a wounded captain out of the mud and had rescued him from enemy gunfire and mortar shells by dragging him to the French lines. His courage earned him the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire, which he never mentioned or showed to anybody. The whole family, they told me, had been very proud of him Not long afterwards, while staying with my maternal grandparents again, I also learned that from the same year, 1940—without having expressed any opinion or made any political commitment that might explain why they did it—they had given hospitality to a cartoon artist, a future film stuntman, a well-known watercolour painter and the former director of the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, all of them Jews. I wanted to know more about those two stories, but, under pressure from my questions, my father, who didn’t have his sisters’ easy way with words, replied that as far as he was concerned, it had all happened in the heat of battle, and he himself had no memory of the scene,

while for or her part, my maternal grandmother explained that it was as much the whole village as her family who had taken in refugees. Thousands of soldiers and civilians had done such things in those years without their names featuring later in history journals or the Petit Larousse, or their faces being seen on television, and they didn’t talk about it, out of modesty, for fear of boring people, or because they hadn’t found the words to describe it. Feeling a little disappointed, I had gone back to the solid world of Jules Verne’s novels and their comforting prophecies, when one day, while poking about in the attic in our house, I came upon the majestic face of an old man on the cover of a glossy, expensive publication. The magnificent colour portrait of Marshal Pétain was matched on the inside pages by black-and-white photos of Verdun, Douaumont, Vichy and his final home on the Île d’Yeu. The Marshal appeared in full dress uniform or wearing a three-piece suit, posing with children, soldiers, railwaymen, or his prison guard. The publication was a special number of a magazine, issued to commemorate his birth or his death, and as I read the captions of the photos and the introductions to the articles, I realised that this man, and his history, about which I knew hardly anything—more than twenty years after the end of the war, Marshal Pétain was rarely mentioned in textbooks and even less frequently in the newspapers— had once been seen in an entirely different light, and that for the editors of this magazine, the head of the Vichy government had been in turn, and without any possibility of disagreement, hero, martyr and victim. Since the magazine had been lying in an attic, and nobody had told me any more about Marshal Pétain than about my father’s military exploits or my maternal grandparents’ dedication to protecting innocent people who were in danger, I deduced that, like them, the Marshal was a good, unassuming figure, and that his sacrifice for the nation had been exemplary. I was too young to detect in any publication the difference between information and hagiography, and too young to understand that the Vichy government, marking the end of the republic of schoolmasters and the tyranny of the freemasons, had come as an answer to the prayers of my father’s family, for whom the protective, patriarchal figure of the old Marshal was preferable to the Gauleiter the Germans might have been expected to install in his place.

Antoine Piazza

The Monogram

Raúl Ruiz

The Spirit of the Stairs

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr

Translation: Paul Buck and Catherine Petit paul@paulbuck.co.uk

‘An omnipresent sense of humour accompanies these philosophical inquiries and picaresque adventures’. (‘Positif’) Raúl Ruiz has produced a self-portrait of a great intellectual. The director Raúl Ruiz, who has made more than a hundred films, completed this, his last work, only a few days before his death. Biography

Known as one of the greatest filmmakers of our time, Raúl Ruiz was born in Chile in 1941. Film adviser to Salvador Allende’s party, he left his country for France after General Pinochet’s military coup. A few days before his death, on 19 August 2011, Raúl Ruiz put the finishing touches to this novel. Publications In Pursuit of Treasure Island, Dis voir, 2008; Poetics of cinema, volume II, Dis voir, 2007; Textes et entretiens, Hoëbeke, 1999; The Book of Disappearances, Dis voir, 1990; Poetics of cinema, volume I, Dis voir, 1995; Le Transpatagonien (with P. Debelbeiss and B. Peeters), Casterman, 1989; Le Convive de pierre, Actes Sud, 1988.

In this novel, the Franco-Chilean director has fun slipping into the skin of Flanders, known as The Belgian, a member of the Agathopedes, a group of Belgian dandies from the middle of the nineteenth century. Those pre-dadaists spent their lives playing pranks, making forgeries and had even put to auction imaginary works supposedly gathered by a bibliophile collector of untraceable books.

This Flanders, who died in 1850, is brought back to life by twenty-first century spiritualists, who ask him to re-invent a new existence for himself. The Agathopede is seduced by the idea of mystification, but doesn’t realise he will have to live it for real, right up to its conclusion. Raúl Ruiz, who made a film in 2008 about those erudite Belgian pranksters, Agathopedia, displays the whole range of the fantastic in this book.

Second sitting — Is there anybody there? — Yes, there is: me, but I abstain. — Anybody there? The ouija board is ready. Everything is ready. I occupy the place. Without rushing. My shadows settle here, there. — Surname, first name. — Flanders Karl August, known as “The Belgian”. — Date of birth? — Ghent, 18 September 1810. — Is Flanders your real name? — Yes. — Profession? — Agathopede. — What on earth is that? — A profession like any other. — Do you make a living from it? — Yes, it’s possible. — Explain. — It’s impossible to explain. — What do you do, precisely? — In the world of the Agathopedes, nothing specific.

— And you call that a profession! — One takes it on, one carries it out, one earns a living. — Do you earn much? — Not much. Or much too much. In the end, it’s worth it. — In the end? — We perform pranks. Long-term pranks. A prank is like a time bomb. Its needs time. — How much time? — Sometimes a hundred years. — That means some of those bombs haven’t exploded yet? — There is one exploding at this very moment. — Explain. — No. It doesn’t amuse me. Silence. — We’ll terminate the séance. The fourteen members of the society rise. Nine leave, the remaining five head for the lounge. Antoine pours five glasses of cognac. No one talks. The wind can be heard whistling. — It’s going to rain. — Yes, it looks like it. — I have to go. I’m expected. — Wait a minute. I have something to tell you. Something that could turn everything upside down. — Really? I’m interested … What is it? — A photographer. — Ah, that one! I’ve heard about him already. It’s that Gamay, isn’t it? — The one who claims it’s possible to take photos of ghosts? — He’s done it already! — I heard that. I also heard he spent a few months in Sainte-Anne. — He’s not mad. — Let’s leave it at that! And when will he be there? — Next week. — I’m not sure I can come. And to be honest, I don’t believe in it. I’ve seen the photos, you can’t really see anything. They leave in a hurry, like typical Parisians. One of them leafs through his diary and pretends to be in a panic. — Oh my God! I’m not sure I’ll be there on time, with those traffic jams!

It takes all sorts! I go back to the alcove under the stairs and do my best to stick the pieces back together. To stick back together my astral body, that I am tempted to call “cloacal” (another Belgian French expression). My leg hurts. Humidity doesn’t suit the greyness of my body. It was Gautier, I believe, who used to talk about “abstract” pains to convey the atrocity of the toothache that sometimes attacked him at the end of an overly long winter. “I feel an abstract pain, he would say. Out of place with the neuralgic zone.” Pains? Yes, they exist even after that temporary death. My leg hurts, and that ache is in the process of shifting painfully towards one of the stairs, from where the spirit has the honour of telling you those few words from beyond the grave. But beyond which grave, by the way? I was pushed into the bottomless well. The communal grave! There lies my former body. And I rejoice from visiting it now and then. It is no longer there. But I am. I am well and truly there. I pay it a visit every Friday. Before my photo sittings. Yes, those are part of my so-called ‘spiritual’ activities. Hence, listening to my spiritualists talking about a photographer makes me laugh. Oh yes, what a laugh I’m having! I know very well, only too well, what a sitting really means. And I take that very seriously. Théodule d’Antibes takes photographs from beyond the grave, that’s correct. They are even very good. He knows how to handle those figures that shiver in the fog. He is gifted, no doubt about that. To start with, he is a medium, a real one. He never fails, he knows the music. ‘To each his ghost,’ he says. And he believes it. During my last sitting, he was not alone. There was someone else. A specimen with an overly piercing eye, who almost made the whole operation fail. That is how Antibes calls our sittings. For him they are “operations”, in the ways one speaks about surgical interventions. — May I introduce you to Monsieur Farigoule. He will be present today. He is very keen on it, he is one of us, you see. He is the author of an essay on “the extra-retinal vision and the paroptic sense”. I arrange my clouds the best I can. — He is here, says Théodule. — I can see, says Farigoule, his eyes closed tight. Théodule sets up his system (I am present, I see everything through his eyes). Farigoule covers his head with a kind of mask or shoebox. He is stripped to the waist. — I’m ready, he says. He looks at me, I can feel it, he looks at me with the countless eyes of his chest. — I’m ready! — Be a bit patient! says Théodule. Nothing is easy with these types of things! It’s not called ‘the beyond’ for nothing. — It’s not the beyond I’m interested in, obviously! It’s what’s going to happen here.

