Fiction France n°12 (version anglaise) by Institut français

Fiction France A selection of French contemporary fiction to be read and translated

No 12 MARCH 2013

Twenty new French ďŹ ction titlesÂ to be read and translated

foreword

Twice a year, Fiction France publishes 20 excerpts—in French and English – of the most talked about novels and short stories from France’s contemporary literary scene. So far, since the first edition, more than 200 authors have been presented. In addition to encouraging foreign rights sales, the magazine has created an opportunity for publishers, authors and translators to meet, interact and forge long-lasting relations. For this 12th edition we present 20 titles—of which there are 6 debut novels and a collection of short stories—inviting you to travel in time and space, from Paris to Port-au-Prince, from Vladivostok to Hanoi, passing through Senegal, Morocco and Hungary. You will meet, indiscriminately, Eugène Delacroix, members of the ComédieFrançaise during the Occupation, an American female opera singer from the 1920’s—or a group of Russian anarchist artists in a more than contemporary Saint Petersburg …

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 Affairs.

We will for each title provide you with the good reasons for discovering and reading the featured books. You will also find on page 114 the list of titles presented in the previous Fiction France editions—including those for which foreign rights have been acquired. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with the respective Foreign Rights Assistants, whose contact details can be found in the summary and on the introductory page for each text, by simply clicking on the email addresses. Finally, the big project for 2013: Fiction France takes on a new look and drops its old paper format for a 100% digital diffusion. An entirely recast version will be launched later in the year. To be continued …

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.

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

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

contents

p. 8

p. 13

Catherine Bessonart

Bernard Bonnelle

And if, at NotreDame, by night …

At the Belles Abyssines

Publisher: Éd. de l’Aube Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: La Table Ronde Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Manon Viard manon@editionsdelaube.com Number of Pages: 288 Translation: Louise Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

Anna Vateva a.vateva@editionslatableronde.fr Number of Pages: 192 Translation: Melanie Florence melaniejflorence@googlemail.com

p. 18

p. 24

Fanny Chiarello

Frédéric Ciriez

Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness

Melo

Publisher: Éd. de l’Olivier Date of Publication: February 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Violaine Faucon vfaucon@editionsdelolivier.fr Number of Pages: 192 Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Number of Pages: 332 Translation: Vineet Lal vineet_lal@hotmail.com

p. 29

p. 35

p. 40

Franck Courtès

Solange Delhomme

Émilie Frèche

Authorisation to Crossings Participate in Running Competitions... Publisher: Denoël and Other Escapades Date of Publication: January 2013

Two Strangers

Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: JC Lattès Date of Publication: February 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Judith Becqueriaux judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr Number of Pages: 200 Translation: Sophie Leighton s.leighton@clara.co.uk

Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Number of Pages: 224 Translation: Adriana Hunter adriana@hunter157.freeserve.co.uk

p. 45

p. 51

p. 56

Christian Garcin

Yanick Lahens

Arthur Larrue

Vladivostok Nights

Guillaume and Nathalie

Going to War

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: April 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Allia Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com Number of Pages: 176 Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

Marjorie Ribant allia@editions-allia.com Number of Pages: 128 Translation: Paul Buck and Catherine Petit paul@paulbuck.co.uk

Eva Bredin, ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Number of Pages: 250 Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Number of Pages: 368 Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@googlemail.com

p. 62

p. 67

p. 72

Kettly Mars

Éric Marty

Patrick-Olivier Meyer

At the Frontiers of Thirst

The Chinese Girl’s Heart

Muscle and Flesh

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Éd. du Seuil Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Geneviève Lebrun-Taugourdeau genevieve.lebrun-taugourdeau @mercure.fr Number of Pages: 170 Translation: Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

Martine Heissat martineheissat@seuil.com Number of Pages: 384 Translation: Annette David annettedavid99@gmail.com

Patricia Roussel proussel@calmann-levy.fr Number of Pages: 240 Translation: John Fletcher j.w.j.Fletcher@kent.ac.uk

p. 77

p. 82

p. 87

Hoai Huong Nguyen

Caroline Pochon

Raphaëlle Riol

Soft Shadows

The Second Wife

Amazons

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Buchet/Chastel Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Le Rouergue Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Maylis Vauterin maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr Number of Pages: 150 Translation: Ros Schwartz schwartz@btinternet.com

Christine Legrand christine.legrand@libella.fr Number of Pages: 272 Translation: Georgina Collins glcollins@hotmail.co.uk

Brigitte Reydel brigitte.reydel@lerouergue.com Number of Pages: 192 Transaltion: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

p. 93

p. 98

Isabelle Stibbe

Michelle Tourneur

Bérénice 34-44

Death by Beauty

Publisher: Serge Safran Éditeur Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Marie Sorlot et Marie-Pierre Garro right@pierreastier.com Number of Pages: 336 Translation: Clémence Sebag clemencesebag@gmail.com

Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr Number of Pages: 308 Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

p. 103

p. 108

Philippe Vilain

Alice Zeniter

The Unfaithful Wife

Gloomy Sunday

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager:

Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr Number of Pages: 160 Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Number of Pages: 288 Translation: Naomi Colmer nay.colmer@gmail.com

Catherine Bessonart

Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Manon Viard manon@editionsdelaube.com Number of Pages: 288 Translation: Louise Lalaurie lalaurie.rogers@gmail.com

And if, at Notre-Dame, by night …

Publisher: Éd. de l’Aube

The first in a promising new series, ‘And if, at Notre-Dame, by night …’ is a classic Paris crime novel, transporting the reader to the heart of one of the world’s most fantastical, fantasized cities. ‘The plot and characters are utterly gripping, Bessonart’s style is wonderfully fluent, and the intrigue brilliantly sustained. I’m sure it will fly off our tables […] There’s a flavour of Fred Vargas [ …] Bessonart’s novel joins that distinguished pedigree of offbeat, sensitive, richly allusive, ruthlessly effective crime writing.’ Librairie Le Lézard Amoureux Biography

Catherine Bessonart lives in Montmartre. A graduate of Paris’s Cours Florent drama school, she writes for stage and television. And if, at Notre-Dame, by night … is her first novel. The next volumes in the series are currently being written, the second and third Bompard novels are already plotted.

Women. Statues. A child’s doll. All found decapitated. Leading the investigation, Commissaire Bompard senses a connection. Between the decapitations, and his own story. Loud and clear, his cop’s instinct tells him not to trust to appearances, but to follow his own intuition. Bompard is convinced only he can disentangle the facts. A hunch confirmed when his ex-wife Mathilde disappears suddenly. This is a classic, fast-paced police thriller centred on a hero the reader will want to get to know a great deal better. A spell-binding first novel.

6 Bompard’s gut churned the next morning. Looking for the cause, and determined to ignore the evidence of the Côtes du Rhône, his suspicion fell naturally on the prawns. ‘Perhaps they weren’t fresh.’ ‘I’m sorry?’ On closer inspection, his chief didn’t look too fresh, either. His complexion had the green hue usually associated with the morning after an official visit. ‘Are you listening to me, Bompard?’ Of course Bompard was listening. The Chief ’s account was familiar enough: the Mayor had called, closely followed by the Interior Minister (actually, his Private Secretary, but that was enough). The Culture Minister had called in person to share his keen sense of shock, and the former Culture Minister, not wanting to be left out, had unhesitatingly shared his own sense of shock, which was every bit as keen as that of his successor. Bompard didn’t relish being called to order, but unlike Louvel, his division chief, he didn’t feel particularly affected by the present, admittedly testing, circumstances. While Louvel gulped back a palmful of arnica granules, recommended by his homeopath in the event of a fall, and similarly indicated for cases of wounded pride, Bompard thought back to the old joke wheeled out by his analyst, in the throes of his divorce. He pictured himself sitting opposite Braumann in his consulting room. He had tried lying prone on the

couch, under the benevolent gaze of this otherwise somewhat austere man, but the recumbent pose had provoked a string of associations that would have kept him in analysis indefinitely. Ever the pragmatist, he had opted for a short series of face-to-face consultations—the kind reimbursed by Our Lady of the Social Security—helping him to digest the unpalatable fact of Mathilde’s departure while not bankrupting himself in the process. During one of their sessions, Braumann had dispensed profound wisdom in the form of a riddle. ‘What’s the difference between being affected and being involved?’ Bompard realised he was staring blankly into space—not the most advantageous expression in his Chief ’s presence—and hastily consigned the memory to the back of his mind. Braumann’s cultivated, intelligent tones called him back: ‘Have you ever eaten a ham omelette? Well, the chicken was involved, but the pig was affected.’ Bompard had not immediately spotted the link between his analyst’s contribution, and what had passed between them up until then, but he appreciated its subtlety all the same. Only later, when his relationship with Mathilde had stabilised, did he allow himself to speculate that Braumann’s riddle had been calculated to illuminate the pain of their divorce, the affliction of separation, and the torture of alimony. The Commissaire glanced sympathetically at his division chief and congratulated himself that in the affair of the decapitated statues, his was the least thankless of their two roles. He decided not to share this new burden of stress with his men. Something had to justify the difference in their salaries. Keeping it to himself showed a touch of class, too, he thought. In his office, Bompard reviewed plans for the investigation with his two lieutenants. Mathieu Piquet-Lamotte, known to everyone at headquarters as Grenelle (in honour of La Motte-Picquet Grenelle metro station in the 15th arrondissement) would pursue a promising line on acrobats likely to turn a blind eye to the nature of the task, and agree to tackle the west face of NotreDame, stone-cutting gear at the ready. Frédéric Machnel—known to all as Mach’ Schnell! (HQ really was a bottomless pit of wit)—would investigate a select cohort of fifty or so international billionaire collectors capable of ordering such an operation. Machnel was a file fiend, a dogged compiler of dossiers on any and every subject. He fell to his task with zealous glee. Bompard decided to parry the attack of the prawns with a walk home along the quaysides of the Seine. On the great open square in front of Notre-Dame, the uniforms had spent the night guarding those statues still in possession of their heads. Nine had been decapitated and Bompard wondered if the number nine was significant, or if the head-cutters had been disturbed as they went about their business. And while it had always seemed ridiculous to him to post a team of cops on the spot

where a crime had already been committed—as if to hammer home the police’s sorry lack of foresight and intuition—he had to admit, this case was an exception. No one at headquarters, least of all him, was prepared to risk seeing a full parade of headless Notre-Dame statues splashed across the newspapers, with the inevitable subs’ field day: ‘Off with their heads … But who’s for the chop?’ This was a damage limitation exercise in the truest sense. At first, Bompard did not recognise Thomas’s gaunt figure. Deep in thought, he paced distractedly towards the spot where the painter stood. The image on the easel stopped him dead in his tracks. Nine decapitated statues filled the space of the canvas, plain and unadorned like a biometric photograph. A single, imaginative touch: the nine severed necks were streaked with blood. In the hyper-realist painting, the livid scarlet dog-collars ringing the black-and-white sculptures were highly disturbing. Only now did Bompard identify Thomas. ‘Photographic realism is it, then, Tom?’ he asked. ‘A very good day to you, Commissaire. Mea culpa! Today, I am straying from the path, looking ahead, as it were.’ ‘Looking ahead …’ ‘Distancing myself from my habitual style. What you see is far removed from my usual work. But sometimes one is swept along by events, a chance encounter ...’ ‘Well, don’t get too far ahead of yourself,’ Bompard cut him short. ‘And stay close to home, I’ll be needing a word with you soon enough.’ He headed for the riverfront. Bompard struggled to pinpoint why he found the young artist so excessively irritating. Thomas was seeking inspiration on his private patch, the free range of his investigation. The pleasure of his quayside walk soured. ‘Damn him.’

Catherine Bessonart

And if, at NotreDame, by night …

He turned up the collar of his raincoat, thrust his balled fists deep into his pockets and set off along the stone quayside, determined to follow the river for as long as it took. He found himself right at the edge of the cobbled walkway. Anyone who missed their footing here risked toppling straight into the water. ‘Christian! Stop—you’ll fall in!’ Mathilde used to worry about him. He had liked that. He wondered if his mother had worried about him when he was a boy, doing reckless, dangerous, boyish things. No doubt she had, but he would never know. A thick, white veil shrouded the first eight years of his life, and he had chosen not to lift it. ‘Stop being so silly! Over here!’ He turned, with a boyish air that few ever saw. But the solitary, hard-bitten adult quickly stepped forward once more. No one was calling out to him. No one feared for his safety. Nostalgia could play cruel tricks.

Bompard walked on. Anne Sylvestre, the lilting, haunting voice of the Sixties, went with him. T’en souviens-tu la Seine? Mathilde’s favourite record was a love-song to the great river: its waters were the colour of deep, blue-grey eyes, said the lyrics. A constant companion for the lonely souls drawn to its quaysides from the black heart of the city, a dancing lover in a sparkling, silken gown, speaking of distant seas, and golden beaches, restoring faith, turning sorrow to joy. Mathilde always complained about his discarded socks. But she had walked out, leaving her world scattered everywhere, and Anne Sylvestre’s song in his heart. Like a foreign body, a graft he could no longer tear free. Bompard turned for home, and the solace of a vintage malt.

7 At 4 a.m., Bompard’s mobile ringtone was a painful reminder of the succession of whiskies that had sent him to sleep. He cleared his throat two or three times, swore he would stop drinking, and answered. Grenelle’s confused horror-struck tones rasped in his ear. Bompard cut the call. Gave himself five seconds to come up with three good reasons why he should carry on in this job. ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.’ The phrase found its way to the front of his mind. He repeated it three times over and got to his feet. He crossed the city, oblivious, on auto pilot. The victim’s body was ice cold. So was he. But the woman was headless, while his own head pounded fit to burst. Bompard stared at the corpse at his feet, mutilated, frozen, as if in surprise, naked, and coated now in a delicate, whitish sheen. The spectacle of the decapitated body left him badly shaken. Cover her face … He couldn’t even do that. Couldn’t close the dead woman’s eyes. After the neck, what Bompard adored most in a woman’s body were her wrists. He bent down to the unknown victim, brushing his fingertips over the veins that pulsed no more, and gave a silent promise that justice would indeed be done. He stared at her pose for a long time, saying nothing, wondering why the woman’s right arm was folded up and back, as if she had been tried to slide it under the back of her head. He didn’t like that.