Raúl Ruiz

The Spirit of the Stairs

Théodule doesn’t reply. He prepares his instruments: a hermetic box inside of which are twenty or so mirrors, whose mechanisms have been adjusted to within a millimetre, and which produce the sound of a clock. — I’m almost done. And then, turning his body to the left, to the right, then slightly backwards, forwards …: — There we are. We can start. The shutters are pulled, the semi-dark is ours. The semi-dark … Not any odd one. That semi-dark he uses as lighting. — I see something like … I don’t know … a sand storm, Farigoule exclaims. — We’re not far from it, whispers Théodule. — There we are! The famous whirlwind. We have it! Ah! How painful it all is! But there is no better remedy for the pains of ghostly legs. — Strike a pose, my friend. Come on! Well, that is Théodule’s great discovery: ghosts have to strike poses. Failing that, no photographs. I comply. — Ah no, no, not like that! A more nonchalant pose. You need to simulate stillness, that’s all. Have a rest first, then portray that rest. Rest? What rest? It doesn’t exist! Fatigue, yes. Aching legs, nausea, everything you wish, but rest … — Come on, my dear, one has to get used to it! It has never been easy, remember the last sitting! All that is gruelling for you, of course, but it’s the same for me. His voice reaches me from a distance. On the other hand, it seems that Farigoule’s voice is coming out of me, that it is not even a voice, but something like a song with no words. Théodule is getting annoyed. — What on earth is happening today! Today of all days! You disappoint me, Flanders! Maria was ten times more focused. At least she knows what striking a pose means. He starts to insult me. — Keep calm, Farigoule tries to restrain him. Science needs patience. — I don’t care about science, I want my photos! He adds a black curtain. And another, then another still. The semi-dark is blinding. And suddenly I feel my body “coming back” to me. I can feel my two legs (two, not three). My head puts up with a heaviness that startles me. My arms move about. I am here. With my whole body! I enter directly into the other world, that of the dying.

Alexandra Schwartzbrod

Ariel’s Dream

Publisher: Gallimard Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr

Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

A fable that is at once serious and light-hearted, showing the diversity of Israeli society – including its ethnic minorities – with great humour, taking a fresh look at the situation in Israel. … and what if this tale were not a fable at all? A deliberately off-beat tale from a journalist who follows events in the Middle East closely. Biography

Alexandra Schwartzbrod is a writer and journalist who was the Jerusalem correspondent for the French left-wing daily Libération, living there for over three years. Le Songe d’Ariel is her sixth novel. Publications Her most recent books include Adieu Jérusalem, 2010 (Éditions Stock), winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière 2010 (republished in paperback by Le Livre de Poche, 2012); La Cuve du diable [The Devil’s Vat], 2007; Petite mort [Little Death] 2005 (republished in paperback by Le Livre de Poche, 2007); and Balagan, 2003 (sncf prize for detective fiction).

A strange ranch rises out of the desert sand. Armed men guard the living corpse of a man who once incarnated armed strength and power, the former prime minister of Israel, Ariel Meron. He is now nothing but a fleshless body, his emaciated features hidden by a copious beard and long hair. His ribs stand out under naked skin that is as white and friable as a sheet of papyrus. The doctors are certain that he is brain-dead. Yet, one morning he wakes. He tears out his drip-feeds and gets out of bed.

Is Ariel the Messiah? He is convinced of it. He has been sent back from oblivion to bring peace. The news spreads throughout the country. And the miracle happens. Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Russians, Arabs, Ethiopians, the ultra-orthodox, the secular, pacifists and militarists, every Israeli celebrates the awakening of the great man. But the jubilation is short-lived … This fable is both serious and light-hearted, highlighting the diversity of Israeli society, and freely inspired by the fate of Ariel Sharon, plunged into a coma since 2006.

Chapter 1 1. ‘Mum’ in Yiddish.

Dogs bark in the distance, he emerges from nothingness. ‘Mamaleh1, Shiptz has found another fox! He’ll come back covered in blood!’ Silence. His mother knows that he loves his dog more than anyone, even more than Lea and David who like to share a snack with it in the shade of the cart on ploughing days. He tries to get up but his body doesn’t respond. A stone is nothing more than a stone in the Samarian desert. Samaria? Where is that? He tries to concentrate, it’s impossible for him to concentrate his thoughts, they flash through his mind one by one, without leaving even a spark of light in their wake. Everything is in darkness. Breathe. It’s the only way to ward off panic, he was taught that in the army. The army? So was he in the army? Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Once, twice, three times. The chest cavity expands, the belly tightens. He feels better. The army is good. What was his mother’s name? Why did he remember the dog’s name? He must empty his brain. Start again, go back to where he was a few moments earlier. Shiptz was his best friend, who would frighten the hens and run rings around the cat. His father was always telling him: ‘Arik! Stop exciting that dog!’

Arik! … Ariel. He had just found his given name. His whole body, or rather what serves as his body since he can feel nothing, suddenly relaxes. He has just scored a point. And he always liked winning; that’s something he remembers well. Ana. Her name was Ana. How could something like that have escaped him? He sees his mother again, crouching in the straw, her arms embedded up to the elbow in a cow’s belly, helping the animal to calve. There was no one like her for knotting the cord around the two pointed hooves and, buttressed by the animal’s flanks, extracting the sticky body of the new-born calf from the warm, palpitating mass. He finds a new inspiration. If he has managed to do so, it’s because his body is there, he is no a mere drifting spirit. Yet he does not feel it as it used to be. But … how did things used to be?

Alexandra Schwartzbrod

Ariel’s Dream

* Mariam woke up earlier than usual that morning. The dogs had started howling at sunrise, raucous sounds that resonated in the vastness of the desert, to the gates of Aqaba and Taba beside the Red Sea. She opened the windows wide and surveyed the stretches of sand turning pale under the first rays of the sun and, closer by, the lawns that Ilan laboured over despite the hot wind blowing from Egypt. She saw nothing but a handful of Romanians, dazed with sleep, wandering up to the greenhouses. She gathered her long dark hair to one side, knotted a scarf around the back of her neck and donned one of the flowery dresses that she had unearthed from a Tel-Aviv second-hand shop run by a woman who was, like herself, a Beta Israel, a Jewish woman from Ethiopia. Mariam had seen so few flowers until she had landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, twenty years previously, but she could never see enough of them to satisfy her for the rest of her life. She walked towards the kitchen, savouring the sensation of her naked feet on the terra cotta floor tiles brought from Hebron in the days when Israelis and Palestinians traded unrestrictedly. Mechanically, she grabbed two onions and three garlic cloves from the basket suspended in a corner of the hearth. She was so accustomed to these everyday gestures that she could perform them without even looking at the swellings into which the knife would be inserted so that the second skin would slide off in one piece, releasing the flesh, white and sweet as the fresh almonds that she would munch when night had fallen, sitting on the ground, her back against the wall of the building that still retained the heat, staring far into the distance in which all the deserts looked alike. Mariam does not talk much. She learned Hebrew at an ulpan2, shortly after she arrived in Israel, but does not like speaking it. This may have been a way of

2. Hebrew teaching academy set up for new immigrants by the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency.

3. ‘Good’ in Hebrew. 4. ‘Yes’ in Hebrew

5. A mixture of fragrant herbs.

protecting herself from other people. How many times had Ilan, the steward, decided to abandon one of those customary, idle conversations, since he was incapable of dragging out of the carer more than a few ‘tov3’s and ‘ken4’s uttered mechanically. In fact, hardly anyone except the old man upstairs gave her confidence, caused her to talk without stopping for breath about her lost family, the marching, the soldiers, her hell. At least he never answered back. She took a piece of lamb from the refrigerator, put it on the table and looked at it disapprovingly. She had asked the butcher in Beer-Sheva countless times to deliver seven pieces a week. The meat needed to be fatty enough to cook in its own juices and melt on the tongue, that was the way the Old Man liked it. Of course, he took advantage and she reproached herself daily for having urged him to eat unstintingly, flattering his gluttony, begging for recognition and perhaps even affection for her, she who had asked herself for so long just what she was doing on this earth. For a few years, working in his service, she had felt useful. She would continue, despite everything, to roast the lamb in the oven, first sprinkling it with zaatar 5, garlic and onion. One day, she knew, the aromas would seep into the Old Man’s dormant brain … * Had the nights always been so dark? The silence so glacial? Were his eyes open or closed? He had so little awareness of his body that he was incapable of distinguishing between high and low, right and left. Not even a tingling in the finger, cramp in the leg, rumbling in the stomach, a tear rolling down the cheek. Nothing, he could feel nothing. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of panic. How far back did his last memory go? Did he fall off a horse? At the idea, his heart shrivelled like a fig in winter and the face of a woman superimposed itself on that of his mother. Gila, my lovely, why did you leave me so soon? Why? He saw her now, her hair blowing in the wind, proudly riding her chestnut mare that had been imported from England. Then the raging beast and the body, the beautiful body, of his wife lying on a stretcher, dislocated, inert and cold. Life that marked a time of stoppage. Might he have suffered the same fate? Where had he been, for goodness’ sake, before tumbling into oblivion? He wanted to open his mouth and call for help but … What did one have to do to activate a muscle? He had forgotten everything, right down to the elementary reflexes. ‘Mamaleh! Come and get me out of here!’ He had managed to breathe. Not everything was lost. Breathe in through the mouth. Breathe out through the nose. Once. Twice. Three times. Become calm again. The army, there was nothing like it for making a man out of a wimp. Make an example of him. Conquer fear.