Bernard Bonnelle

At the Belles Abyssines

Publisher: La Table Ronde Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Anna Vateva a.vateva@editionslatableronde.fr Number of Pages: 192

Translation: Melanie Florence melaniejflorence@googlemail.com

A quest in the form of an investigation, set against the backdrop of France’s ‘phoney war’ in Africa during the 1940s. Striking characters, crushed by the weight of their destiny or galvanized by a spirit of rebellion. An exciting and fascinating read. Biography

Bernard Bonnelle was born in Paris in 1961. As a naval officer from 1986 to 2002, he served aboard several warships, sailing from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, by way of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Since 2002 he has pursued his career in administration. Bernard Bonnelle currently lives in Poitiers. At the Belles Abyssines is his second novel. Publications Les Huiles, Michel de Maule (2011)

Alban doesn’t hold with convention; Pierre is more circumspect. When they strike up a friendship in the Paris metro, no one can predict that several years later, once they are both naval officers, they will travel the world aboard the Jeanne d’Arc, nor that their friendship will endure beyond death. At the end of the summer of 1939, Alban is found dead in his cabin on the Étoile-du-Sud, the patrol ship he commanded, at Djibouti, where the Indian Ocean meets the Red Sea. Appointed his successor, Pierre arrives in a city under siege where the threat of war

is imminent. He who knew his friend better than anyone refuses to believe the whispers in colonial society: unable to face leading a dangerous mission, Alban has chosen to commit suicide instead. In his search for a truth which must not be told, Pierre will have to follow the path taken by Alban. As he tracks down the clues, he will meet all sorts of people: diehards and cowards, the ambitious and the rebellious, the cynical and the resigned: all, however, are haunted by the memory of an elusive female figure.

7 Djibouti is not an African town, but a French town in Africa. The white wings of the newspapers unfurling on café terraces; the shadows of the tall trees imitating planes and chestnuts, the light filtering through them as if at Vic-Fezensac, Castéra-Verduzan or Villeneuve-Loubet; the small-town intrigues conducted behind louvred shutters throwing slivers of sunlight on to the drinks tray; the chimes of the town hall peacefully sounding the hours after the sudden lowing of ships leaving port and the call of the muezzin wavering in the night; the colonials have recreated their familiar little world in its entirety there, to ward off the silence of the Somalis wrapped in their mystery, and the anguish of the arid expanses, pebbles stretching as far as the eye can see, the emaciated goats, the unrelenting heat. A pale line was visible on the horizon, between the sea and the sky, equally drained of colour. As the Sagittaire drew nearer, the port came into focus with its cranes, coal sheds, and one or two large ships at the quayside, among the dhows tied to each other in pairs. We were due to come alongside in the early evening. A sudden squall complicated the manoeuvre: despite the efforts of the two harbour tugs, it was as if the quayside were pushing the steamer away. Just before nightfall, success was in sight, and they were about to throw the hawsers, but the water was too choppy. The waves slammed against the quayside, sending white-topped billows right on to the fo’c’sle of the Sagittaire. There was a risk of damage. We had to go back and wait, tossed about in the darkness,

on the black waters of the basin. The passengers had at least learned a new word to put in their letters home: the khamsin, the desert wind, full of scorching sand, had us in its grip. Towards ten at night it dropped suddenly and at last the steamer was able to dock. Near to the berth where the Sagittaire had come in, attempts were underway to load the holds of a small cargo boat with a herd of camels, unsteady on their feet and skittish from the khamsin. As soon as the gangway was in position, the passengers, impatient to come ashore, poured out among the animals which Danikil dockers were urging on with loud cries and sticks. In the light from the car headlamps, baggage was spreading over the quayside, where it was seized on immediately by Somali children who offered their services to carry or watch over it, or guide passengers to their waiting cars. Dangling from the hoist of a crane, a camel revolved slowly, braying with terror above our heads before it was swallowed up by the hold. A woman’s cry rang out; a lad had climbed right to the top of the derrick of the Sagittaire. He was crouching atop the cargo boom, seemingly indifferent to the risk of losing his balance and plummeting on to the concrete thirty feet below. With considerable pride at being the centre of attention, he waved merrily at the crowd before sliding down the rope and diving into the sea just at the moment a policeman in shorts was about to grab hold of him.

Bernard Bonnelle

At the Belles Abyssines

‘Are you Lieutenant Pierre Jouhannaud—the new Captain of the Étoile-du-Sud?’ The face of the person addressing me in this way was hidden by the dark. I made out bushy eyebrows and the outline of a nose, above a thick moustache. A flash of light revealed the look in his eyes, burning with fever. Bent and lopsided, the figure was bizarrely dressed in a Russian peasant smock over a sailor’s tunic and a pair of shorts which were much too big. ‘The commander asked me to drive you into town.’ The Russian peasant indicated a small, ancient Citroën parked underneath the overhang of a shed. I was concerned about my trunk, but he assured me I would need only my suitcase—without offering to carry it, though. With enormous respect, however, as if it were a question of the Holy Sacrament, he vouchsafed to me a sealed envelope, divulging in conspiratorial tones that it was a personal communication from Captain Marquin, the chief of the Navy in French Somaliland. Having cranked the motor into life, he slipped behind the wheel and flung open the door on my side to invite me to get in. In an attempt to strike up conversation, I asked my driver to introduce himself, and received one word in reply: “Potemkine”. Sensing that my curiosity was not quite satisfied, he went on in a pronounced Russian accent: “Potemkine, of the Étoile-du-Sud.” He gave a nod in the direction of a ship at the quayside, amid a flotilla of dhows. Lying low in the water, she was much smaller than I had imagined. Only the two modest canons visible at the bow and stern gave her anything of the appearance of a warship.

‘The Étoile-du-Sud’. The Citroën gave a jolt. Potemkine swerved to avoid an emaciated dog which had suddenly appeared in our headlamps. As I had not yet assumed my command, it would not have been fitting for me to spend the night on board. Before she should disappear behind the dark bulk of a warehouse, I turned to look at what was to be my ship—but which was for me at this moment primarily the tomb of Alban de Perthes, or at least the place where he had spent his last months and met with an unexplained death. I said the name of my friend aloud, and my driver leapt in with ‘The poor Captain.’ The words could have been an expression of pity, but the squint smile which accompanied them lent the word ‘poor’ a colouring of sheer contempt. Potemkine was starting to annoy me. Abandoning my attempts at conversation, I turned towards the darkness. The harbour was giving way now to an indistinct expanse of rough land, with the dark outlines of occasional dwelling places, spindly bushes and open fires surrounded by shadowy figures swathed in loose robes or with just a piece of cloth tied round their waists. Our car turned into a broad avenue lined with palm trees and we arrived in the town. Most of the buildings were of the same design: neat blocks set squarely on whitewashed pillars, behind which was a gallery housing booths with closed shutters, perhaps a makeshift affair with a canvas roof. On the upper storey, beneath the terrace, large Moorish-style openings, filled by louvred shutters, echoed the rhythm of the arcades at street level. Crossing the sunlit square, the Citroën turned into a part of town where the architecture was plainer, with no arcades or galleries. My driver pulled up outside a small three-storey block. A signboard on the corner of the frontage told us that we were at the Hôtel Chic de la Mer Rouge— proprietors: Apostolides Frères. Slamming the car door behind me, I went into the hotel, leaving Potemkine to see to my luggage. While I waited for someone to come and attend to me, I opened the envelope from the Commander of the Navy: it was a special order giving the arrangements for my taking up command. The ceremony was to take place the following morning at 10, after I had paid him an official visit in full summer dress uniform. I had done well to pack my sabre and white gloves in my suitcase, since my trunk would stay on board the Sagittaire until Potemkine was of a mind to collect it. The hotel seemed sunk in a deep sleep. No receptionist was forthcoming. I went back outside to share my concerns with Potemkine. The street was empty. The car had gone, along with its driver and my suitcase. I found myself alone, in a strange place, ready to collapse with exhaustion, and my belongings were goodness knows where. Steps sounded in the lobby. A person appeared, tying the cord of his dressing gown round his ample girth. He announced sullenly that I was in the

presence of Spiridon Apostolides himself, the proprietor of the hotel. I gave him to understand that I did not much care who he was and his hotel did not impress me; all I wanted was to be shown to my room without delay. His eyes grew wide with surprise. He went behind the reception desk to check the register. ‘There’s no reservation in your name. And nothing for the Navy. Just when we’re fully booked, as well. What rotten luck! Potemkine, you say? Ah, now I’m beginning to see … He came by last week but didn’t say anything about your arrival. I bet that scoundrel’s slipped off to the Belles Abyssines. I’ll get someone to drive you there.’

Bernard Bonnelle

At the Belles Abyssines

Fanny Chiarello

Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness

Publisher: Éd. de l’Olivier Date of Publication: February 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Violaine Faucon vfaucon@editionsdelolivier.fr Number of Pages: 192

Translation: Catherine Spencer catherinemarielouise@yahoo.co.uk

“Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness” is set in the Roaring Twenties and takes us from New York to Paris in the wake of our mysterious diva heroine. A new voice in French literature “Fanny Chiarello’s language and imagery are brilliantly inventive”, Les Inrockuptibles Biography

Fanny Chiarello was born in 1974 and lives in Lille. She has published short stories, works for young people and poetry collections. Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness is her second novel. Publications L’éternité n’est pas si longue, Éditions de l’Olivier (repub. Points, 2013)

In April 1927, after the brilliant success of her first Parisian Norma, Carlotta Delmont disappeared. Fugue, suicide or kidnapping? For two weeks, the police, press, public and friends of the American singer wonder what has happened to her—until she reappears and their questions then centre on the reasons for her disappearance. Where was she all that time? And with whom? Carlotta was the subject of so much commentary and theorising that, much to her dislike, she became a living legend subjected to the scrutiny and the demands of the public at large. She would pay dearly for her moment of weakness and, just like her favourite heroines, would have to sacrifice part of herself for her freedom.

Paris, 14th April 1927. My beloved Gabriel When this letter reaches you, I shall doubtless be on the train headed for Milan, even further away from you. As you will have already read in the press, I am completely recovered. My voice no longer bears the slightest trace of that terrible cold that almost silenced me and which forced me to let a Parisian understudy take over for four evenings. I would rather have broken a wrist than had a sore throat, for it deprived me of the one thing that consoles me about not being with you. Those several days of enforced silence plunged me into a profound state of distress, to the point where I began to fear the day my vocal chords give up the ghost once and for all—what will I do then? For five long days, cosily ensconced in my suite’s Louis XV furniture, I wandered miserably among the gilt-edged doors and the Old Masters, feeling as cumbersome and useless as a bag of laundry … I wasn’t so much moping for those missed appointments with the Palais Garnier as for the glimpse I had had of what it would be like when only a thread remained of my vocal chords. I know no happiness can last forever in a life destined to come to an end—all the more reason to extract every last drop of enjoyment from the opportunity of incarnating, one after the other, these fearsome or wonderful women to whom I give voice, before nature exerts its toll and condemns me to singing nothing but mezzo-soprano roles.

For the moment, I rejoice that I can forget such dark thoughts by taking simple refuge in singing. I was right, you see, to refuse to speak for almost a week. If Ida claimed I was being affected, it is because her life does not depend on her vocal chords. It would, however, be most ungracious to complain about her for she took perfect care of me during those few days of dereliction. She even transformed this unfortunate circumstance into the opportunity for a great and beautiful adventure: would you believe, she got it into her head to have me read works of literature and by dint of persuasion, I plunged into quite obscure titles. I raised my eyes to heaven at prose and rolled them even higher at the very notion of poetry but to my astonishment, a long poem that she read me resonated with me in the most curious way. Can you believe that? A chambermaid sharing her love of poetry—I mean the kind one reads—with her prima donna of a mistress? The only poetry I knew was that of life, the one that Mimi describes so well in La Bohème: Mi piaccion quelle cose che han si dolce malia, che parlano d’amor, di primavere, che parlano di sogni et di chimere, quelle cose che hanno me poesia. Lei m’intende ? But I digress again. It wasn’t Mimi I wanted to praise but T.S.Eliot, whose poem Ida read to me. If I talk about it to you, it’s not to convert you as well but because I have some good news to tell you. Do you remember the piece for voice and orchestra that I commissioned from Samson Blacksmith nearly two years ago? Samson wanted me to choose the text and I had no idea of what to use. Over time, I almost forgot the project, so insurmountable did the task seem to me. I had to find, among the literary works of the millennium, the golden nugget to which nothing needed to be added and nothing taken away. You know how lazy a reader I am; I would give up before even opening a book. And here, during that week, the pearl was miraculously being offered up to me through the intermediary of the enigmatic Ida. It is What the Thunder Said, an extract from a long poem entitled The Waste Land. No sooner had I finished the last page than I sent a wire to Samson in New York for him to get hold of the book and ask Mr Eliot for permission to adapt it. The text was published five years ago and it may not yet have been put to music. I hope not, with all my heart. You know how much I long to create a role, or else a lyrical piece of some scope. You must be thinking that I seem very cheerful for someone who said they were overwhelmed by sinister revelations. It’s because writing to you almost makes me feel as if I’m close to you and nothing is more reassuring to me. You are sitting at my table, in the bar at the Ritz, drinking the same tea as me, and