Shwartzman6, his name was Shwartzman. His schoolfriends who spoke Yiddish, and there were a lot of them at the time, would dance around him catcalling, ‘Black man, black man, get away from the mirror, mirror …’ Nothing annoyed him more. He saw himself as the hero of a Western, galloping away on a horse, throwing his lasso deep into the herd and, with a manly gesture, catching a runaway steer. Land and animals, that was life. Life? It cannot be this bottomless crevasse over which he is flying at this moment, terrified by the idea of falling into it and forgetting the light forever. He clung on to his memory of the farm, Kfar Hoshen. Having just remembered the name of the place, a wave of relief ran right through him, so strong that he seemed to feel his fingertips move. At first they had lived in a tent, then his father had built walls and raised the roof, added a hen-house and a cowshed. The farm … Another image passed through his mind. A flash of golden light, a stretch of sand extending beyond the horizon. No, he did not want to leave Kfar Hoshen. The loft in which he spent hours watching the cat chasing mice. The barn in which his father hid his old German Mauser pistol in a wooden crate, buried in straw. The fields in which he stood guard when night had fallen, armed with the Circassian dagger he had received for his barmitzvah. With this memory, he was overcome by a feeling of pride. He had fought the enemies, yes, he had, he knew it, it was written on his flesh, in his veins, his blood. A creaking noise. He wasn’t alone. Impossible to say whether the sound was close or distant. He listened hard, on his guard. That is how the best of them had died at Latrun, that cursed hill so close to the Holy City. A moment of inattention. A surprise attack. No question of getting caught out again, like a greenhorn. He concentrated on his fingers. If he could manage to make his hands move, he would be saved and the rest would follow. And what about his eyes? How does one open one’s eyes? On which muscles should one concentrate first? Why wasn’t one taught this at school! School wasn’t his strong point, he had never been more than an average pupil. Not like his sister. She did better than he did in every subject. But he never reproached her for it. He had other trump cards. He knew how to command, he would never throw in the towel. Never … At the time he was convinced that ‘what cannot be obtained by force is ripped out through even greater force’.

6. ‘Black man’ in Yiddish.

Alexandra Schwartzbrod

Ariel’s Dream

Philippe Ségur

The Lucid Man’s Dream

Publisher: Buchet Chastel Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Christine Legrand christine.legrand@libella.fr

Translation: Georgina Collins glcollins@hotmail.co.uk

The story of a personal crisis, a love story and a thriller; this apprenticeship novel by Philippe Ségur takes a fresh, humorous and lucid look at contemporary society. How refreshing! ‘A brilliant writer, equally at home discoursing on the eternal genius of the Doors as on the impact of ‘Steppenwolf’’. (Christine Ferniot, ‘Télérama’) Prix Renaudot des Lycéens in 2002, for ‘Métaphysique du chien’ [Dog Metaphysics] Biography

Philippe Ségur was born in 1964. He currently lives in Perpignan where he works at the university, lecturing in human rights and constitutional law. He started writing at a very young age and has already published six novels with Buchet Chastel. In addition, Ségur is the author of several poetry collections and two essays on political power. Publications Recent novels include: Vacance au pays perdu, 2008; Écrivain (en 10 leçons), 2007; Seulement l’amour, 2006; Poétique de l’égorgeur, 2004; Autoportrait à l’ouvre-boîte, 2003; Métaphysique du chien, 2002 (awarded the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens). All published by Buchet Chastel and available in paperback.

Simon Perse is a disillusioned man who has just left his wife and children to live alone in a flat the size of a postage stamp. For as long as he can remember, Perse has been able to survive on very little sleep and decides to use this capacity to stop sleeping altogether, a decision based on advice from his psychoanalyst with whom he has a complicated relationship. For the first few days, he experiences a euphoric sensation, a feeling of extreme power. But slowly, he is overcome by hallucinations, starting with something very small, with a voice he hears. Each time this happens, Perse finds himself back in an unknown world, in a different era. In these interchangeable worlds, there are

two constants: a woman he falls in love with, always the same person but with different names, and a rival who systematically terminates the hallucinatory period by inflicting a violent death upon him. A death that returns him to reality. Apart from that minor annoyance, everything could have been fine for Perse, a man who experiences two daytimes every twenty four hours. But things become complicated when a doctor tells Perse that he is suffering from a terminal neurological disease and only has a month to live, while the woman who has been haunting him appears in his real life.

1 I had decided to stop sleeping. To be done with the medication, the psychoactive drugs, everything that could be an obstacle to my lucidity. I lost consciousness for a fraction of a second, letting go of my porcelain pill box, which smashed on the wooden floor of the lounge. I grabbed hold of the cd cabinet. The top part broke away and tumbled over on me, emptying its contents into the open space. For just a moment, I regretted my inclination towards sloppy diy. The bag of screws and fittings supplied with the cabinet remained unopened and neatly stored away in the cupboard. Too late. Thirty cds were propelled from their slots and scattered all over the floor. My left hand slid over one of the high density polyethylene (unbreakable) cases which had just shattered upon impact, and my forehead collided with the corner of the coffee table next to the sofa. I gave up and stumbled to the bathroom to assess the damage. A bruise was starting to appear over one of my eyebrows. My eyes were red, with dark, heavy bags beneath them. I looked deathly pale, my skin crumpled up as if it had been for a spin in the tumble drier. I hadn’t slept for seventy two hours. A result I’d achieved through sheer will-power, and I was quite proud of it. Since childhood, I’d belonged to the great brotherhood of insomniacs. Over the years, the problem only got worse. I had tried everything: excessive sport, extreme yoga, deep relaxation techniques, herbal medicine, homeopathy, acupuncture, Buddhism, and all the useless advice from those useless

American-style books which explain sleep cycles and how to transform your way of life to become one of these new age world citizens. To be physically well, spiritually well, neither drinking to excess, nor eating excessively, until a quiet and well-earned death comes and puts an end to this restful absence of questioning. But diet philosophy, a sugar-free life and an organic happy ending didn’t suit me. I turned to hard drugs. For years, I crammed myself full of sleeping pills and anxiety medication. Zopiclone—7.5 mg, prazepam—10 mg, ativan—10 mg, bromazepam—6 mg, hydroxyzine—25mg, xanax—0.25 mg, lormetazepam—2 mg, I had tried out almost every legal drug available. I was no longer a human being, I was a chemical laboratory. My dealer was first-rate, that’s a fact. A hard-up quack in need of patients who prescribed to the letter exactly what I asked him to. Now and again, when I hadn’t got the time to make him sign my prescriptions, I faked one instead. I would scan one of his old prescriptions, delete the handwritten section and just keep the header and surgery id code. All I had to do then was forge his handwriting. The other option was to deal directly with his distributor. A pharmacist who acted as though she was simply employed as a grocer, and as though the legal obligation to keep a record of all prescriptions was just a holiday homework task (the sort of chore you can always put off until tomorrow; all school kids know the score). I would casually walk into the chemist’s and come out with the same old spiel that every desperate junky on earth uses: ‘Hello, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’d be ever so grateful if you could help me out with a box of Zolpidem, if you don’t mind. I haven’t had the chance to see my doctor for a repeat and I’m running short for tonight.’ Of course, it was better to have the right image. And I had the image. Clean-cut, friendly, and above all, well-known in the store. When I was there, I stocked up on a special toothpaste with minerals, hypoallergenic soap, and anti-fatigue beauty products for round my eyes. I was what you call in the apothecary world, a target market for products with an excessive mark-up, and in the grocery business—a bloody good customer. Now and again that was worth a little box extra for me, which they could recover at a low cost, because its disappearance could be concealed by cleverly cooking the books. Besides, my knowledge of pharmaceutical products was a reassuring factor. I wasn’t one of those people who did stupid things with medication. The proof: I had tried out every substance my pharmacist professed to stock. These last few years, I had lived on zopiclone, the state-of-the-art nighttime knock-out. Guaranteed sleep-mode in quarter of an hour, watch in hand, watch broken in the morning. I had become a junkie without even realising it. I alternated periods of heavy usage, at night even tripling the maximum prescribed dose, with periods of withdrawal when I tried to wean myself off the medication by cutting up tablets with a razor blade. I couldn’t stop. I escaped

them for a few days, a few weeks. Sooner or later, I ended up returning to my old ways, at the end of my tether, exhausted by sleepless nights. I always had a box in reserve at the back of a cupboard. Even when I stopped taking them, I needed to know I had some to hand. It’s this little detail that gives away a real drug addict: he might appear to be clean, but his mind, well, that never gives up. Philippe Ségur

* * The idea of stopping sleeping came to me during an appointment with my psychoanalyst, Dr Zennegger. He was a great bloke. The session had been rather boring that day. Stretched out on his velour couch, I spoke to him about the five-year mental block I’d had with my new novel. The plan for the book was quite something. I was going to have to push myself to my limits and delve into the depths of my psyche. This book frightened me. I had used every possible strategy to avoid writing it. I had moved house, published another three less significant books, tried to change jobs, divorced, moved again, suffered depression, contemplated suicide, and now I’d run out of excuses. I told Dr Zennegger every reason I had not to write this novel that I wanted to write, when I was clearly unable to do it while wanting to. But although the intensity of my debate seemed fascinating to me, it didn’t appear to have the same effect on him. I heard him behind me, sighing quietly, wheezing through his whiskers (Dr Zennegger had the same patriarchal beard as the creator of the Oedipus complex). Most significantly, he’d stopped taking notes. His pen was no longer scratching away on his notepad. ‘I’m sorry doctor but you’re holding me back’. He cleared his throat with a polite cough, just to recover his vocal chords which he hadn’t had the opportunity to call upon for half an hour. ‘You say I’m holding you back.’ ‘Yes, doctor. It’s quite obvious you’re not interested in what I’m saying.’ ‘You think what you’re saying doesn’t interest me.’ ‘There you go. That proves you’re in favour of the argument not to write the novel and that it isn’t worth writing.’ ‘You don’t think my novel is worth writing.’ ’No, I didn’t say that.’ I had to be wary of Dr Zennegger. He was a crafty, intelligent bloke. He could make me express things I was unaware I wanted to say even though I did everything to avoid speaking about them. I was going to have to play a tight game. ‘I didn’t say this novel isn’t worth writing. Quite the opposite, it is worth it’. ‘So, in your opinion it’s worth writing,’ said the doctor. ‘I didn’t say that either! I said that it’s worth writing but that certain objective

The Lucid Man’s Dream

factors stand in favour of the fact that it’s not worth the bother. That’s what your indifference is suggesting. So, I’m compelled to say that you’re in favour of me not writing this book, despite the fact I might be absolutely convinced of the opposite. And as a result, I’m persuaded that to write it would be a mistake’. ‘You’re persuaded that to write it would be a mistake’. ‘You see, you’re holding me back!’ Dr Zennegger was the ultimate professional, a dangerous professional. He knew things before I did. He led me wherever he wanted me to go. But he didn’t know who he was dealing with. If he thought he could get me to bow to the validity of his analyses without a fight, he and his patriarchal beard had another thing coming. ‘Transference’ and ‘murder of the father’. He’d love a bit of that. I worked out a counter-attack. ‘To be honest, doctor, I think you’d consider changing your position if I told you a bit more about the subject of my novel. You see, it’s the story of a man who can’t sleep and who has to binge on sleeping pills to lead a semi-normal life. So, you see I’m completely involved in the whole thing.’ Dr Zennegger remained silent. For a few seconds, my gaze gathered up the treasures on his bookshelves. Beautiful books on psychoanalysis and psychiatry were skilfully organised into piles of intellectual disorder. A collection of African figures and masks took pride of place in front of them. A very Totem and Taboo ambience married with the strictest academic eclecticism. Dr Zennegger had thought about his interior decor down to the minutest detail. There was an abstract painting above the couch. The midnight-blue canvas was sort of slashed across the middle by a streak of red paint, oozing around the edges. A touch of modernism and sexual symbolism, it was really very powerful. ‘You see what I’m getting at, doctor?’ I heard not a sigh, nor a cough from the black leather armchair behind me. Dr Zennegger didn’t know what I was getting at. I was overcome by a delightful sensation of well-being. ‘I write novels, doctor, works of imagination. I’m not supposed to get involved. If I get involved in the book, I’m going to have to delve into the depths of things. I’m going to have to find out why I’m still an insomniac despite my efforts to be otherwise’. Not a word from Dr Zennegger. His silence spurred me on and I launched into an improvised summary. ‘In short, I’m going to have to ask myself why I’m clinging to my insomnia and so, logically speaking, I’ll know that in fact the last thing I want is to sleep!’ ‘You’ll know that in fact the last thing you want is to sleep.’ Steady and hollow, emerging from beyond the beard, the voice of Dr Zennegger had just brought the session to a conclusion. He’d put his finger on the issue. The last thing I wanted was to sleep. How had he known that? He’d been snoozing for most of the session.

Carl de Souza

In Freefall

Publisher: Éditions de l’Olivier Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat martineheissat@seuil.com

Translation: Carl de Souza (text)/ Sophie Lewis (biography, publications and introduction), sophie_l@fastmail.fm

A kaleidoscopic novel that brings together the fate of an ambitious young man, political turbulence in an island country and the challenges of badminton. Carl de Souza with his affinities to writers such as V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry, has confirmed his place, thanks to this novel, as one of the great francophone novelists of the Indian Ocean. Biography

Carl de Souza was born in Rose Hill, Mauritius, in 1944. His youth was shaped by the contrary attractions of the sciences and literature (due to the educational system), of French and English (English being the country’s official language for administration and education), but also by his country’s independence, which was proclaimed in 1968, memories of which he draws on in this novel. De Souza currently directs the arts and culture department of a large group of Mauritian companies. Publications Besides Le Sang de l’Anglais (‘The Englishman’s Blood’) (Hatier, 1993) and La maison qui marchait vers le large (‘The House Walking Towards the Ocean’) (Le Serpent à Plumes, 1996), two of de Souza’s novels have been published by l’Olivier: Les Jours Kaya (‘Kaya Days’) (2000) and Ceux qu’on jette à la mer (‘Jettisoned’) (2001).

After fifteen years away, Jeremy Kumarsamy, a badminton champion at international level, returns to his native country, a former British colony with strong similarities to Mauritius. A bad fall leading to disabling injury and a serious attack on a sporting authority—he is threatened with arrest—have deprived him of free movement. Sequestered in his house under the ‘vigilance’ of his mother, he recalls his childhood and adolescent years, and particularly the chaos of a career made up of family crises, personal failures and sporting glory.

By making secret outings into town, he is able to piece together everything that has changed since independence, for it was during his adolescence, in the mid-1960s, that his country was freed from English colonial rule, though the subsequent riots caused the deaths of many among both rebels and authorities (including Kumarsamy’s father). Gradually this kaleidoscopic novel paints the fate of an ambitious young man, caught between the fallout of his country’s political turmoil and the overwhelming pressure exerted by the world of sport.

Felicity in the afternoon Felicity was clad in the afternoons of Port-Benjamin, their ethereal whiteness, their undetermined extent. Offices closed earlier and earlier at the beginning of the 60’s, the golf course and the bar at Albion Hall were besieged, fishing trips were organised in a frenzy that could only be explained by the feeling that life at Port-Benjamin would no longer be the same. Since the Second World War, a defence force composed of local soldiers and British officers, armed with obsolete equipment, had been maintained. On the Queen’s birthday, it paraded, but its inefficiency was felt in the remote islands where there was growing unrest. Afternoons on the sand court playing badminton with Felicity, Ivy’s younger sister, suspended time. In Jeremy’s head, his aunt’s opal spectre would always be dancing, in an old ball gown, low-necked and too large, amid bursts of the end of day: furrows traced by canoes, ripples near the reefs, and the stealthy leaping of a school of mullets. Sometimes, in its flight, the shuttlecock blended with this whiteness, confounding the boy. He found himself, as a result of a spectacular fall, lying with his nose in the coral sand. The putrid smell of the marine life it once sheltered invaded his nostrils. Between the infinity of the sky where the shuttlecock roamed and this piece of ground where each sand grain stood out, the transition was abrupt. Resentful, like a mollusc on the seabed, he stoically waited for some reaction from Felicity.

What the hell was she up to? Jeremy could see, floating above him, puffy clouds, pale and static, forgotten by the trade winds. He could hear, punctuating the thundering of the breakers, the mournful calls of tropicbirds flying back from the ocean with tired wings to nest in the mangroves. He sensed that she was taking advantage of the break to turn towards the house of Dr Henrik who was spying on her, and then to the gate where Ivy would appear after her club meeting. Before the latter’s gaze would wander out of the limits of their garden, beyond the seawall and the only gap in the reefs, where Sammy’s pirogue would soon appear. They grabbed their rackets each day, even if South-East wind was blowing. Just as a “real tennis” player would use the roof of the stands to make the ball rebound inside, Felicity knew how to use the wind to her advantage. She would strike deliberately towards the sea and hope for a boomerang effect. “Banana shot!” she would boast, tensing her slender biceps if it worked. Sometimes, however, the wind would betray her, by suddenly dropping. At low tide, it was the boy’s job, as Felicity looked on sadly, to climb the seawall and fetch the shuttlecock from the other side, bruising his knees and elbows against the rough surface. She helped him to go down, holding his arm, alternately encouraging him and apologising. “C’mon, Jeremy, it’s within your reach. Look, just between the coral bunches …” Close to his neck, he felt her rebellious curls and her breath; he touched the muddy seabed, fearful in the midst of invisible creatures. “Put your foot a little further to the left, not on the sea urchin, stupid. Forgive me, I’m so clumsy …” And she promised not to do it again and to simply aim at him in the future. Often in class, half-listening to the mathematics lesson, he could hear the wind whistling through the casuarina needles. Utterly desperate on the way back home, he cursed the sea, its foaming waves and the spray he endured from time to time. Tennis adepts, football fanatics would practise undisturbed, while Felicity and he could not, however hard they tried, direct any shuttle. His frustration would lead him as far as to blame her for never expressing regret at such climatic conditions, leaving him alone to mope around. But, if by some miracle, the ocean surface smoothed, Jeremy shot off and ran towards the house to harass her: “All right, today” Did he have to remind her of the adequately calm conditions, could she not guess his state of mind? She took her time: “Yeah, not bad, we can’t expect any better in winter …” “But it will be dark soon, hurry up, we won’t have time for ten points!” He paced like a caged lion, wondering why he had to endure this, as he watched her leaning over the watercolour that had kept her busy for hours. Ten points, that was the agreement, or rather, what had been decided by Felicity. The idea was to maintain the longest rally as had always been the case before the British imposed their rules.