we are chatting gaily, following no particular subject but simply following our thoughts wherever they take us. Or mine, rather, since I still haven’t had a reply to my previous letter and so I cannot comment on it. I don’t hold it against you. Such a long silence is unlike you, particularly when I have such a need to feel protected, and so I suppose you must be extremely busy. Would you like me to tell you a bit about Paris? So many friends had described it to us in such glowing colours that I was very surprised to be prey to such suffocating melancholy here. My indisposition and my fear of silence are not the only explanations for this lassitude; there is something more nebulous. I should not talk to you about it, so as not to cause you worry, but I have never been able to hide things from you. If I had to hide the slightest thing from you, I would feel so alone that I would go mad. Such thoughts sometimes overwhelm me, here, and a thousand others that are just as strange and uncustomary. Perhaps it is normal, so far from our home and from all I know. The city of Paris in itself is rather beautiful, even though everything there is very old, narrow and winding. That is part of its charm. Since my recovery, I get up very early to walk around, alone or with Ida. Some mornings, the city can barely be made out under a greyish tint, with the Seine and its banks, lined with book-sellers, and Notre Dame in the background like the spectre of a gothic castle hanging over the water; everything I look at seems unreal and ashen in texture. The silvery water calls to me. If I jumped over the parapet, the water would swallow me up without a sound, wrapping around me like fog. On other days, however, I cross the Jardin du Luxembourg under a cloudless sky, the buds on the trees standing out against the azure blue with magical clarity, the luminous air filled with the sound and odour of a morning at the dawn of creation, and yet I still feel that strange solitude weighing down on my chest. I watch young, elegant couples strolling but I am unable to share their happiness. At first I thought my despondency was because the city lent itself to love and you were so far away, so that it was a sheer waste to walk there without an arm to lean on or another pair of eyes to embrace the unfamiliar landscapes around me. Yet what oppresses me is not so much lack or solitude as a nostalgic longing, for what I do not know. All this must seem very confused to you but I cannot tell you more precisely exactly what was happening within me. I am speaking to you a lot about solitude but in fact I have done nothing but go out since my recovery and I quickly made up for lost time in terms of society life, which has provided a rather agreeable diversion to my recent moroseness; with the French, one does not get bored. My general opinion of them has barely changed since my last letter. In the main they are exuberant people, so undisciplined that they apparently need to challenge the established order to make themselves feel alive. They are also less puritan than our compatriots. However, I do not believe they are truly free. Their lives are compartmentalised and their enthusiasms hierarchical. That is why we are playing Norma and

Fanny Chiarello

Carlotta Delmont’s Weakness

not Tosca, which local critics value barely higher than a Christmas carol. What is more, Parisian newspapers would never advertise an opera or a symphony in their entertainments section as the New York Timesdoes, for in their eyes these forms of artare superior to others. A Frenchman will not go and listen to Norma one evening and go and see Skeleton Dude in Barnum’s Circus the next, as we would, or if he did he would keep quiet about it. And I have trouble imagining French housewives going crazy about both Caruso and Al Jonson as ours do. I don’t see why one should compare Swanee to Rigolettoor what Swanee takes away from Rigoletto but that’s the way it is. Perhaps I exaggerate slightly: not all intellectuals here despise popular shows. They might sometimes mix with the riff-raff at a cabaret and wildly applaud a singer there although that does not stop them heaping the most degrading names on her. When I was a girl, my mother liked to tell me certain stories that I took for legends. I thought at the time that she was trying to give me a disturbing image of the Old World. She told me how European newspapers had commented on the most popular musical events of her time and particularly their astonishment the day Anton Seidl conducted a Wagner opera on Coney Island for 25 cents a seat: in their eyes, that was like taking one’s wife to tea with a lady of the night. She also told me of their horrified clamour when Richard Strauss had played his works on the fourth floor of Wanamaker’s. It was unacceptable for a German composer to play in a big store: he had to play in Carnegie Hall, at the risk of being unable to accommodate the masses crowding to hear the maestro. After two weeks in Paris, I am inclined to give credence to such tales. For all that, I have met some endearing people here who are, to say the least, interesting. Artists of all disciplines who came of their own accord to greet me in my hotel or who introduced me to society women holding salons. Winnaretta Singer, Princess de Polignac, was one, an American lover of the arts, particularly music. I sang at her home as soon as I was better, accompanied on the piano by a local composer, whose name would mean nothing to you, who writes refreshingly simple pieces. But I’ve told you about everything except performances to come. It’s because, for my part, everything looks good. The first will be held tonight; I’ve been given a good press—indeed, I’m barely used to such a unanimously warm welcome. I have to acknowledge that France is particularly hospitable: I am received everywhere with all the consideration usually reserved for crowned heads. What is more, nobody here is expecting some superhuman effort from me. I resumed rehearsals five days ago already, Sunday included, and I am not tired, at least not physically. In Milan it will be different because I have to alternate roles with quite different ranges, which risks spoiling my voice and exhausting me and so I am taking advantage of this respite, as far as my affliction allows.

I so look forward to clasping you to me and feeling how much you protect me from everything. I hope I will soon get your next letter, which is so overdue. I am not reproaching you; I know how time races by and that it comes between us just as much as space. In exactly the same measure. Three thousand six hundred miles are nothing more than time, for you are always as present in my heart, while it takes six days sailing to be in your arms again. I have to leave you now, my precious Gabriel. Ida tells me it is high time to be leaving for the Palais Garnier where tonight I shall sing my first Parisian Norma. Think of me at that special moment. I kiss this letter. Your Carlotta

Fanny Chiarello

Carlotta Delmontâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Weakness

Frédéric Ciriez

Melo

Publisher: Verticales Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Anne-Solange Noble anne-solange.noble@gallimard.fr Number of Pages: 332

Translation: Vineet Lal vineet_lal@hotmail.com

“Reading ‘Melo’ after ‘Des néons sous la mer’ leaves you in no doubt. Frédéric Ciriez ought to be designated an endangered species, alongside our great proletarian writers—the likes of Queneau, Calet and Pérec. Authors whose work echoes the world of the common man, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, getting right under his skin.” Transfuge “The characters in ‘Melo’ are charged with energy, lighting up a dreamlike Paris with the charm of their hopeless naivety. An African dandy, a Chinese trinket-peddler: such wonderful protagonists!” Elle One of this year’s top releases. Biography

Frédéric Ciriez was born in Paimpol, Brittany, in 1971 and studied arts and linguistics in Brest and Rennes. Following a number of literary collaborations he published his first novel in 2008. A novella, Femmes fumigènes, appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française (nrf) in April 2010. Publications Des néons sous la mer, Verticales, 2008 (republished by Gallimard in the “Folio” collection in 2010).

In Mélo Frédéric Ciriez explores the streets of Paris and its inner suburbs, focusing his point of view on three characters whose lives are not quite the norm: a forty-something suicide victim, a dandyish refuse lorry driver and a girl who sells lighters door-to-door. Written in the first and third person, this urban panorama is framed as a triptych (“Transfixion”, “Transformation” and “Transaction”), with each part linked to the others either overtly or via more subtle allusions. The Suicide Victim, the Dandy and the Street Hawker each trace, in their own way, the outlines of a Baroque altarpiece, or a

modern-day vanitas, and highlight one crucial question: what exactly is the fire that consumes us all? The answer lies in the title: Mélo, the melodrama of life. Here are three individuals excluded by society, whom even the most naturalistic authors would be hard pressed to portray. Through evocative language, rich in originality and imagery, Frédéric Ciriez demonstrates his skill in documenting what lurks below the surface of everyday life, along with the anti-heroes that inhabit the blind spots of our existence.

Just by the Château d’Eau metro I tuck into some grilled corn and gaze at the cobs sizzling on the street vendor’s brazier. He’s an Indian in a flowery shirt. The smoke rises straight up in the air, like in church when I was a kid, and I think to myself: this is the most laid-back grill in Paris, even if it reeks of petrol. It’s buzzing here in the rush hour. I gnaw at my food in peace, admiring the waves of blue-nailed women ebbing and flowing from the Afro hairdressers or the Sunshine clothing store, its frontage covered in bits of broken mirror. I admire these women as much as I despise the dozens of layabouts dressed like out-of-work R&B stars, prattling away and herding customers into the local beauty salons. They ought to give all those horrible men a scratch now and then, or execute one of them to set an example, and form a militia to enforce the law, screaming: bugger off Joseph, and take your style with you! I lean back against the metro railings, looking south. My vehicle’s doubleparked, facing north, with two attractive dark-haired men keeping a watchful eye. I see a man in a tracksuit reflected in my metallic toecaps. Poor guy … I hope he’s thinking: I’d give anything to have a pair of those! Well, nice try, mate, but that’s not quite how things work in the civilized world. Shoes like mine are what it takes to be Parfait every day, and you won’t find any round here, or if you did they’d be plastic and certainly not ones you could afford … so you’d better get back to betting on the horses at that Chinese place over there! Maybe he’s a junkie, or he’s gay and trying to come on to me. But since everyone looks like they’re putting on an act, not least myself, it’s far from easy knowing who’s who, and who this guy is. Sometimes I think: I could have been an actor too, and not just some badly-shaven bit-part player like my cousin Désiré, warbling away at pavement cafés as he waits for the phone to ring. I’m still ravenously hungry. I hand another five-euro note to the Indian roasting in the sun.

The beast purrs into life. Three hundred horsepower under the bonnet in front of the Fair & White Center, “the world leader in beauty products for dark, olive and mixed complexions”. The boys are at the back, on the footboard. It’s as hot as the tropics, a bit of fresh air won’t do them any harm. The steering wheel is red-hot. I slip on my micro-perforated gloves. First gear, very gently. The prototype wrenches itself from the molten earth. Boulevard de Strasbourg at 30km/h: a herd of cars crawling towards the Gare de l’Est. I tower above my surroundings and the smog. The sun’s heat is piercing; even the car bodies seem to be on fire, as do their seats for those women driving in their summer outfits with bare thighs. Today my crew are wearing their spring uniform: green T-shirts and yellow overalls under a highvisibility en471 chrome harness—it’s those new High Environmental Quality standards, you need to know them off by heart. They cling to the support rail, neck thrown back, forehead facing the sky. I light a Dunhill and crank the aircon up a notch. This week I could have had a stronger team, but that’s life, and to be honest I’ve had worse in the past. On the left of the lorry I’ve got Bébère, a Kabyle who’s a bit on the flabby side. On the right there’s Sydney, a Malian, a social climber. He’s the one I don’t trust. I’ve always been wary of the Malian mafia when it comes to the city’s refuse collection, and the same with the Senegalese—all those West Africans who’ve never been to school and don’t have any scruples. The liquid waste slopping around in the depths of the truck appears on the monitor by the steering wheel. It’s disgusting. I look away and stare straight ahead at the city passing by. We park on Boulevard de Strasbourg in front of a kfc swarming with people. My men demolish a mountain of rubbish bags that have been piling up in the restaurant’s bins. A place that’s been exterminating chickens “Since 1939”. Sydney grabs the bags in twos. Bébère does them one by one. I’ve always known the Berber was a slacker and the other guy a show-off. Sometimes they get into fights, which I hate: after all, I’m charged with ensuring the team’s physical well-being. As if to prove the point … Sydney launches one of the bags as high as he can into the air, waits for it to land, head-butts it into the lorry, and then taunts Bébère who’s a bit older and stockier. Sydney, I’ve told you before not to do that in public, ’cos there’s folks that can see you and might complain to the council! Maybe it’s his ear protectors or he’s avoiding communication, but he doesn’t give a damn for what I say and carries on provoking a terrified Bébère. I wonder how he keeps his cool; if it were me I’d chuck Sydney into the waste chute and push the button. The people who make up our teams back at the office have no idea. Having got rid of all those chickens, the pair of them turn to a broken wheelie bin and begin to drag it. They struggle to wedge it onto the teeth of the

hoist; then the bin rises and empties in one move. Bébère stares with lifeless eyes; I’ve told him not to smoke joints anymore when on duty. My co-workers empty the last bins, give me a little wave, grab the support rail and we’re off again. The corner of Boulevard de Strasbourg and Rue de La Fidélité. Given this heat, you’d think you were in Brazza. I watch my guys, their mouths open and faces plastered with dirt, and realise I’ve no wish to be back in their shoes. Paris is filthy and full of bins. I rummage around the glove compartment and spray myself with some Antaeus by Chanel. And you never used to see so many rats before. Whatever the head honchos of the city might say, there’s more and more of them on the streets; we’ll soon need to set up a quality mark just for the Parisian rat. This afternoon the critters are out and about with the tourists; they’ve no hang-ups whatsoever, scampering around between the bins, totally green thanks to my Pilot Ray-Bans. There goes Sydney, dashing off to try and kill one with his heel. Missed … I’ve promised him dinner on me if he manages to exterminate ten in one day. He’s been trying for six months and he’ll never make it. His best tally is four. Sydney, try a bit harder and I’ll treat you to a kfc! He’s annoyed and shakes his fist at me. Bébère has his revenge. I turn into Rue de La Fidélité. Not everyone could live up to that street name. Come on, Dream Team Derichebourg, we’re hitting the high spots now, then I’m off to empty the truck and you’ll get your break! We pass the Lumières de l’Est lighting store and stop in front of a restaurant that’s named after the street; they hold musical evenings in their basement club. I’ve never been there myself, but apparently it’s really chic, and I guess it would be a great spot to strut my stuff. Why not even rent it one day, to create a bit of a buzz? It’s central and could raise my profile. The bins outside this place are always clean. That’s rare these days. The management has respect for its customers. I know because wherever I go on my rounds I see restaurants with bins chock-full of frozen food packaging outside their front door, which tells me they’re treating their guests like pigs. A little man in a white shirt and a bow tie comes out and greets my guys as he throws some rubbish into the truck himself. We set off once more. We go down the street and stop in front of Les Délices d’Afrique, an Ivorian restaurant. It used to be a Kabyle bistrot. Our team would drop by for a beer from time to time; then it changed hands and we didn’t like the atmosphere. I know the current owners really well, especially her. I’m double-parked. Rosalie, the boss, moves her lips in slow motion. Despite the racket from the lorry I can make her out: “Hello Parfait, you smooth talker …” I raise my finger to my lips and give her a little wave, y’know, nice and subtle, so her man doesn’t spot me outside the Hôtel de Londres et du Brésil.