Carl de Souza

In Freefall

Previously, everybody had had fun this way with various feathered projectiles: geisha girls in kimonos handling brightly coloured bats to celebrate New Year, dandies wearing lace costumes at the royal court of France … These cliched ideas which turned the shuttle game into a feminine pastime did not bother Jeremy as long as it was Felicity who played with him. Their game was only distantly related to the matches held according to the laws of the Badminton Association of England, as practised at Albion Hall where Sammy, the boy’s father, reigned. Felicity and Jeremy kept their own rules secret. Should an intruder appear, they stopped shouting the score but would surreptitiously indicate it to each other by the number of fingers, in a sort of deaf-mute sign language. There were special moves: hitting the shuttlecock between the legs was worth two points and Felicity gave herself three for the banana shot. From time to time, she introduced new constraints after observing experienced players at Albion Hall, where children were not allowed, thus putting Jeremy in a position where he was unable to challenge her. Felicity had started painting on the advice of Vera Jenkins, her only friend, who wanted to protect her from her reputation for idleness. The Jenkinses lived on Samson Island, about twenty miles towards the south of the archipelago, where Vera held the position of head nurse of the hospital. But Jeremy had never met her, for Vera was never invited to their place. This was a situation Jeremy had never encountered before, where no intrusion was allowed. There was concern about porcelain palettes, tubes of paint and brushes to order from Kuala Lumpur. When Jeremy had tried to obtain an explanation for this agitation, he had been rebuffed. But once, looking over Felicity’s shoulder, he saw a sketch of the Port-Benjamin pier with its tin roof. Felicity’s hesitant hand had not spared its derelict state, with piles of poultry crates, and stevedores lying here and there on the ground, sleeping off some despair. It seemed to the boy that she had highlighted the least attractive aspect of the port. Felicity’s sketch had revealed to him a temporary and fragile world. Jeremy would never have dreamt of choosing such a place as a subject; the islands, as pictured by the “News Pictorial” films of the Information Department, seemed heavenly even if Sammy looked down upon these stories filled with colourful images of “natives” to illustrate the local folklore, but then, his father railed against everything.

Akli Tadjer

The Best Way to Love

Publisher: Éditions JC Lattès Date of Publication: January 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr

Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

‘Akli Tadjer combines humour, tenderness and cruelty, thereby revealing the key to living better and learning to love oneself. A delicate, funny and serious novel, all at once’. (Nadège Badina, Librairie Majuscule, Thonon-les-Bains, for ‘Page’.) From the author of ‘Il était une fois… peut-être pas’ [Once upon a time … perhaps not], adapted for television by Charles Ménès. Biography

The Parisian suburb of Gentilly, tower blocks, gangs: Akli Tadjer’s adolescence resembled that of many second-generation immigrants. An avid reader, he discovered the works of Céline, a startling revelation to him. He began writing, at first composing songs for suburban rock groups. Soon after, he was taken on by a racing paper as a messenger boy, where the editor spotted his talent and enrolled him in a school of journalism in Paris. In 1985, after a trip to Algeria, Akli Tadjer wrote his first novel, Le Passager du Tassili, which won the Georges-Brassens prize. He is the author of seven novels, three of which have been adapted for television. Publications His most recent novels include: Western, Flammarion, 2009; Il était une fois peut-être pas, éditions JC Lattès, 2008 (republished as a paperback, Pocket, 2011); Bel Avenir, Flammarion, 2006 (republished as a paperback, J’ai lu, 2008); Alphonse, éditions JC Lattès, 2005 (republished as a paperback, Pocket, 2007); Le Porteur de cartable, éditions JC Lattès, 2002 (republished as a paperback, Pocket, 2003).

When the little girl in a yellow dress appeared to me, I felt dizzy, my heart was racing. She was playing hopscotch in the main square outside the Grande Poste in Algiers. I shouted out her name and she turned round, waved to me and then hopped through one, two, three squares before disappearing into the last one, Paradise. Immured in her silence, Fatima revisits her past, with its secrets and its botched love affairs

filled with violence and betrayal. And then, at the very end of her memory, like a sun rising anew, appears a little child. Her son Saïd, with her in Paris, still doesn’t understand why his mother has never been able to say she loved him. La Meilleure Façon de s’aimer is Akli Tadjer’s most personal work to date, unique in its combination of humour and tenderness.

As soon as it is dark and I know that no-one will now come and disturb me, I try to form sentences. But the only sounds that emerge from my mouth are tortured moans, hissings or rumblings that rise up from my belly. I persist, but try as I might, my words remain trapped inside my head. Finally, weary of battling, I give up and play with my memories. Memories are fun. They come and go, like waves on the sea. That’s how the Sanchezes came back to me. On the Post Office almanac, marked 1960, pinned to the yellow formica dresser in the kitchen. I was ten years old. It was the nuns of the Bab-el-Oued orphanage who had placed me with them. They lived in Hydra, on the heights of Algiers in a little white, one-storeyed house surrounded by eucalyptus trees so tall they touched the sky. I also saw myself on the doorstep, clutching my little cardboard suitcase, the day I arrived. The Sanchezes wanted me to call them daddy and mummy. I never could. I had already had a real father, a real mother and that was why I couldn’t. I saw again my room and its wallpaper patterned with big green and mauve flowers, the portrait of General de Gaulle on the dressing-table, the bronze crucifix on the wall above my bed, and on my bedside table an old brown missal that I was frightened to open. How old were the Sanchezes in 1960? Seeing them again like this, they looked old enough to be grand parents.

Mrs Sanchez had an extremely pale, very bony face and a large, full-lipped mouth that was foreign to smiles. She only ever dressed in dark colours or black. Her shoes, her stockings, her skirts, her blouses and her veiled hat all exuded mourning. On Sundays, we went to mass at the church of Notre Dame d’Afrique. I had trouble making the sign of the cross. Mrs Sanchez was exasperated that I got it wrong every time and would thrust my hand back intothe cold water of the stoop; I had to do it again until the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were in the right order. I never liked the church much. I thought it smelt of mildew and wet dogs. And then there was the priest, whose sermons were so boring that I would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of them. After mass we would take the trolleybus along the coast road to La Madrague. There I would swim for hours in the clear water of the Mediterranean and then, when I had had enough of swimming, I would clamber up a wall of rocks and onto a parapet overhanging the sea, I would do gymnastics while the Sanchezes sat outside a café drinking anisette and eating grilled sardines with their fingers. When I went back down, exhausted from all my playing, I would join them and, unfailingly, Mr Sanchez would frown at me and pull my ear. “How many times have I told you not to play on the parapet. You’ll break your back if you fall onto the rocks, you damn idiot!” And he would threaten never to come back to La Madrague if I continued to clown about on the parapet. I would say sorry, whining that it was the very last time—and the following Sunday, after swimming, I couldn’t resist climbing the rocks to do cartwheels and all sorts of acrobatics on the parapet. Mr Sanchez had skin as brown as a desert date, short, hairy fingers and a sadness in his eyes that he hid behind tinted glasses. He also had a silver watch hidden deep in the pocket of his voluminous navy blue velvet trousers. It was on his watch that I learnt to tell the time. Had the Sanchezes had children of their own or other children from the orphanage before me? I never knew. For my first Christmas, at the foot of the tree was a new missal, a score of La Marseillaise and a map of France with its colonial empire. I was extremely disappointed and Mrs Sanchez gave me an earful. Yes, I was ungrateful. Yes, Father Christmas would not forget that next year. Yes, it was a waste of time trying to civilise a little blackamoor and other pleasantries that I don’t recall. Back to me, too, came the bursts of explosions and the sound of tracked tanks on the asphalt of the streets of Algiers. The papers now talked only of war, attacks, massacres. On the radio, between the new rock and roll songs that really stirred me up and the quiz game “Le Jeu des Mille Francs”, important people speaking from Paris gave assurances that order and security would