Frédéric Ciriez

Melo

We’re about to turn into Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, a global melting-pot of a street. We pass the Swinging Londress brasserie. I turn to Bébère: D’you know what Londress means? Get it right and I’ll swap places with you … He answers smugly: It’s the capital of England! I reply: Wrong, it’s a brand of cigar. This used to be a tobacconist’s, it’s about time you stopped chewing that African Makla and spitting all over the place! […] I notice a Chinese girl on rollerskates flogging trinkets in front of the newsagent’s. I slam on the brakes. “Hey you there, get in!” She shrugs and looks at me, unsure whether my intentions are good or bad. “Yes, you there, get in and show me what you’ve got!”, and I snap my fingers at the basket of goods on her belly. That does the trick … She scrambles onto the footboard and shows me her stuff. She’s got rings, key chains, fluorescent bits and bobs for kids and a sweet little pair of breasts under her black tank top, but what I’m really after is a lighter. “Briquet? Lighter?” She gazes at me all doe-eyed, but she hasn’t a clue what I’m saying. “Briquet, click-click, lighter?” I show her my packet of Dunhills and my broken Bic lighter. Got it, the penny drops. She gabbles two or three words in French, but all I pick up is: “Yes … just for you … very cheap …”; then she ferrets around in her basket and pulls out her tackiest lighters, along with some novelty ones like lipsticks and mini-flashlights … “How much?” The girl points to the tacky lighters and holds up her thumb, then points to the novelty ones and lifts up two fingers. I can see her pretty little wild butterfly face through my Ray-Bans, and I think to myself that it can’t be easy peddling stuff on skates every day when you don’t speak the local lingo. I ponder for a moment, then point to the novelty lighters and raise my thumb saying: “One euro, OK? I’ll take it for one euro, OK?” She responds by starting to shake her head again, but gently this time, from right to left, like an eel, as if she wants to haggle. Then she looks at me without saying a word, expectantly, with a crafty little gleam in her eyes … This girl certainly knows how to bargain. Since I’m fed up with the dashboard lighter that only works half the time, I blurt out “OK, OK” and choose a lighter shaped like a lipstick. She shakes her head in delight, chuckling as she tries to say something, but I don’t understand Chinese. Then she shrugs, holds out her thumb and I hear her say: “Bèn dàn, many grateful you very kind sir …” I give her two euros and tell her to keep the change. She seizes the coin and races off on her skates, flexing her buttocks in her black jeans. Clearly she’s heading down to the Boulevards, trying her luck at pavement cafés along the way. Then she disappears round the corner and I’m left with a fake lipstick in my hand.

Franck Courtès Publisher: JC Lattès Date of Publication: February 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Eva Bredin ebredin@editions-jclattes.fr Number of Pages: 250 Translation: Shaun Whiteside shaun.whiteside1@btinternet.com

Authorisation to Participate in Running Competitions... and Other Escapades

A very charming style, funny stories, sometimes savage, but always full of humanity, exploring the private dramas of affluent France. Franck Courtès’s heroes are all ages. Childhood and adolescence are important elements. The author works for the television programme La Grande Librairie and for Lire magazine. Biography

“One of my obsessions since my schooldays was to work alone, to spend my evenings alone in my bedroom and then, as soon as I could, to set off on my own for the countryside. With my militant humanist parents, it wasn’t easy to act the hermit. I was being brought up a bee, I saw myself as a butterfly. It started like this: with a moped, at the age of fourteen. All the stories I later told in my photographs, and today in my writings, came from that, from a quest for the total, perfect freedom that a simple escapade in the countryside could bring me. Me, a child of fourteen, far from sturdy, unleashed on the main road for seventy-five miles, overtaken by lorries, freezing, with a joy verging on hysteria. No other journey has ever made such a powerful impression as that one. But I have a lot of travelling with my job as a photographer. I took pictures of people, celebrities. I have enjoyed issuing instructions to a Prime Minister or a famous actor. Aside from my commissions, for years I kept a photographic diary. It was photography that taught me to listen. Today, I write and make up stories, drawing on simple things around me, to which I enjoy giving a wider resonance, more sensitive, dramatic or amusing. As I write, I shift the fates of my characters, and I sill surprise myself by laughing or crying. I was born in Paris in 1964. I still live there, but I’m doing ok.” Authorisation to Participate in Running Competitions... and Other Escapades is Franck Courtès’ first short story collection.

Friends from country houses, a young man facing up to his cowardice, a divorced father who signs up for a television game show to win over his children, a young woman sacrificing everything to run the marathon, a Parisian bourgeois bohemian contemplating the world in a Japanese restaurant. In the course of these short stories, from the heart of the city to the heart of the country, Franck Courtès unspools the thin thread of our lives. He speaks masterfully of those private, silent earthquakes that topple each of his heroes and make them so fragile.

Authorisation to participate in running competitions 1 Things went pretty well for her with that young doctor on rue Botzaris. Her reflexes were good, her blood pressure excellent. Such stamina, such energy were rare in a forty-six-year-old woman. Such nerves, a more hardened doctor might have added. She had to flex her knees thirty times to check her heart rate recovery. She performed the thirty flexes at full speed without leaning on the couch. The doctor barely had time to sit back down at his desk. Puzzled, he considered her for a moment. She was keen to impress him, too. Christine Juve got her breath back as discreetly as possible, gulping air in silence, purple in the face. Dr Ladoze came back over to her and checked her pulse. They both remained silence, looking at the little screen of the device. She peered at the young doctor out of the corner of her eye. ‘And also, that’s not my best time ever.’ The young man smiled: ‘It isn’t a competition, madam.’ Her pulse quickly resumed a normal rhythm. ‘Very good,’ he said at last. Christine promised to add on a bit of distance when she told Patrick, her husband. This young man didn’t realise.

As he asked his questions, she felt as if she were sitting an exam. It was about being granted ‘authorisation to participate in running competitions’, as they put it. A medical certificate allowing her to take part in her first marathon. Open sesame. Reading the registration form on the internet, the formalities had irritated her. She had phoned up to confirm that the certificate was in fact compulsory. Now, at the doctor’s, she derived a certain pride from this. Authorisation from a doctor impressed her friends and family. Twenty-three euros later, Christine was standing on the pavement with the certificate in her pocket. She went home, swiftly crossing the Buttes-Chaumont, furtively making sure that men were looking at her. She called Patrick straight away, without even taking the time to undress. Her hands were shaking as she recited the numbers of her medical results to herself like a mantra. Patrick picked up. He was in a hurry, she could feel as much and it annoyed her. Had he forgotten how significant her appointment was? She heard the unpleasant click of his computer keys. He was doing two things at once ‘Patrick, are you listening to me?’ ‘Yes, darling, but can’t you tell me all that this evening?’ She hung up and hated him for a moment. She thought again of her lie in Dr Ladoze’s surgery. She hadn’t told him everything.

Franck Courtès

Authorisation to Participate in Running Competitions... and Other Escapades

Christine put her coat on a hanger and hung it in the cupboard. She took off her shoes, placed a shoe-tree in each and put them back in their box. Then she went to the bathroom, splashed her face with cold water and changed. Dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a tee-shirt that was too short for her, she made herself a green tea in silence. The memory of her lie weighed heavily upon her. The young doctor had asked her questions about her athletic habits, he wanted to know how many training sessions she had per week. ‘Every day!’ she had announced. ‘And how many times per session?’ ‘About an hour, but two or three at the weekend.’ ‘Every day? Are you preparing for the Olympics or something?’ ‘No, for a marathon,’ Christine said, irritated. He must be lumbered all day with the halt, the lame, with smokers and skivers and the overweight and all kinds of human flotsam and jetsam. Let him keep his sarcasm for them. She said nothing of the pain and boredom that she felt during her long sessions. She said nothing of the diarrhoea that forced her, after an hour and a half

of running, to disappear into a forest when she was lucky enough to find one. ‘You don’t smoke?’ ‘No,’ she said, staring at the floor. ‘What’s your alcohol consumption like?’ How she hated that medical language! Alcohol consumption had a whiff of guilt, of cops about it. ‘I have a drink from time to time, like everyone, with food.’ She felt boiling blood gushing into her ears. She was lying. Thomas Ladoze was glad to get it over with. With spring approaching, he issued a dozen of these certificates a week. He hadn’t studied medicine to issue permission to the affluent to go and hurt themselves. He signed, stamped, held out the certificate and pocketed his remuneration. Christine Juve considered the sheet of paper as if it were a diploma.

2 She pulled a face at the pungent taste of the green tea. A glass of wine would have been more welcome. Christine mentally added up the calories. If she drank a glass, she would have to compensate by depriving herself of lunch. But with the marathon three months off, there was no question of skipping a meal. With a sinking feeling, she controlled herself and went on sipping her tea. Christine didn’t feel like an alcoholic, it was just that she couldn’t face certain situations without alcohol. A distinction that doctors were in her view incapable of understanding. Even as a teenager, her nerves had kept her from going out with her friends in the evening. Her mother, a beautiful woman of implacable authority, had, with an excess of reprimands, stripped her of all her self-confidence. Soon alcohol had become a lifeline. One day a sensible boy who wanted to kiss her told her he thought she was beautiful. It was a revelation. More than love, compliments became her question. But her obsession with being liked, for want of success, brought her nothing but suffering. Rather than entrusting her soul to a shrink, she paid attention to her body, and more importantly to her clothing. She moulted several times a season, and was careful never to miss the sales. A new coat was enough for her to be reborn. She felt like someone else, better, definitely more beautiful. Alas, very often, she was the only one aware of her transformation. Arriving at a dinner party, for example, she did not achieve the effect she was hoping for. Her friends placed less importance on outward appearance. Stripped of her armour at the cloakroom, her only refuge lay in drunkenness.

The first few minutes before a drink were torture. Christine tended to say anything at all when she was asked a question. She could, in her desire to be in tune with everybody, contradict herself at any time. She doled out flattery, expecting compliments in return. Sometimes she led men to believe that she was falling in love. That won her their sympathy at least. And when nothing worked, she stayed silent, stuck in her unease, hating herself. The opening of the bottle wounded the moment of her release, the good times had arrived. For a moment she forgot her mediocrity. Once the glass was in her hand, a mechanism was set in motion. Christine took care not to drink too quickly, to take maximum advantage of the euphoric effect of the first mouthful. She made it a point of honour that no one should notice her terrible pleasure. Alcohol spread its sweet warmth through her blood, blew in each of her limbs like a spring breeze. Her brain became calmer, freeing itself gradually from all responsibility. She was reconciled with her surroundings, with the people around her, with the whole of humanity; but most of all with herself. It always ended the same way. Christine thought she was being funny and gay when she was just making a fool of herself. Patrick, her husband, always pointed this out just as she felt most liberated. Christine didn’t have words harsh enough to tell him he was nothing but a killjoy. He would regret it. Patrick knew who would regret what the following day.

Franck Courtès

Authorisation to Participate in Running Competitions... and Other Escapades

3 When her mother went into hospital, Christine was alarmed by her metamorphosis. Her mother could no longer feed herself normally. Sweets accumulated in the drawer of her bedside table. It took Christine a long time to stop trying to feed her. On the day of her death, she couldn’t bring herself to look at her mother’s remains, they now bore so little resemblance to her. She had become dreadfully thin. Christine stepped backwards in the room and bumped into the nurse, apologised and said there must have been a mistake. Patrick picked her up in the car park and wrapped her in his arms, where she could finally cry. ‘She’s better off where she is,’ he said. The formula. ‘Shut up,’ she whispered, lifting her head. And she stopped crying after that. Christine took up running three days later. She had been running for a year

now. She had learned from magazines, from the internet. Because yes, you can indeed learn how to run. Today, she was subjecting herself to a training regime worthy of a professional. But her belly was protesting against such an effort. Christine disappeared into a forest or a field of maize for a few minutes around about the eighteenth kilometre. What she left behind her was so revolting that she couldn’t imagine it having been inside her only a few minutes previously. She conscientiously recorded everything in a notebook. Her times, her distances, but also her moods and sensations while training. Then she did sums and made comparisons. It gave her encouragement. The programme was very strict, the objective rather high. She had been warned. She imagined covering the forty-two kilometres and two hundred and fifty metres in three hours and ten minutes. Or an average of thirteen point three kilometres an hour. Rather than being discouraged, she took heart from the doubts of experienced runners. Her success would bring praise raining down upon her. Soon nothing was more important in her eyes than that objective. She abandoned the laundry, the housework and the homework of her children, who naturally didn’t complain. Patrick hesitated between admiration, encouragement and worry. Most importantly, he was often absent during this time. An increased work-load kept him late at the office. The only thing that Christine didn’t sacrifice was shopping. Food was at the very heart of her preparation. She had to measure things, to take great care what she ate. She hunted down fat and sugar, and the children’s snacks regularly ended up in the bin so that she could avoid temptation. She had to lose weight in order to run better. To increase lightness and limit the risk of injury. She dreamed of seeing that cumbersome body melting away, the last obstacle to her flight, her ecstasy. She neglected her husband, too. She set off early to go running in the cold and rain. They no longer saw much of each other. She gleaned advice from specialist magazines. The covers showed healthy young people. She scoured each picture for reflections of her fantasy. Men and women blurring in a single fleshly ideal. Christine discovered that the hardest thing about a marathon was the preparation.