Akli Tadjer

The Best Way to Love

again reign in Algeria. It was onlya matter of days, of weeks, if that. When Mr Sanchez came back from the factory, he would take me on his knee, stroking the back of my neck, promising to adopt me when the situation had calmed down. He also promised me that on my new documents I would no longer be Fatima but Françoise. Had it made me happy to know that the Sanchezes were going to become my adoptive parents? You bet! I was terrified of returning to the nuns at Bab-el-Oued. I was not much liked there because I was top of the class, the prettiest and the smartest of all the girls. That’s what Emmanuelle, the old mother superior said, when she held me up as an example. Inevitably, this provoked jealousy. In the playground, some girls pulled my hair or hit me on the head, calling me a bootlicker, saying that I had sold myself to the Christians and was headed for the fires of hell. I didn’t care; I liked to learn, I liked to read, I liked to write, I liked to live and I was the prettiest. That was the way it was. Nothing could change that. A very hot day in the summer of 1962.Mr Sanchez getting angry in the dining room. He was giving nasty kicks to the china cabinet while fulminating: “Filthy A-rabs. Filthy de Gaulle—they’ve really conned us, the bastards!” Upstairs, Mrs Sanchez was packing trunks, bags and my little cardboard suitcase while muttering between her teeth: “After all we’ve done for them, that’s the thanks we get from the dirty Arabs.” Then, she took the portrait of General de Gaulle and spat on it before throwing it in the bin. The next day, at crack of dawn, we headed for the port. We were not the only ones to be rushing towards the sea with suitcases. Other Europeans were going in the same direction. Soldiers were screening people in front of the gates to the port; Arabs were turned aside with the butt of a rifle and the Europeans were allowed to pass the first security cordon. Later, I saw the news reports on television of the exodus of the repatriates from Algeria. It was exactly as I experienced it that day. The crowds, the shouting, the sobs and the tears. The trunks, the suitcases, the bundles hastily shoved by the dockers into the entrails of the boat. On the bridge of those boats, the clusters of screeching children, the faces of distressed women and the frightened old people watching Algiers disappearing. On the quay, Algerians feverishly waving adieu. We managed to get past a second security cordon. I clung onto the handle of my little suitcase. We managed to get past a third security cordon and I clung even tighter to the handle of my little suitcase. At the foot of the gangway to the boat, Mr Sanchez presented his papers to some policemen. They examined them carefully and then they shook their heads, staring at me. One of them patted my cheek. His hand was cold and hard. Mr Sanchez swore on his honour that he would sort everything out with

the authorities as soon as they disembarked in Marseille. They had another long discussion. Mr Sanchez had discreetly taken out several bank notes from the pocket of his voluminous navy blue velvet trousers to soften them up. It did no good. Mrs Sanchez got angry. She ranted at them, her fist threatening, that it was inhuman to want to split us up. She was pink with anger and blue veins striped her temples and her neck. It was the first time I saw her other than in black and white. The siren of the boat wailed three times in the port. Mr Sanchez stroked the back of my neck and promised that he would come to get me because I was his little Françoise. Mrs Sanchez crouched down to kiss me. She stank of Notre Dame d’Afrique and her tears stuck to my cheeks. And, as in the television news reports, I stayed on the quay waving my hand with the other Algerians. A policeman took my little suitcase, another took hold of my arm to help me up into a van with barred windows and they took me to the Bab el Oued orphanage … Then, I felt dizzy and my heart started racing because the little girl in the yellow dress appeared to me. She was playing hopscotch in the main square outside the Grande Poste in Algiers. I shouted out her name and she turned round, waved to me and then hopped one, two, three squares before disappearing into the last one, Paradise. Rain stripes the panes of the window in my room. The grey of the sky merges with the slate roofs of the hospital buildings. A new day dawns over Bicêtre. My nose is cold, my feet are cold, my eyelids are burning and I have a stomach ache.

Akli Tadjer

The Best Way to Love

David Thomas

Date of Publication: February 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com

I haven’t finished looking at the world

Publisher: Albin Michel

Somewhere between David Lodge and Jean-Paul Dubois. Following ‘La Patience des buffles sous la pluie,’ the author has confirmed his talent for the novelette. Biography

David Thomas is 46 and lives in Paris. After working as a journalist for fifteen years, he has devoted himself to full-time writing. He has published several plays and a collection of short stories. Je n’ai pas fini de regarder le monde is his second novel. Publications Un silence de clairière, Albin Michel, 2011 (prix Orange du Livre 2011); La Patience des buffles sous la pluie, short stories, Bernard Pascuito éditeur, 2009 (prix de la Découverte 2009 de la Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco).

100

‘I don’t know why I’m saying all this, probably because I’d like to know who I am too.’ A man who can’t live without his wife’s yelling, another one arrested by the police just for smoking a cigarette indoors, a little man underneath his 192-kilo mistress, a woman who dreams of knocking out her partner in the boxing ring …

Over 75 short stories, David Thomas once again invites himself into the cracks in our lives. Nothing is spared, not our ridiculousness, our cruelties, our weaknesses or the guilty compromises we reach with ourselves. But whether they make us laugh or squirm, all of these characters also have something of what it is that turns a human being into someone endearing, someone you’d be happy to sit down next to.

Letter to a stranger Dear son, Your mother and I have listened very carefully to the cd you burned for us. To be honest, we didn’t think it was that great. I had already been able to observe how slowly you were progressing, but what we heard confirms that you really aren’t very good at drumming. You have no more talent for rhythm than you had, throughout the whole of your school career, for mathematics. What’s more, your little pals don’t seem to have more of an ear than you do. I think it would be wise for you to give up any sort of future in music. And apart from the fact that you are wretched interpreters of other people’s music, your own compositions are, to be perfectly frank, a bunch of utter crap. Having said that, your mother and I aren’t at all surprised. For nearly twenty years now we have wondered what we did to produce such a son. Far be it from me to want to offend you but, my poor boy, you haven’t got much going for you. Your physical appearance, first of all, so awkward (I know it isn’t your fault and we don’t reproach you for it) and that face as greasy as butter (once and for all, would you make an appointment with Dr Akmezian, he’s the best dermatologist in town!). And then there are your limited intellectual abilities. You can’t imagine how flabbergasted we were to learn that you passed your school-leaving exam. Which only goes to show that miracles aren’t just things that happen in the Bible. Admit that the manipulation of ideas, culture, curiosity aren’t your strong point. While we’re on the subject, ‘difficult’ has two fs and just one l,

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we’ve told you that two hundred times! And then that sexual obsession which, I admit, is down to your age, but there again, can you spare your mother the sperm-drenched tee-shirts that you leave under your bed? The fact that you’re jerking off all day long is one thing, that your mother should have to witness it quite another. And finally, those girlfriends of yours, each one more stupid than the last, that you keep bringing home to us. Frankly, they aren’t much to shout about. I know you’re right in the middle of a very stupid age, but is it really necessary to make it worse? Son, your mother and I had a chat and decided it was time for you to take your independence. So we would ask you, when we come home on Sunday night, to have left the house. Go where you like, it’s no business of ours. We’ll leave you in peace, that’s a promise. Don’t thank us, I too would have liked my parents to help me emancipate myself at your age. Can you ask your mates (it will keep them busy) to help you to move your things out of your room, as we would like to do it up for some friends? We’re sure you’ll find a place to live very quickly. You’ll see, looking for a place of your own is very exciting. We wish you the best of luck, Dad.

Ugly My wife is ugly. She has the arse of a race-horse, the thighs of a Bulgarian wrestler, a belly like a bag full of water, she has no neck, dubious teeth and a huge spot on her chin. She’s as ugly as a pot of jam, or a white pudding or something. When I introduced her to my friends, when we started going out together, every time I noticed a little moment of doubt in their eyes. A slight floating moment that you feel when somebody doesn’t understand something. They all think she’s nice. That’s often what people say about ugly women. If someone says your wife is nice, you can take it to mean that he doesn’t think she’s up to much. A woman’s physical appearance is the first thing people talk about—and that applies to anyone you talk to, male or female—except when you don’t dare mention it. Well, no one ever mentions my wife’s figure. All the women I had before her were beautiful. I know why people like a pretty woman, it’s as much for the pleasure of looking at her as for the pleasure of having her on your arm, of making people jealous. I know that feeling very well. My wife is ugly, and yet she excites me. She is ugly and the pretty women I bump into in the street seem distant and entirely without allure. One day I will have to work out why I love this ugly girl. Why, now, a woman’s beauty no longer affects me. I can’t work out if that’s good or not.

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Anxious I’m an anxious kind of guy, and I’m the world champion at keeping that anxiety in check. It’s stronger than me, I have to put myself in situations that make me fragile and which I regret afterwards. I’ve always told my boss what I thought and, even though I’ve been working for him for twenty years, every time I open my mouth I bite my lip for a week saying to myself that this time was the time too many and this time he’s really going to chuck me out. It’s only when I’m overdrawn that I tell my needy friends I can lend them money, just hoping one thing, that they won’t remember the next day. I lie to my banker like a politician standing in the presidential elections, and when I cheat on my wife, I do it without a condom so that I can spend the next three months worrying I might have caught something. It would never occur to me to fill up the car before driving three hundred kilometres, so when I’m driving I pray to St Christopher that I won’t break down. I put myself in impossible situations with my customers, our suppliers or my creditors. I don’t pay my rent, I defraud the taxman, I take the train without a ticket. And it’s like that with everything. I actually think I like fear better than boredom.