Solange Delhomme

Crossings

Publisher: Denoël Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Judith Becqueriaux judith.becqueriaux@denoel.fr Number of Pages: 200

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

Sustained by an elegant and precise writing style, ‘Crossings’ analyses the power of feelings and the toll that they take in a poetic and vivid language that gives rise to some breathtaking seascapes. Biography

Solange Delhomme was born near Paris in 1964. She grew up in Normandy, then returned to Paris to study at the Haute École des Sciences Politiques. She loves Japanese literature, and she enjoys both watercolour painting and surfing. She lives and works in Paris. Crossings is her first novel.

When her grandmother dies, Clara discovers some private notebooks and letters that belonged to her mother, Marie, whom she never knew and who, she believes, ran away shortly after she was born. Reading these lines suddenly shatters silences, secrets and absences that go back many years. Clara discovers a father she no longer recognises, an abandoned mother and a grandmother devastated by an unhappy love affair. She seeks refuge in her wind-beaten seaside house that seems to resonate with her own turmoil.

It is there, perhaps, that she will be able to find the strength slowly to return to life and to love, and to escape her family’s destiny. In this first novel, sustained by a unique narrative construction, the characters cross paths without ever truly finding each other. Across three generations of women for whom love has been an obstacle to experiencing or even accepting their motherhood, there is an issue of transmission. But also the question of choice or fate. To be saved or destroyed.

The narrow, bare room is stifling in spite of the cold, its white walls glistening softly in the night, with a section of starless sky and the sea roaring in the distance. On the bed, her eyes wide open in the dark, Clara lies motionless. Her slender, outstretched body, its frame visible under her skin that is still silky despite the passage of time, shows a tension in its fragility, the strength of the working sketch. Her thoughts are leading her away. She lets herself drift, unable to escape from what has so tormented her for so long, those moments wasted in attempts, endeavours and hope followed by flight. Since everything has failed, she is forgetting herself in the illusion of the past returning to life. In the dark, the sea approaches, swells and rolls against the house, then slides alongside her, lifts her and retreats, pulling her back with it. Clara closes her eyes. Later, her train of thought deposits her in the dreary light of dawn just as the tide leaves a timber on the pebbles. She wakes, her thoughts as scattered as her hair, feeling drained, spun about by a terrible passing whirlwind, impaled by the sensation, a blade, the resurgent of the memory. The thought vanishes again, instantly elusive. It leaves on her the impression of a disaster that has already happened, been buried and then suddenly revealed, so quickly that it can only be imperfectly remembered. Clara recognises the fear but she cannot find its source. What took place is experienced in an instant, its trace rediscovered in her, then lost again. Suffering does not bring anything useful. As day breaks, everything is already beginning over again and as the light begins to cross the edge of the bed, Clara takes a decision.

It’s simple; it won’t take very long. To cease moving, let go completely and slide along the slope already carved out, then simplify further, become a smaller presence, purge and free the skeleton, every fibre tensed. She rests on the bed, in this room, between the walls that will gradually close in and eventually suffocate her. Waiting for her body to understand and adjust, she lets her thoughts permeate her, presenting her with a sequence of images from the past, retracing the journey, searching, growing restless, then struggling, getting tired and finally lost. So perhaps, before madness can overwhelm her completely, something will be born in her. After the storm, calm; after the turbulence, silence and peace. Either the wild creatures will be tamed or they will have devoured her. In the stillness of morning, the sea breeze.

Solange Delhomme

Crossings

I look up at your face. Your serious, solemn face, set at an angle, gazing down at me. Not a smile, not a word. A long gaze. A ponderous truth. I cannot escape it. You move closer, you give me a kiss, a kiss as light as a cloud, a morning kiss, a kiss that says hello. Your lips placed tenderly and cheerfully on mine. It is a caress, it is a dream; it lingers, I cannot forget it. It is a dream. At first there was a scarcely audible hum, then a brief whistling. A few minutes later, no sooner had they cleared their plates from the meal-table than it had started again and continued without stopping. It had become a harsh grating noise that oscillated and intensified from one moment to the next and rolled up between the mast and the shrouds; all the metal parts of the boat had also started to clink and whistle, along with the other boats, and this had been going on for over an hour. The noise signalled an oncoming wind, even more, a storm. Everyone who heard it knew. They felt their napes and backs growing tenser and heavier under the pressure of a worry that mounted as this rose, with the gusts shaking the badly folded sails on the decks and the sea breaking against the sides of the wet boats there. Short, sharp waves were jumping and running amok like lunatics. Dusk was falling, a dark threat hanging over the sea washed white by the turbulent weather. Her father had said there was no reason to be afraid. He laughed and teased her, mimicking the blowing gusts, coming up to whistle into her ear. He had had a bit to drink. The clumsiness that made him bump against the recessed areas of the kitchen, the card table and the steps at the entrance was not only due to the swaying of the boat. When it was time for the weather report, Clara had watched from her berth as he sat down and switched on the radio. She had straightened up to hear the rapid voice better as it issued the forecast. There was no storm warning for them and the depression would pass them by— it would just be a fairly strong gale and a choppy sea. Her father had turned round to her, exclaiming, ‘You see! There’s nothing to worry about; I’ve known it far

worse than this, I assure you!’. Her eyes level with the port-hole, she could see the waves rushing up to her and, on the current that formed her horizon, a few lights from the island that were blinking and seemed to be slowly drowning. There was no place left for them at the port, only this uncertain mooring; there was a risk they would be searching all night long. Pierre had decided to leave. Clara had sunk down into the narrow bunk, curled up in her sleeping bag, huddled and still nothing in her could escape these feelings inside her that came from the world outside: the rolling and pitching of the boat, the waves breaking over the hull a few centimetres away from her, the intensifying vibrations and the racket, as the wind howled and the mast whistled to the biting crackle of the sails, the sheets that scraped and screeched, and the rapid footsteps, a halfstumbling run with sudden stops, slips and her father’s curses on the deck. The narrow berth held her in place but the boat was moving forward with sudden jolts and bumps. The world was nothing but noises. Water everywhere. And then, amid all this din, an unexpected stop, a dull roar. The list had suddenly worsened. Everything unsecured in the cabin tumbled down in a staggering crash. Clara stayed wedged into the berth, clinging to the edge, stifling a cry. The door to the deck fell completely open on Pierre, with a blast of rain and ice-cold air. His face was twisted by the strain, his dark eyes all but disappearing under his brows between the deep furrows, his long hair drenched. He looked like a drowned man. Without a word or a look in her direction, he had sat down heavily, head in his hands, shaken by sobbing. They had remained that way for a long time, he dripping on the steps and she upright in her berth, with the boat leaning at a bizarre angle, absurd, trapped in the violence of the impact and the damp, cold and chaos of the upturned cabin. The boat had hit some shallows; Pierre had been powerless to prevent it. Incapable. No means of escape. They could only wait for help in the hope that the boat would stay afloat. That night, Clara had realised that it was not the storm, nor the raging currents that ran through the sea, nor the rocks that had finally stopped them that had frightened her. It was him—his anger and his panic, and his dangerous weakness that had almost killed them. She was ten years old. Her life with Pierre had begun when her mother had left several years earlier, leaving the two of them talking together in a Paris flat. She was unable to miss what had happened before that—the life shared by all three of them and her parents’ history, perhaps once having been in love— because she had no memory or notion of it. Pierre never mentioned it; there was nothing to be said about it. There was not a single photo or object in the flat; everything had disappeared. As if none of it had ever happened. She only knew that she was called Marie and that there had been a before and an after. In

her dreams, a dark-haired woman would often appear, her back turned, leaning over a table, writing, with some black notebooks piled up around her; she could never get any closer despite her efforts and her outstretched arms. At the end of the dream, a drawer would open in the table, swallowing up the notebooks and the woman. Clara awoke with a strange sensation in her mouth, as if a delicious sweet had been taken from her before she had even had time to taste it, a film on her lips. After their semi-drowning incident, nothing more had been said about boats. The night had felt interminable, with silence reigning in the devastated cabin, as the rain and the gusts continued to howl outside before slowly beginning to subside. They had not moved, nor slept, physically and mentally numbed, clinging on as best they could in the sloping boat. There had been no words uttered, nor any comforting gesture, as each lay alone at either end of the cabin. He had offered no explanations, and she had asked no questions. The lifeboat had found them and brought them back to land the following morning. Their boat had proved extremely difficult to tow. It was damaged and Pierre had got rid of it. Afterwards, he had never spoken of it again, ashamed of what had happened and his own carelessness and weakness. They had returned to Paris, each with some bruises, he with some cuts on his hands, and a new discord between them.

Solange Delhomme

Crossings

Day by day, her father cast a slightly longer shadow over her. After that night in the boat, when she had realised that it was his own panic that had taken them on to the reef, she had kept her distance from him. Silence had engulfed them even more. They had continued to be gripped by fear; he in his powerless rage, she in her forlorn disappointment. Life had resumed its journeying between the Paris flat and the cold, weather-beaten seaside house. This was Pierreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s childhood house in a village that stretched along the coast. The low, grey houses faced on to the large beach, the steely horizon, the islands and foreign lands. This was where he had learnt all there was to know about the sea, fishing, boats, the winds and the tides. He had left it all behind in order to come to study in Paris. He had stayed there. His parents had long since died; the house was only inhabited at weekends and during holidays. They came there whenever they could; they did not sleep well there.

Émilie Frèche

Two Strangers

Publisher: Actes Sud Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Claire Teeuwissen c.teeuwissen@actes-sud.fr Number of Pages: 224

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

The portrait of a family trapped in their own private torment that has been left unspoken and unresolved for too long, ‘Two Strangers’ is a novel about a separation and an impossible but essential reunion. A journey across time with its own inexorable momentum, full of evasive elliptical detail, and of memories and emotions illuminated with acerbic humour, total lucidity and an indefatigable longing for justice. Biography

Émilie Frèche joined Actes Sud in 2010. Her first novels were published by Ramsay and then Anne Carrière. She has written two non-fiction works about the death of Ilan Halimi: La Mort d’un pote (Panama, 2006) and 24 jours: la vérité sur la mort d’Ilan Halimi, co-written with Ruth Halimi (Seuil, 2009). She has also written two books for children: Un jour qui n’existe pas (Actes Sud Junior, 2012) and Un petit garcon tout lisse (Actes Sud Junior, 2013), as well as a novella, Les Collectionneurs, published by Éditions du Moteur (a company she herself set up in 2010) and currently being adapted for the big screen by Récifilms. Her last two novels have also both been adapted for film and are currently in production. Two strangers is her sixth novel. Publications Her recent novels include: Chouquette, Actes Sud 2010 (J’ai lu edition 2013); Le Film de Jacky Cukier, Anne Carrière, 2006 (new edition in the “Babel” collection, Actes Sud, 2013): and Le Sourire de l’ange, Ramsay 2004.

Élise has not seen her father for seven years. He lives in Morocco, barely knows Élise’s husband and doesn’t know her children at all, while she knows nothing of his life. Father and daughter have fallen out so many times, hurting each other and inflicting petty humiliations on each other, that in the end they no longer even speak the same language: they have become two strangers.

And yet when Élise receives an improbable telephone call from her father, summoning her to see him, she obeys the domestic tyrant’s orders as if responding to an age-old reflex, even though her own household is falling apart. She takes her ancient Renault 5—her only legacy from her beloved mother—and heads for Marrakech.

My father frequently compared himself to François Mitterand. Not that he particularly admired this left-wing figure, but he had an absolute fascination for power, and the Head of State was its supreme incarnation. So, like him, he wore a red scarf, collected mistresses, had his own napkin ring at Chez Lulu, red Machiavelli’s The Prince and had a Labrador called Adriatic, identical in every way to Baltic, the President’s famous dog. It was only with this animal that my father was ever truly kind. And reliably even tempered. He loved that dog, venerated her. Every evening he went through the routine that a trainer had taught him: lie doooooown, staaaaand up, your paaaaaaw, give me your paw, come on, give me your paw, give daddy your paw, who’s daddy’s favourite girly girl? The dog would then put her paw in my father’s hand, she would roll over and then sit up on her rear end like a circus animal, and this earned her the right to lick her master’s face with her slimy wet tongue, it was the ultimate reward. For a long time I viewed my father’s neurotic relationship with this animal as tangible proof that he was mad. But as I grew up I realised most dog owners behaved like him. These people could insult their wives, mistreat their children and be pigs to their friends, but they were always absolutely lovely to their dogs. Because dogs have the unique trait of being both servile and loving. You just have to know how to train them. If they’re well trained, dogs obey unquestioningly. They accept teasing, privation and contempt. Some children do too, but when children grow up they then resent you and walk out—not dogs. Dogs

stay. To the very end. Because dogs don’t do resentment. Because they know no shame. You can insult them and five minutes later there they are again, huddled against your leg, licking your hands … It’s a buzz, isn’t it? When you have a dog it’s impossible not to abuse that power. It would take too much effort. Too much humanity. Ever since I grasped this fact, I’ve always been wary of people who have dogs. I mean, for instance, there’s no way I could have a relationship with a man who had a poodle, or even a tiny little chihuahua. No, I just couldn’t. Simon, on the other hand, had a cat when we met. A little grey cat who was quite shy, he was called Woody. This particular cat hated being stroked, never listened to a thing you said and could vanish for days on end with no sign of life. He was afraid of everything. Very nervous, neurotic even, and spectacularly selfish. There wasn’t actually any point in that cat at all, but Simon loved it. Yes, Simon loved that stupid bloody cat and didn’t ask for anything in return— that’s how all of us should love, and I think deep down this was something else I found attractive about him. If he’d loved a dog instead of that cat, things would have been different; if he’d loved a dog I’m sure we wouldn’t have had children together. * Tom and Leo are nine and seven. The big one has no memories of his grandfather, the little one’s never even met him. When my father called three days ago, Tom used the word somebody to describe him. He said Mum, there’s somebody on the phone for you, and I didn’t imagine for one moment that it would be my father. I often think about him, though. Lots of images conjure memories of him for me, lots of smells too, and situations, but until that call, I always thought of him as you would someone who’d died, in the past tense. I couldn’t persuade myself that he was still there, that he was trundling on in his own way somewhere in the world, that he was still eating, sleeping, loving and breathing even though we never saw each other. Perhaps it was my way of not completely hating him, because we don’t hate the dead, we just forget them. So my father’s back. He’s been resuscitated in a way, and he only had to say one word, just one, for me to recognise him. His voice had exactly the same weight of authority as it used to, the same icy, intransigent tone which made my brother and me call him Adolf, Tito, Pol Pot or Benito. I felt like hanging up on the spot. Saying he’d got the wrong number. My mother’s no longer with us and my brother’s always on the other side of the world climbing some mountain so, all on my own there, I didn’t feel I had the strength to face up to him. Why was he calling me after seven years’ silence? To say what? What did he want from me? What had

I done now? I didn’t get around to asking. I let him talk, it was very brief. “Élise,” he said, “I need to see you, I’m in Marrakech, I’ll expect you before the end of the month.” And he hung up. I rushed through the boys’ bath, supper and bedtime story that evening, then hopped straight into a taxi and broke the promise I’d made to my husband to leave him alone. I knew it was a mistake. He could use it against me later, but there was no way I could keep news like this to myself: my father had just called me after seven years without making contact, he wanted to see me, he was expecting me at his house in Marrakech before the end of the month, it was momentous news, unfathomable even, it was completely unbelievable news given who we were dealing with and the relationship I had with him, I really had to offload it onto someone the way characters in cartoons hand on a piece of dynamite, quick, quick, before it blows up in your hands, and Simon was the only person who would understand the scope of news like this. I’d lived with Simon for twelve years, he’d given me two children, he knew just how much of an issue my father was in my life. And now I needed his advice, his support. I needed him to hold me in his arms and tell me exactly what to do. I gave the driver the name of his hotel and we headed along the banks of the Seine towards Place de la Concorde. It was only then that I realised it was bang on a month since we’d seen each other.

Émilie Frèche

Two Strangers

Simon had chosen a guesthouse behind the Gare de l’Est station. A really shabby little guesthouse for people in transit, and I wondered why he’d made this choice, he could have afforded better, he had the money, or he could have gone to his mother’s apartment, she wouldn’t be back from Cannes until midApril. But maybe he wanted a complete change of scene? Maybe, like the other customers there, he liked to think he would buy a one-way ticket to Prague or Budapest and never come back. The thought almost made me lose my footing as I stepped out of the taxi. I ran the short distance to the hotel and stopped briefly outside the door. Even though it was dark, I could see through the glass and make out the receptionist behind his desk, a bald little man with an inscrutable face, and behind him the pigeon holes with keys dangling in them, it really looked like the sort of place you booked by the hour. I asked which room Simon was in, then said I was going up. The man got to his feet and reached his arm out to me: Wait. I stopped in my tracks and we stayed like that for a few seconds, frozen, slightly idiotic. In the end the man picked up his phone and while he waited for a reply he asked me in a whisper for my name. I lied. Although we’re not actually married, I gave Simon’s name, thinking that being his wife would give me more weight, but I immediately regretted this when the receptionist led me to understand that Simon didn’t want me to go up—it was even more humiliating than if I’d said I was a total stranger.

“Are you sure?” I persisted stupidly. “Can’t I go up, really?” “No,” said the receptionist. “He’ll come down. He asked for you to wait for him in the café over the road.” I ordered a beer and, as Simon still hadn’t shown up, had another one. The room full of tables was almost empty, there was just a couple at a little table in the window, they were rather like an atoll lost in the middle of the ocean, but the bar was a mass of people, immigrants clustering round to watch the television. It was a bulky old set hanging from the ceiling, like in a hospital room, and it was showing images of what had come to be known as the Arab spring. A few months earlier a street pedlar in Tunisia had set himself alight outside the government buildings, triggering a revolt that toppled the regime and took down those in Egypt, Libya and the Yemen in its wake. Morocco was not affected. Not yet, I thought. I succumbed to the magnetic draw of those emotive images in which crowds of people marched as one, forming such a compact tide that you instantly felt you were suffocating. The men at the bar made comments in Arabic. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but they seemed to be delighted with this great wave of freedom, and I wished I could celebrate with them. I’d travelled a lot in that part of the world, had written guides and travelogues on most Middle Eastern countries; I knew how important these revolutions were, how necessary whatever the outcome, but my head was so full of my father’s request I felt like an outsider to the rest of the world.

Christian Garcin

Vladivostok Nights

Publisher: Stock Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Fabienne Roussel froussel@editions-stock.fr Number of Pages: 368

Translation: Sue Rose suerosepoet@googlemail.com

This richly sensual book, beset by invisible forces, is a particularly fine example of Christian Garcin’s ability to weave together interconnecting storylines, characters and places in his novels. This compelling fictional universe draws widely on the writer’s extensive travel experiences to provide an X-ray of contemporary China and Russia. Biography

Christian Garcin was born in Marseille in 1959. His first book, Vidas, was published by Gallimard in 1993, and he has since written many novels, short stories, and essays, as well as poetry, children’s books (for L’École des Loisirs) and travel literature (published by L’Escampette). In 2010, he accompanied the writer Éric Faye to Yakutia, where they travelled down the Lena River to its mouth in the Arctic Ocean. Their account of this journey, En descendant les fleuves—Carnets de l’Extrême-Orient russe, was published by Stock in 2011. In the summer of 2012, as part of the France-Russia cross-cultural exchange year, Garcin joined a group of French writers travelling along the Yenisei River in central Siberia to the closed city of Norilsk. In 2012, he was awarded the prix Roger-Caillois for his entire oeuvre. Publications Christian Garcin’s most recent novels include Des femmes disparaissent, Verdier, 2011; La Piste mongole, Verdier, 2009; La Jubilation des hasards, Gallimard, 2005.

Frenchman Thomas Rawicz, whose only crime is a rather scatter-brained approach to life, is being held prisoner in a dingy room, sitting opposite a Chinaman convinced that he has finally tracked down Tomas Krawczyk, a gangster involved in prostitution and child trafficking whom he has been chasing for weeks. The Chinaman, ‘Zuo Luo’, is a private detective who has forged a reputation for saving battered women, assisted by Wanglin, the brains behind this unlikely partnership. Once the case of mistaken identity has been resolved, Thomas is released. Interested to learn what brought these two allies together, he joins them, postponing his departure for Irkutsk, where

he was supposed to meet Marie, his FrancoRussian girlfriend. What connection can there be between a Korean prostitute, a professional movie extra with a long career in Hong Kong Kung-Fu films, two soldiers killed in the Sino-Soviet war of 1969, a strange bright-eyed Siberian woman and a Latino gang leader? What happens when personal histories become entangled with world history? From Vladivostok to the shamanistic Olkhon Island on Lake Baikal, via the subways of New York, what started out as a straightforward manhunt will end up having unexpected consequences …

1 I’m the one asking the questions Thomas folded the newspaper with his free hand and placed it back on the small table between him and the Chinaman, prominently displaying the article he’d just glanced at without reading, and the somewhat blurred photo printed next to it. He jutted his chin at the photo. ‘That ‘Zorro’ is you, isn’t it?’ he asked, with a grimace. His other hand, the one tied to the cast-iron radiator, was hurting. ‘Shut your mouth, Krawczyk,’ said the Chinaman. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that my name isn’t Krawczyk. It’s Rawicz. Thomas Rawicz. You took my passport, so you should know.’ The Chinaman drew deeply on his cigarette then slowly exhaled the smoke through his nostrils. ‘Shut your mouth, Krawczyk.’ Then, with his eyes fixed on his trainers, the Chinaman murmured, shaking his head. ‘Your passport … Do you take me for a fool?’ Thomas sighed. ‘Is your name really Zorro?’ he asked again. ‘It’s a nickname,’ replied Zorro through a fresh cloud of smoke. ‘In Chinese, it’s pronounced “Zuo Luo”’. ‘And you don’t mind? I mean, don’t you think it sounds a bit stupid?’ Zuo Luo inhaled deeply, blew the cigarette smoke into Thomas’s somewhat

bruised face, then turned his head towards the small round window. Every so often, there was a nauseating whiff of diesel. Darkness fell slowly like a thick, damp quilt. They could hear voices, the din of birds and a few cars, which sounded farther away, their engines muted. Probably a park, thought Thomas. Perhaps the small scruffy park below the avenue that ran alongside the port, between the boulevard with its busy traffic and the cranes. I think I saw what looked like an abandoned shed there yesterday. He coughed and asked for a sip of water. ‘Yeah, and then what?’ said Zuo Luo. ‘Just a sip,’ repeated Thomas. ‘Anyway, you’re hardly going to keep me tied to this radiator for months, are you? At some point, you’re going to realize you’ve got the wrong man. Then you’ll be sorry.’ Zuo Luo just sat there, gazing at his trainers. ‘What’s your real name?’ asked Thomas. ‘What’s it to you?’ replied Zuo Luo. ‘Planning to take me to court, are you? Fat chance.’ ‘Not necessarily. But I do like your nickname. A while ago, I read a book about a bloke with the same name. Or, at least, his nickname was Zorro or Zuo Luo. He was Chinese too. Odd, isn’t it?’ Zuo Luo drew on his cigarette. ‘A book,’ he repeated. ‘Yes.’ ‘A book about me.’ ‘That I don’t know. A book about someone called Zuo Luo, anyway. A story about a private detective who helped young women who had been sold by their families. His real name was Tchou Weng Wang.’ Zuo Luo leant towards Thomas. ‘What did you say?’ ‘Tchou Weng Wang. At least, I think that was his name. It was spelt Z-h-u, I read it as Zu or Zou, but someone told me it was pronounced Tchou. Or Djouw. That said, he didn’t look much like you. He was much fatter.’ ‘Why, were there photos?’ Thomas sniggered. ‘Not fatter, but definitely heavier. You do know that there are such things as portraits, or descriptions, in novels, don’t you?’ The irony seemed lost on Zuo Luo. ‘Tchou Weng Wang, you said?’ ‘Something like that. Chinese isn’t really my thing. Why, is that your name?’ ‘It’s close,’ said Zuo Luo. ‘Badly pronounced. It’s also my nickname and my job. That adds up to quite a bit.’ ‘But he wasn’t your build. He was much bulkier, I’m telling you. Fat cheeks, a real sumo wrestler type.’

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Vladivostok Nights

‘Hmm. What was the book about?’ ‘Stories, I guess. Zorro in Canton, Zorro in New York, Zorro in Japan, Zorro’s childhood, Zorro growing up, Zorro in love, that kind of thing. A friend of his was also in it, as I remember, an informer called Duck Face. As well as loads of women.’ Zuo Luo took a deep drag, then threw his cigarette butt on the floor and crushed it out with his heel. ‘Duck Face. That’s ridiculous,’ he murmured, blowing a thick pale grey cloud into the air. ‘No more ridiculous than Zorro,’ said Thomas. ‘Who wrote it?’ ‘Do you think I remember that?’ said Thomas. ‘Why don’t you just give me a sip of water. When your friend gets here, he’ll realise I’m not the man you think I am, and you’ll be in deep shit for treating me so badly.’ Zuo Luo sighed, stood up, filled a glass of water from the tap, and offered it to Thomas, who gulped it down in one. Through the small, open window, they could hear occasional snatches of conversation in Russian, floating above the more distant noise of the cars. ‘That’s rubbish,’ said Zuo Luo. ‘I’ve never set foot in New York. Or Japan.’ ‘I never said it was you,’ said Thomas wiping his lips with his free hand. ‘It’s only a novel, after all. Wouldn’t you like to untie me?’ ‘What? No. No way,’ murmured Zuo Luo, absent-mindedly. ‘Tell me, was the book written by someone Chinese? Or was he French like you?’ Thomas sighed. ‘Listen, I don’t remember. I think it was attributed to a Frenchman but written by a Chinaman. Or the other way round. Understand?’ ‘No.’ ‘Fine. Either that, or I don’t remember. Anyway, I don’t give a damn. When will your friend get here?’ ‘He won’t be long now,’ said Zuo Luo. There was a silence. Darkness had fallen. The strange darkness of an electrical night. The birds were quiet now. All they could hear was the odd fragment of Russian conversation and the rumble of lorries in the background. And there was still the smell of diesel fumes. Even though it was night time, the heat was sticky and uncomfortable. ‘If you’re not the man we’re looking for, what the fuck are you doing in Vladivostok?’ asked Zuo Luo. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I’m the one asking the questions, remember,’ said Zuo Luo.