David Thomas

I haven’t finished looking at the world

Seven years Seven years loving each other, hating each other, putting up with each other, believing in it, splitting up, getting back together, crying, shouting, saying no, yes, yes I love you, I can’t go on, come back, believe me, it’s over, don’t be scared, we still love each other, go fuck yourself, I’ll never leave you, leave me alone, come here, I can’t help it, give me a child, it’s stronger than me, clear off out of it, I don’t believe you, shut your face, I get on your nerves, yes, that’s it, I can’t live without you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, what time will you be back? we’ll be okay here, do you like it? I think about you all the time … Seven years in Paris, in Berlin, in Formentera, in New York, in Toulouse, in Corsica, in Vietnam, in Greenland, in Normandy, in the Pyrenees, in Noirmoutier, in Nice, in Morocco, in Vancouver … Seven o’clock in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, at night, in bed, in the shower, in the car, in a doorway, on the beach, in the forest, in the kitchen, in the cinema, in the cellar, in a lake … Seven years in January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December and every day, two thousand six hundred and twenty-one days, and the same number of nights. Seven years of airports, of stations, of underground trains, of buses, of taxis, of motorways, of paths, of streets, of tracks, of planes, of pontoon bridges … Seven years of phone-calls, of texts, of emails, of skyping, of letters, of photos, of films … How many calls? Four thousand? And texts? Five, six thousand?

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Seven years of intonations, of voices, cars pulling away, bicycle bells in the courtyard, running taps, fingers clicking on the computer, clothes falling … Seven years of smells, of perfumes, of skin, of hair, of hands, of caresses, of mouths … Seven years of joy, of sex, of love, of lack, of impatience, of reunions, of loneliness and faces buried in necks … Seven years to end up with so much pain.

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Carole Zalberg

Missing America

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: February 2012 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr

Translation: Ros Schwartz schwartz@btinternet.com

This twentieth-century journey focuses on the characters of four unforgettable women, from pogroms to the anti-apartheid struggle, transporting the reader from Poland to France, to the United States and on to South Africa; ultimately it is a journey into our individual and collective memories. A narrative structure that is spell-binding in its very simplicity and flow. Biography

Born in 1965, novelist and poet Carole Zalberg lives in Paris. She has contributed to various collective works, and her poetry has been published in two anthologies (Les Jeunes Poètes français et francophones, ed. Jean-Pierre Huguet, 2004; Anthologie de la poésie française, ed. Jean Orizet, Le ChercheMidi, 2004). She also writes columns for the Magazine des livres, bsc news and Vents contraires, as well as song lyrics, and has been involved in several film and theatre projects. Carole Zalberg runs writing workshops in schools and literary events (hosted by the Paris bookshop “La Terrasse de Gutenberg”), is a judge for the France-Quebec prize, and a member of the selection committee for Bleu pétrole. Her website (www.carolezalberg.com) features literary and art works by a number of guest authors. Publications Recent novels include L’Invention du désir, vu par Frédéric Poincelet, Les éditions du Chemin de fer, 2010; Et qu’on m’emporte, Albin Michel, 2009; La Mère horizontale, Albin Michel, 2008; Mort et vie de Lili Riviera, Phébus, 2005; Chez eux, Phébus, 2004; Les Mémoires d’un arbre, Le Cherche-Midi, 2002.

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Two women living on opposite shores of the Atlantic are preoccupied with the recently deceased Adèle. A survivor of two world wars and exile, Polish-born Adèle’s life spanned the twentieth century. From beyond the grave, her complex personality continues to influence the lives of Suzan in America and Fleur in France. They are bound together by a shared connection to the past that both transcends and enriches their lives. Through the portrait of these three women, across three generations and three continents, interweaving History with a capital ‘H’ and family history, Carole

Zalberg depicts human beings in all their vulnerability and resilience, investigating the role of memory and the discovery of the other as a necessary means of knowing oneself. Contrasting forced exile (Adèle) with elected exile (Sophia) and the wanderings of an almost ordinary American woman (Suzan), the novel tackles the perilous process of interpreting the past (Fleur). Without ever creating a hierarchy between her characters, Carole Zalberg’s writerly novel is rich in ambition and sensibility.

She could not swear that they were grieving. Not from where she stood concealed in the shadows, shielded from curious stares and intrusive questions. From that distance, it was impossible to make out whether there was an atmosphere of sorrow or relief. The small group clustered around the grave looked like flock of huge birds gathered around a kill. Huddled together to block out the wind. Stamping their feet with impatience or because of the cold. So these were Adèle the Frenchwoman’s nearest and dearest. Suzan observed them from her hiding place among the trees in this rather grotesque city, a naïve offering of stone and greenery dedicated to the dead, in the hope that they would leave the living in peace. So this was all that remained of the arrogant Adèle: a handful of men and women come to pay a hasty, shivering homage to the woman who had been her late father’s secret love. She could move closer. Introduce herself. After all, it had been an open secret for a long time. Having left Palm Beach yesterday, Suzan had not slept in order to make it to the funeral on time. She only had to walk a few steps. But the figures gathered on the tiny plot in this vast cemetery where funeral processions overlapped seemed much less real to her than the memories of her father or of her own family. She had eventually met the Frenchwoman who had come to America after several decades to meet up with her handsome gi again. In the elderly lady’s features, Suzan had glimpsed the joyous, frustrated young woman who had been the love of her father’s life. Months earlier, after the death of her mother, while attempting to sort through an entire lifetime’s worth of papers, Suzan had come across a bundle

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of letters. Perhaps as a way of shutting out her grief—Suzan had adored her mother and was completely unprepared for her death—she had taken it upon herself to try and find the beautiful Frenchwoman who had written to her father in her touching, flimsy English. After a few weeks’ research, she was able to inform her father that Adèle was alive and still married. Suzan had contacted her and could safely say that Adèle would be delighted to hear from dear Stanley. At first the former lovebirds had written to each other tentatively. Then telephoned each other, she speaking her unnatural English, and he a few words of French which he’d picked up over the years. Stanley had followed the course of Adèle’s husband Louis’s illness from afar. When Adèle became a widow, she finally accepted Stanley’s invitation to cross the Atlantic. But the bubble burst. Suzan’s father wanted to marry his love now she was free at last. Strutting about like a cockerel who’d lost his feathers but was still hale and hearty, he treated Adèle like royalty and duly proposed. After all the celebrations, all the fuss and excitement in the local paper, the object of his affections decided thanks but no thanks, it was very flattering but frankly she didn’t want to deal with another elderly man’s laundry or deteriorating health. She returned home, apparently content with her pile of press cuttings and posed photos. That was the end of the fairy tale. With no dream to cling to any longer, Stanley died a few weeks later. And if Suzan had come all this way, it was perhaps simply to see with her own eyes that Adèle’s dreams too were over. She saw. In the paltry graveside send-off, Suzan looked for further confirmation that Adèle had made the wrong choice, realizing at that moment that the reason she had come was to seek revenge and appeasement for the sake of her departed father. Some signal must have been given, for suddenly the little knot of mourners disbanded, each person hurrying off in a different direction. Suzan had the strange and rather exhilarating impression of a pile of leaves that she had dispersed with a thought.

Carole Zalber

Missing America

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

Bello Antoine

Cendrey Jean-Yves

u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore]

u Turkish [Everest Publications]

The Pathfinders Gallimard

u Russian [Gelos] u Slovak [Premedia Group]

Benchetrit Samuel

A Heart Outside Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Shanghai 99

Abecassis Eliette

Sephardi Albin Michel

u Castilian [Les Esfera de los Libros]

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

Adam Olivier

The Steady Heart Éd. de l’Olivier

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

Adam Olivier

Unfavourable Winds Éd. de l’Olivier

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

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

The Louganis Girl Actes Sud

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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 German [Droschl] u Hungarian [Joszoveg] u Italian [Barbès Editore] u Korean [Open Book] u Rumanian [Pandora] Bassignac Sophie

Back to Back JC Lattès

u Russian [Azbooka Atticus]

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

Her Father’s Daughter Le Seuil

u Castilian, Catalan and Basque [Alberdania]

u German [Knaus/Random House] u Turkish

[Dogan]

Berton Benjamin

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar Hachette u Italian [Nottetempo]

u Vietnamese [Nha Nam]

Besson Philippe

The Accidental Man Julliard

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag] u

Korean [Woongjin]

u Polish [Muza]

Bizot Véronique

A Future Actes Sud

u German [Steidl Verlag]

Bizot Véronique

Prize Day Actes Sud

u German [Steidl Verlag]

Blas de Roblès Jean-Marie

The Midnight Mountain Zulma

u Chinese (complex characters) [Morning Star,

Taiwan] u Czech [Host] u Dutch [Ailantus] u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian [Frassinelli] u Romanian [Trei] Blondel Jean-Philippe

(Re)play! Actes Sud

u Swedish [Bokförlaget Opal]

Honecker 21 Actes Sud

Chalandon Sorj

My Traitor Grasset & Fasquelle

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

Constantine Barbara

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

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

My Name Is François Grasset & Fasquelle

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Publishers]

Darrieussecq Marie

Clèves P.O.L

u German [Carl Hanser]

u italien [Ugo Guanda Editore]

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and Australia] u Swedish [Norstedts]