2 The Day Before In fact, I’d ended up in Vladivostok by mistake. The day before, I’d been in Belogorsk. I’d gone there to meet Yuri Berdaiev, head of Galiana Editions, to make an offer for the rights to the latest books by three of the authors with that publishing house, which had been kind enough to give me the odd paid assignment from time to time: a novel by Igor Phren, one by Eugenio Tramonti and a posthumous story by Norwich Restinghale, with an introduction and commentary by George Traunberg. We’d agreed terms for two of them (Tramonti and Restinghale), and I stayed for two days, one spent walking in a beautiful forest with Yuri and his wife some thirty miles out of town, along the Chinese border, a magnificent, fertile region where tigers had been seen, although we didn’t spot any. We then spent the evening drinking. My train for Irkutsk was due to leave during the night. After that, I simply went to the wrong platform. I blame those stupid, bureaucratic, centralized Russian train timetables, though the booze might have had something to do with it. I was supposed to take the 3.37 a.m. TransSiberian train to Irkutsk where I was meant to be meeting Marie, who’d arrived in Moscow the day before, but I got on the train going in the opposite direction, to Vladivostok, where no one was waiting for me. I’d forgotten that the timetables for all Trans-Siberian trains are based on Moscow time, not that of the cities they pass through. So, although the Belogorsk-Irkutsk train did leave at 3.37 a.m., it was 3.37 a.m. Moscow time—in other words, the one leaving at 9.37 a.m. from Belogorsk. I’d showed up at the station six hours too early, in the middle of the night around 3.00 a.m., suitably sozzled from all the vodka I’d been drinking to keep me going which, incidentally, had been a very bad idea. When I couldn’t see any train indicated at 3.37 a.m., I’d remembered this business with the timetables and muttered a mouthful of abuse at the perverse inventor of such a bloody stupid system. Helped by the booze (or rather not helped by it), I’d proved completely incapable of coming up with a mathematical calculation to subtract—or was it add?—six hours—or was it five or seven?—I couldn’t for the life of me remember—from or to the train times, and had therefore simply tried to find a train leaving at 37 minutes past the hour, any hour, and I’d found one—a nice old Trans-Siberian train. That had to be the one, the train indicator said 9.37 p.m. Moscow time, yes, that had to be the right train, I’d told myself, there must be six hours’ time difference. I’d added six hours to 9.00 p.m. in my head and ended up with 3.00 a.m., but of course I was doing it the wrong way round, because I should have been adding six hours to that bloody stupid 3.37 a.m. Not only that, but I’d done it all, in my fuddled state, without realising that the indicated direction was Vladivostok, not Moscow via Irkutsk. I’d headed over to the freezing-cold,

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Vladivostok Nights

deserted platform, had climbed into the carriage, where, unaccountably, no one checked my ticket—usually a carriage attendant, the provodnitsa, inspects your ticket, but perhaps he’d gone off for a pee or had overslept, who knows. By another stroke of bad luck, my seat (upper bunk on the left as you entered the carriage) was unoccupied. I stretched out and, without even taking off my shoes, fell into a fitful asleep, continually interrupted by noises, lights when the train passed through a station without stopping, and both when the train stopped, plus a bad headache due to the amount I’d drunk. And, even stranger, the provodnitsa didn’t show his face for the entire journey. I didn’t realize my mistake until I’d fully woken up, about five hours later, seeing towns I hadn’t noticed on the way out flash past. In the meantime, a small plump woman had taken the lower bunk, and an old man the one opposite. I greeted them with a silent smile. There were another fifteen hours to go before we arrived in Vladivostok. I had nothing to do there but, after all, what did I have to lose? I prayed no ticket inspector would show up and make me get off the train in the middle of nowhere, in some gloomy town surrounded by impenetrable forests, disused factories or former gulags.

Yanick Lahens

Guillaume and Nathalie

Publisher: Sabine Wespieser Date of Publication: April 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Joschi Guitton jguitton@swediteur.com Number of Pages: 176

Translation: Trista Selous trista.selous@btinternet.com

A man and a younger woman meet in contemporary Port-au-Prince, the violent, poverty-stricken, fearsomely beautiful Haitian capital. Their passion is at once carnal and intellectual, touched by the shadow of a past trauma. In choosing to write this novel almost three years after the earthquake, Yanick Lahens provides a stunning celebration of the victory of life and writing over catastrophe. Biography

Yanick Lahens lives in Haiti. Her novels, short stories and essays, notably Failles (Sabine Wespieser éditeur, 2010), portray her island as it is, lucidly and without indulgence. Her independence of mind and the authority she has acquired through community activism give her a unique position on the Haitian literary scene. Publications From Sabine Wespieser: Bain de lune (forthcoming 2014); La Couleur de l’aube, 2008 (rfo prize 2009).

Guillaume is a sociologist, Nathalie an architect. They meet at the office of the French agency funding the construction of a community centre on which both are working. Guillaume, now 50, his utopian ideals long abandoned, has spent his whole life in Haiti, Nathalie has just returned, having left suddenly at the age of 18. From initial exasperation their mutual attraction turns into a dance of seduction as each gives way to a passion that will not be denied. Yanick Lahens is a fine storyteller who does not shy away from using the codes of the erotic novel to captivate her readers, writing of the impatience of desire and the unthinking

sensuality it arouses. But she also looks beyond the particular situation of her characters and, as she plunges Guillaume and Nathalie into their affair, never forgets where they come from, still less where they are now. But, while the narrative acknowledges the poverty endemic to the Haiti in which it unfolds, and which its two black middle class protagonists are keen to hold at bay, there is nothing miserabilist in the writing. Nor does it dwell on disaster, beyond an unspecified sense of menace hanging over Haiti in December 2009.

A couple pass through the door of an apartment block in Pacot, up on the hill overlooking Port-au-Prince, in the fiery glow of dusk. The sunset wraps the city in glittering colour, masking its shuddering tumult, the miraculous, searing passage of the centuries. At this hour you can watch the silence rise, dampening the great racket of days tossed this way and that. A silence that hangs like a veil between sky and earth. The silence of rooms locked to contain the agitated monologues of the flesh. Turmoil, trembling, fever. Guillaume has taken no special care over his appearance. He has never seen the need for such attention to the surface of things. And, turning fifty now, he’s not about to change. He doesn’t need to change. He’s already proved himself, at work and with women. From her figure it’s clear that Nathalie, meanwhile, is around thirty-three, thirty-four. No more than that. And her thirties suit her. Her lace-up walking shoes, jeans and tee-shirt reveal that she’s a practical woman. Guillaume is a good fifteen years older. In other words, he has left the first half of his life behind, whereas she, Nathalie, is in her prime. Something in the way they move towards the door of the apartment block reveals that they aren’t yet lovers, but soon will be. The imminence of this seems inevitable. As they enter the narrow street the space between them reduces. Eventually they touch. At shoulder height. Every now and then their upper arms brush against each other. Just. Their forearms too. Guillaume knows what he’s doing and Nathalie lets it happen. She feels immense pleasure at these lightest of touches that are almost nothing at all. This warm unspoken wanting. Of course

Guillaume knows this and finds it delicious. A few metres from the door he stands back a little and secretly observes her. Just now Nathalie and Guillaume are in the soft, sweet, enchanted uncertainty of beginnings. And there is nothing more enchanting than this uncertainty, these beginnings. Nothing. Of all the images it is these they will recall. Afterwards. Long afterwards, when all has been said and done. As she steps in front of Guillaume and stops at the door to the apartment block, Nathalie avoids looking at her image reflected in the big bay window, so she won’t have to see how fear has discomposed her features. She closes her eyes, just for an instant. Fear could plunge her into that great wild place, left behind, way down inside, and which still terrifies her. So she takes a deep breath. Just to gather her scattered fragments. Find a place for her fear. So it can sleep peacefully. Deep down. Nathalie wants to stay on her feet. On her feet in her desire for Guillaume. Guillaume follows Nathalie. He is tense, submerged in an almost unbearable male impatience. And yet he has put on the same show for so many women, without total conviction, rounding off his performance with the routine gymnastics of an ardour that holds no surprises. So many … Rifling through his memory, all vanity aside, the hastily calculated total seems considerable. He had thought that thus far he’d solved the problem of his manly appetites in a satisfactory manner. And yet here, in this twilight, his belly aches with a forgotten hunger. Aches with something that wants to seem like faith. Inside him there grows an inexplicable foreboding that he won’t be able to make this woman’s breast rise and fall with pleasure like a huge wave. That he won’t hear the babble of the angels from her lips. Nathalie can’t find her key and eventually sits down on the low wall to the right of the door. After three fruitless attempts she empties her bag of its contents with a gesture of powerlessness. Guillaume knows all about women’s bags and laughs out loud when Nathalie curses, then finally finds the wretched key. He squats down beside her, plants a kiss on her forehead and helps her put everything back into the bag. He pretends to wait with serene patience, as you wait for a child that insists on doing everything itself. The security guard sitting by the door with a rifle between his legs watches the whole business from behind his dark glasses, with the expression of a man who has seen it all before. But he’s enjoying the scene; he’s a male rejoicing at what he sees as the conquest of another man on whom luck has smiled. A brotherly voyeur. Before stepping inside the building, Guillaume glances, not at the big bay window, but at Port-au-Prince below. One last time. Port-au-Prince which,

Yanick Lahens

Guillaume and Nathalie

he could almost swear, has drawn back with its open sores, its naked strength and swagger, so as not to poison their first embrace. Port-au-Prince: a mirage in the dusk.

2 Guillaume pushes open the apartment door, swings Nathalie round and holds her close. He has hardly opened his mouth before Nathalie puts her fingers to his lips and murmurs in a light whisper, deliberately extended, “Sssshhh”. He mustn’t speak. Not yet. Not so soon. She wants to clear the decks. Make space. Guillaume closes his lips around the finger that has silenced him and bites it gently, very gently, before taking Nathalie’s face in his hands. Lips appear inside Nathalie’s closed eyelids. Thin lips. Almost like the lips of people from cold countries. But these are deep purple, the colour of star apples. Fierce, furious lips. Fierce too are the eyes the colour of acacia honey in the stubbly face before her. Guillaume kisses her with parted lips. Warm. Fleshy. His eyes are dark and soft. Coffee skin. Huge mouth. Probing tongue. Seeking. Probing. Nathalie falls back in his arms. Offers him the mouth of a woman who just wants to know, even if it’s bitterness and cruelty. She puts her hand on the back of his neck, holds him close against her and is still. Nathalie wants to find in this stillness the strength to go further. Guillaume caresses her lips and speaks to her softly. Very softly. The pleasure flows from his fingers to his belly. From his belly to the taut impatience between his legs. Nathalie can’t hear him. She’s stopped hearing him. Guillaume’s hands leave her face and move slowly downwards. They slip inside her tee-shirt, then under her bra. Her nipples rise, hard, between his fingers. Nathalie is already ready to die with pleasure. Here and now. Eyes half shut. But she looks at him from the depths of a mystery that he can’t enter. Not yet, not so fast. Guillaume pulls her tee-shirt up and over her shoulders, then immediately proceeds to free her from her jeans, undoing them with a contained fever. He slips his hand inside the white lace of her pants, takes them off and lays them on the floor. He could make love to her right now, get it over with. He knows what to do. He’s done it before. But just now Guillaume wants this woman and none other. He wants the game. As her joy mounts, Nathalie’s ever vigilant attention to the chaos inside her softens. A little. Slowly. Just as, for Guillaume, the outside world, the great hurly burly of the city below them, starts to fade. Nathalie wants the game too. But the game has slipped away from her.

She has to get it back. Quickly. Cling to it so she can be as close as possible to Guillaume. To Guillaume’s desire. So she stands up straight. Turns round. Pulls Guillaume towards her again and starts to undressing the man who is going to make love to her and to whom she is going to make love. Every now and then she looks him in the eye, as she likes to do. “Fierce” would be the right word to describe this far-sighted look. Piercing its target like a dagger. The look that is often her last form of protection. Nathalie clings to it with all her strength. With her full attention. Ready for disappointment. And then Nathalie dares. She touches the softness of his sex. In his turn Guillaume moans. And moans again, she closes her eyes. So does he. Too gentle, too hard, his moans tell her. Much too hard. And then, again, she looks at him. Another kiss seeking an adjournment. A reprieve. This reprieve is another name for the restraint of women. Agreed on by whom? For what? In her head the answers lose their shape. She stops looking for them. Nathalie thinks of the miraculous image of the Virgin with sad eyes that her mother hung above her bed, ribbons of every colour in her childish plaits, daybreak smell of coffee, taste of akasan with syrup, hard August rain on her skin. Between Nathalie’s knees Guillaume raises his torso, fists planted on the sheets, face distorted with desire. Then Guillaume moves. He moves with, deep in his belly, the male fear that he’ll be unable to raise the swell in this woman’s body. But he moves. And when Guillaume enters Nathalie’s wet warmth, it’s as a doubting conqueror. Nathalie meets him with a slight retraction. He speaks very softly to her. Trying to find the best, most gentle pulse. But doubting all the same. Even in the most honeyed words. Even in the last violent thrust into the slit. Guillaume sees nothing of Nathalie’s strangely staring eyes, just as she hears nothing but the silent sound of blood in her temples. She tries to jump overboard, to dissolve in her vast inner sea the hard, dense core that won’t let go of her. But she can’t reach it, the core slips away, breaks and scatters into the chaotic squall at the end of things. Guillaume sees nothing of Nathalie’s open eyes, open despite her to the colours of the sunset. To Port-au-Prince below them, however distant, with its open wounds, its naked force and its swagger in the first flight of these two bodies beneath its reddening sky. To the chaotic sea of its rooftops. Guillaume collapses without seeing. Men don’t see. Not those things. At least not at once. Guillaume flops into the dampness of Nathalie’s sex, his right arm around her body. Nathalie, meanwhile, looks for the first time at the softness of his chest and back, slightly lighter than his face and arms. The lazy undulations of his muscles. A mature man’s body. Still standing, but in defeat. The little everyday defeats reminiscent of the big defeat, far bigger than him. Bigger than everyone, all the men and women on the island. An unfathomable land of a body, rediscovered after so many paths wandered. A land to be reinvented.

Yanick Lahens

Guillaume and Nathalie

Arthur Larrue

Going to War

Publisher: Allia Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Marjorie Ribant allia@editions-allia.com Number of Pages: 128

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

A florid and oneiric style that sketches protagonists worthy of the best ‘polars’ in a narrative both poetic and savage. A stunning plunge into contemporary Russia in the company of the anarchists of the Voïna group, peers of Pussy Riot. When art morphs into politics. A highly topical novel, both brilliant and funny. Biography

Born in 1984, Arthur Larrue has chosen St Petersburg to teach French literature as well as search for adversity. Going to war is his first novel.