Davrichewy Kéthévane

The Black Sea Sabine Wespieser

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Davrichewy Kéthévane

The Separated Sabine Wespieser u Georgian [Ustari]

Decoin Didier

Is This the Way Women Die? Grasset & Fasquelle

u Castilian [Alianza] u German [Arche Literatur Verlag] u Italian [Rizzoli] u Korean [Golden Bough Publishing] u Russian [Geleos Publishing House]

109

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

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Commonwealth] u German [Droemer Knaur]

Descott Régis

Caïn & Adèle JC Lattès u Spanish

Énard Mathias

Garnier Pascal

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Arabic (Egypt) [National

u English (worldwide rights) [Gallic Books] German [BTB Verlag]

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants Actes Sud

Center for Translation] 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 Japanese [Kawade Shobo] u Korean [Bada Publishing] u Portuguese (Brazil) [L & PM Editores] u Portuguese [Dom Quixote, Portugal] u Russian [Atticus] u Serbian [Geopoetika] u Turkish [Can] Énard Mathias

Zone Actes Sud

u Castilian [Belacqva/La Otra Orilla, Spain]

u Catalan [Columna, Spain] u English [Open

Letter, United States] u German [Berlin Verlag]

u Greek [Ellinika Grammata] u Hebrew

Apocalyspe Baby Grasset & Fasquelle

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

[Tiderne Skiften] u Dutch [De Geus Uitgeverlj]

Fargues Nicolas

Despentes Virginie

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Czech [Host] u Danish 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 German [Bilger Verlag] u Italian [Galaad]

Deville Patrick

Kampuchea Le Seuil

u Castilian [El Aleph/Grup 62] u German [Bilger Verlag]

Dugain Marc

An Ordinary Execution Gallimard

u Bulgarian [Fakel Express] u Catalan [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] Dugain Marc

The Stars Never Sleep Gallimard u Hebrew [Armchair Books]

u Italian [Marco Tropea] u Russian [Corpus]

You’ll See P.O.L

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Faye Éric

The Man With No Prints Stock

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Filhol Elisabeth

The Power Station P.O.L

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

u Swedish [Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag]

Flipo Georges

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

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Grazie] u Russian [Pokolenie] u Spanish [El Aleph] Garnier Pascal

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye Zulma

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The Panda Theory Zulma

Germain Sylvie

The Unnoticed Albin Michel

u English [Dedalus Limited, United Kingdom] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing]

Ghata Yasmine

The Târ of My Father Librairie Athème Fayard

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Giraud Brigitte

A Year Abroad Stock

u Dutch [Uitgeverij Van Gennep] u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian [Guanda] u Portuguese [Platano Editora]

Giraud Brigitte

Not to Worry Stock

u German [Fischer Verlag]

Guénassia Jean-Michel

The Incurable Optimists’ Club Albin Michel

u Castilian [RBA Libros] u Catalan [Edicions

62] u Croatian [Vukovic & Runjic] u Czech [Argo] 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] Guyotat Pierre

Coma Mercure de France

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Italian [Medusa] u Russian [Société d’études céliniennes] Haddad Hubert

Opium Poppy Zulma

u Italian [Barbès Editore] u Spanish (worldwide

rights) [Demipage] Hane Khadi

So Hungry It Hurts Denoël

u French [NEAS, Senegal]

Hesse Thierry

Demon Éd. de l’Olivier

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

110

Jauffret Régis

Le Bris Michel

Mattern Jean

u English [Salammbo, United Kingdom]

u Italian [Fazi Editore]

u Croatian [Fraktura] u Greek [Hestia]

Lacrimosa Gallimard

Joncour Serge

The World’s Beauty Grasset & Fasquelle Le Tellier Hervé

How Many Ways I Love You Flammarion

Enough About Love JC Lattès

[Wisdom House] u Russian [Riopl]

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]

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Khadra Yasmina

Olympus of the Unfortunate Julliard

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

[Bizâncio] u Spanish [Ediciones Destino] Kiner Aline

The Game of Hangman Liana Levi u German [Ullstein]

Korman Cloé

Colour-Men Le Seuil

u Castilian (Latin America) [B Ediciones

Mexico]

La Peine Bertrand (de)

Soundtrack Éd. de Minuit

u Spanish [Pasos Perdidos, Spain]

Lalumière Jean-Claude

The Russian Front Le Dilettante

u Chinese [Chu Chen Books] u English [The

Lesbre Michèle

A Huge White Lake Sabine Wespieser

u French [Héliotrope, Quebec only]

Lindon Mathieu

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

Luce Damien

Luxemburglar Éd. Héloïse d’Ormesson

u German [Droemer Knaur]

Majdalani Charif

Caravanserail Le Seuil

u Catalan [La Campana] u German

[Knaus/Random] u Greek [Scripta]

Malte Marcus

u Castilian [Libros del Asteroide]

Garden of Love Zulma

Lapeyre Patrick

u Spanish [Paidos] u Turkish [Pupa]

Life is Short and Desire Neverending P.O.L

u Albanian [Toena] u Bulgarian [Altera/

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 , United States of America] u German [Karl Blessing] u Hungarian [Mandorla] u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore] u Japanese [Sakuhin Sha] u Korean [Minumsa] u Lithuanian [Baltos Lankos] u Polish [Replika] u Russian [Azbooka/Atticus] u Serbian [Akademska Knjiga] u Turkish [Pegasus Yayinlari] Lê Linda

In Memoriam Christian Bourgois

u German [Amman]

u Italian [Piemme] u Polish [Albatros] u Vietnamese [Les Éditions littéraires

du Vietnam]

Malte Marcus

Harmonics Gallimard

u Greek [Kedros] u Italian [Barbes Editore]

Marc Bernard et Rivière Maryse

When Men Clash Calmann-Lévy

u Castilian [Rossell Editorial]

Martinez Carole

The Field of Les Murmures Gallimard

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Danish [Arvids]

u Dutch [Van Gennep] u English [Europa

Editions, United States of America] u Italian [Mondadori] u Spanish [Tusquets] u Swedish [Norstedts]

Milk and Honey Sabine Wespieser

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

Mauvignier Laurent

Some Men Éd. de Minuit

u Chinese [Art et littérature du Hunan]

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

[University of Nebraska Press, United States]

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

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

Down to the Plain Sabine Wespieser

u English (worldwide rights) [Seagull books]

Miano Léonora

These Troubled Souls Plon u Swedish [Sekwa förlag]

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

Three Strong Women Gallimard

2009 Goncourt Prize: 31 contracts signed worldwide Ollagnier Virgnie

The Uncertainty Liana Levi u Italian [Piemme]

Ovaldé Véronique

And My Transparent Heart Éd. de l’Olivier

u Albanian [Toena] u English [Portobello,

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

111

Pagano Emmanuelle

Révay Theresa

u German [Verlag Klaus Wagenbach]

u Czech [Euromedia] u German [Der Club

Childish Hands P.O.L Page Martin

Perhaps a Love Affair Éd. de l’Olivier

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

Pancol Katherine

The Slow Tortoise Waltz Albin Michel

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Castilian [La Esfera

de los libros] u Catalan [Edicions 62]

u Chinese (traditional characters) [Business

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

Beefsteak Phébus

u English [Whereabout Press, United States] u

Romanian [Nemira] u Spanish [Demipage]

Raoul-Duval Jacqueline

Kafka, The Eternal Fiancé Flammarion

u English [The Other Press, United Kingdom

and United States] u Estonian [Eest Raamat]

u Hungarian [Ab Ovo] u Russian [Text]

Ravey Yves

Bambi Bar Éd. de Minuit

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion Editura]

Ravey Yves

Kidnapping with Ransom Éd. de Minuit u German [Kunstmann Verlag]

Reinhardt Éric

Cinderella Stock

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

Dirty War Viviane Hamy

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]

u Italian [Mondadori]

Rolin Olivier

u English [MacLehose Press]

Toussaint Jean-Philippe

The Truth About Marie Éd. de Minuit

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

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

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

Rolin Jean

Varenne Antonin

u German [Berlin Verlag]

Rosenthal Olivia

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

u Italian [Nottetempo]

Paris-Brest Éd. de Minuit

Roux Frédéric

u German [Wagenbach]

A Lion Hunter Le Seuil

A Dead Dog After Him P.O.L u Polish [Czarne] u Russian [Text]

What Do Reindeer Do When Christmas Is Over? Verticales

The Indian Winter Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (complex characters) [Ye-ren,

Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros]

Sansal Boualem

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

u Catalan [Columna] u Czech [Pistorius

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

Farewell Jerusalem Stock

u Croatian [Hena Com] u Hungarian [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 Italian [Into]

u Korean [Hyundaemunhak] u Russian [Ripol] u Spanish [Ediciones Casus Belli] u Turkish

[Can Yayinlari]

112

Sylvain Dominique

All the Dreams of the World Belfond

Fakirs Viviane Hamy

Viel Tanguy

u Dutch [De Arbeiderspers] u Italian [Neri Pozza]

u Spanish [Acantilado]

Winckler Martin

The Women’s Chorus P.O.L

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