While some couples grapple with difficulties in their relationship, others choose to risk their lives by shaking up the politics of the State. But what happens when those people run into each other by sheer chance? The narrator goes to squat at a friend’s apartment, whose keys he has been given, only to find others have already taken up that right. There he meets real squatters, two men, a woman and a child, members of the Voïna group*. Sharing a night with these colourful characters, the narrator evokes with extreme subtlety his few hours spent with the most radical branch of contemporary art. He breaks in through the back door, zooms in with the vigour of a telephoto lens: from the hairs of a beard stranded in the kitchen sink to the pixellized squirrel decorating the little boy’s tee-shirt. Arthur Larrue uses the actions of that group as

a pretext to write a kind of thriller both funny and breathtaking, a night rich in twists and turns and shady characters, from the deranged neighbour to the inspector in charge of the “War” dossier. *Voïna (‘War’ in Russian). As fiendish as Pussy Riot (whose member, NadejaTolokonnikova, took part in Voïna) and no less blasphemous vis-à-vis the repressive politics of the State— they painted a giant phallus on the bridge facing the KGB offices in St Petersburg, organised an orgy in one of the rooms of the National Museum of Biology in Moscow and hung immigrant workers, Jewish people and gays in a supermarket—this anarchist group of artists has been waging, since 2007, a merciless war against a fascistic, xeno— and homo-phobic State.

1 ‘It doesn’t matter at all …’ Esther was standing naked in the middle of the room. She had shouted other things before that; she was trembling with rage. I didn’t respond. I was staring at details of her doll-like body, until I saw her as simply an empty husk. The fold of flesh beneath her breasts, the crack of her smooth and plump sex. I imagined throwing myself on her and ripping out her heart. That heart would have the dimensions and colour of a boiled beetroot, I thought. A beetroot that would bleed abundantly and would stain my nails purple. With that image in mind, what she was saying was no longer of any importance. She went to sit on the edge of the bath to apply red varnish to her toenails. I remained motionless, I stopped thinking about anything, I forgot the boiled beetroot. Then we went to bed, her body glued against mine, she repeated the same thing, and once again I failed to respond. ‘It doesn’t matter at all, does it?’ Opposite the bed, I could see the night through the window. St Petersburg’s lights were wavering because of the rain. It was dark and blurred. The city seemed to transform into mist, the buildings to be drowned in miasmas. A morbid attraction made me restless. I felt like dissolving and being diluted within, like an alcoholic dissolves and is diluted into drinks to see what will be left of him after the liquefaction of his organism. To see what solid remains of

oneself after having drowned in the night. That was it. She spoke for a last time but I no longer cared, I was staring at the darkness and the murky lights. ‘Tell me please, tell me it doesn’t matter …’ She fell asleep and I parted from her. Her warm buttocks had been against my back. The wet cold fell on me as soon as I stood up. I left the light off. My eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. She was sleeping in a zigzag position, her right hand slid beneath the pillow and her mouth half-opened. The moon fell on the sheets, making them shine. All was very quiet and muted. I had that bed waiting for me on the other side of town. My friend TamrikoBamriko had left it for me. TamrikoBamriko was a Georgian duchess, the daughter of a boxer and herself a violinist in a Jewish orchestra. Alexandre Dumas had calculated that there were as many aristocrats in Georgia as there were men on horses, but that didn’t take anything away from the nobility of TamrikoBamriko. Her apartment was situated in a neo-Gothic red brick building, with pushchairs in the stairwell and houseplants weeping from the windows. I had already been in that apartment the year before for a dinner TamrikoBamriko had cooked, coriander thrown in everything. I was going back tonight in a taxi caught in front of Esther’s door. The journey cost me two hundred and fifty roubles. ‘You can go there whenever you want, it’s big and empty …’ The street smelt of benzene and fried food. The sky was lead grey and swallowed the rusty roofs like some kind of huge toad whose flabby skin would distend into improbable proportions. I was incapable of getting away from Esther’s image. Everything I saw reminded me of her and represented a part of her body or the tone of her voice. That distortion weighed down at the back of my head, like some form of abscess. I could see her in the clouds and hear her laughter in the hooting horns. The fraction of the car window I had opened channelled the cold onto my neck. It stank of tobacco, I needed fresh air. The driver was chain-smoking, he didn’t throw out his dog-ends but piled them in an ashtray, never to be emptied. That scraggy man, with deep wrinkles and sunken eyes, cast sidelong glances at me. I probably puzzled him, with my melancholic way of sticking my forehead to the window and blowing little wavelets in the condensation. We were driving through Lomonossov Street, a green net hanging down to retain a collapsing front wall. Big blue screens had been erected in front of the pink arcades to signal the site was to be renovated, but the site and the screens must have been forgotten for rust and corrosion were eating away at them. One must live, I told myself, not become trapped. The main thing is to leave her, sharp. The radio was playing a meaningless pop tune, the gear lever was decorated with a chrysanthemum frozen in a Plexiglas cylinder, the Kazan Virgin’s oval head was taped to the dashboard. I stared at her, and she stared back. I had

thrown three jumpers in a big yellow canvas bag. Those idiots retained the stubborn shadow of Esther in their stitches; she had the habit of putting them on to slouch around. I used to lick her skin to rouse its scent, it drove me crazy and I spent hours smelling her like an insect in love with a flower. I caressed her belly through a moth hole, she emitted little sharp cries that she shut off with her teeth. I hated her. ‘Are the bridges raised?’ ‘We’ll soon know.’ ‘I must get to Mir Street, I’m staying there …’ ‘At this hour sometimes they are raised, sometimes …’ Esther had a cat who was jealous of me. I never knew if it was her or him who scratched my bag when we made love. I used to send him flying to the other side of the room by grabbing him around his ribcage, but he came back stealthily. He was a pedigree tom, black with white stripes above the eyes, and almost hairless ears. He miaowed each time we whistled or called his name. I was very proud of my wounds. Esther disinfected them with a cotton bud dipped in antiseptic lotion, told me, laughing, not to move, then sat down behind me, wrapping her legs around my belly. Her treatment made my blood pale pink. She mended her lover in order to torture him again. I was her toy, her thing, she used to say her man. Hers was a terrible nature, but it was sugar-coated. She didn’t give an order without attaching one of her moon-like smiles. ‘You must reassure me, I must never ever doubt your love, or else …’ She liked military marches played by four hands on the piano, Gothic novels, menthol cigarettes, zoos. TamrikoBamriko’s apartment was situated on Petrogradskaya, north of Esther’s, on the other side of the Neva. We were level with Souvorov’s statue. A tramp was warming his feet at the flame of the war memorial in the Field of Mars, I could see his silhouette wavering in the gas. The taxi stopped in front of Trinity Bridge, which was in the process of being raised. We could no longer go that way. A militiaman was erecting metal barriers with orange crossbars, lining them up one after another, taking his time. The driver took the opportunity to teach me a lesson, it seems that driving exhilarates. ‘Is there a timetable?’ ‘A timetable?’ ‘Yeah, a timetable for the raising of the bridges, so that you know when you can …’ ‘You’re a foreigner, right, German perhaps, Danish?’ ‘French ...’ ‘Ah, France is pretty, no?’ ‘Yes, it’s very pretty.’ ‘Do you live long there?’ ‘One hundred and twenty, even more with vitamins …’

Arthur Larrue

Going to War

‘You live well and long! Ah …’ ‘So what?’ ‘In Russia, we kick the bucket early, but we are never bored.’ ‘Hence that idea of looking for an open bridge...’ ‘Or a closed one …’ ‘I’m just tired, mister, and unhappy.’ ‘A woman?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A Russian?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Our women are there to make us suffer, you should have taken something else!’ ‘…’ ‘Are you really that unhappy? In winter, a woman is useful and comfortable, she keeps you warm, you shouldn’t leave her when we are so close to snow, you will miss her even more …’ ‘…’ ‘What to do? Do you want us to plunge into the Neva?’ We crossed by another bridge without saying another word. At Tamriko Mamriko’s, the lift was out of order,I had six floors to climb. My sheepskin jacket weighed six kilos, it made me sweat but gave me a healthy look. I had lost all the tan acquired in a summer spent with Esther, one month had been enough and the texture of my skin had regained that nasty yellow typical of St Petersburg. ‘Nikolai Gogol described it as a haemorrhoidal skin tone but we can’t claim a medical link between haemorrhoids and a flagging face, though one can reasonably assume that the suffering caused by one provokes a nervous exhaustion that may affect the other—I had a spot on my right cheek.’ Memories burnt my eyes. A scene came up. Under the sun, Esther was listening to the lapping of the sea. She was telling me about an octopus that lived at the third right pole of the pontoon of the Paressouso where she was lying. ‘You will recognize its den by the shells it has arranged in front of its door. It is an octopus collector of shells,” the child told me. “Here’s a bamboo stick to force it out. Octopuses are very playful and this one likes fencing. When it cuts and thrusts at you, catch it by one of its tentacles, and pull it from the water so that I can see it. It will be very slimy, but out of love for me, ignore your feeling of disgust. Here’s the mask and snorkel …’ The kid who was lingering between the pointed poles under repair had tipped her off, he was painting the upturned shells lined up on the sand like cups. I think he told her his secret because he wanted her to like him. Esther was blond, she had green eyes, the salt from the sea flavoured her skin. When I bit her it left crystals on my tongue that made my teeth crunch. She was constantly

worshipping the sun,swooning beneath it from midday to half eight at night, spreading her fingers so as to burn the least little bit of white skin. I declared the line of her knickers the most beautiful frontier in the world but she replied that she wanted to nap. ‘I read the future in your buttocks, Esther …’ ‘Octopuses are eight times more intelligent than us. Eight, one for each tentacle. They chose not to rule the world in order to collect shells. I love you. Dive. I’m going to have a nap …’

Arthur Larrue

Going to War

Kettly Mars

At the Frontiers of Thirst

Publisher: Mercure de France Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Geneviève Lebrun-Taugourdeau genevieve.lebrun-taugourdeau@mercure.fr Number of Pages: 170

Translation: Sophie Lewis sophie_l@fastmail.fm

Kettly Mars plunges us into a hell in which every kind of corruption is permitted and, by viewing it through the eyes of a man struggling with his own demons, she strives to comprehend the inexcusable. “If Kettly Mars makes her realist fiction out of the torments of her compatriots, it is only in order to force them, and we along with them, to face the chaos head on. Profoundly compassionate, yet free from misplaced idealism.” Le Nouvel observateur Her previous novel about the Haitian tragedy, Saisons sauvages, sold more than 8,000 copies and was translated into English, German, Dutch and Croatian. Biography

Kettly Mars was born in 1958 in  Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where she lives today. At the Frontiers of Thirst is her sixth novel. Publications Her most recent publications include Le Prince noir de Lillian Russel, published in 2011 by Mercure de France (in collaboration with Leslie Péan); Saisons sauvages, 2010, (republished by Gallimard for their ‘Folio’ collection, 2011); and Fado, 2008.

Haiti, January 2011. Following the dazzling success of his first book, Fito Belmar is living off the royalties and appears to be leading an orderly existence, punctuated by boozy evenings with his friends and mistresses. But Fito is hiding a terrible secret: on certain nights, he slips away to the camp known as Canaan, one of the sprawling refugee camps that multiplied in the wake of the 2010 earthquake— since grown into an immense slum—there to pick up the young girls whom poverty forces to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Trying to suppress this dark side of his character, Fito finds himself helplessly returning to this place of perdition.

When he welcomes Tatsumi, a Japanese journalist writing a report about Haiti, to the island, Fito feels threatened. If she discovers his secret, he will be lost. But Fito is not immune to the slender journalist’s charms … Could Tatsumi help him find a more enlightened way to live? Kettly Mars turns her lucid gaze upon her native country, training the spotlight on the implications of humanitarian aid. She weighs up the material and ethical consequences of the earthquake: the dangerous levels of promiscuity, the prostitution of Haiti’s children, a world without moral compass, where everything becomes an object of consumption.

Fito looked at his watch. Ten to seven: he would be on time to meet them. The Jeep’s headlights skimmed furtively over the twisted trunks of the neem trees that bordered National Highway 1. The traffic was flowing and the car slipped rapidly along with it. An abrupt but liberating development after the congestion that had held him up for almost an hour, all the way to the Bon Repos exit. Fito felt a little cold but he didn’t adjust the thermostat. Better to let his blood cool down. In no time he would be sweating out every drop of water inside him under a makeshift shanty. The vegetation grew sparser as he drove on. Soon he would be at the Route-Neuf intersection, the crossroads for every peril on earth, at the exit for Cité-Soleil. He saw them standing there beneath a clump of oleanders. He knew to look for them there, like the other times, but at the sight of them his heart beat loudly in his chest and his throat tightened. He turned off the tarmac, pulled his off-roader over onto the beaten earth verge and unlocked the doors. When the two men climbed into the car, the night surged in with them. There was almost no sound from outside; a few cicadas were sawing in the brambles here and there and, far away, the motor of a powerful generator throbbed. Inside the car, the three men exchanged a brief greeting. After about a kilometre, Uncle said: ‘Slow down … turn here, boss.’ Fito took a rocky path off to the right. First they had to go past Corail, the resettlement camp with its orderly rows of tents pitched by the foreign soldiers. Higher up, the perfect anarchy of Canaan camouflaged a ridge of treeless mornes, the Haitian hills that towered over the Northern highway and whose far slopes, facing away

towards National Highway 3, merged with the foothills of Morne-Ă Cabrits. AÂ terrain of volcanic tufa, hot and infertile. Here and there, a few, rare clusters of neems and some cactus, whose territory displaced families had reclaimed for their campsites. Canaan: a cauldron of women, children and men, of laughter and tears, of hungers and thirsts. A chaotic agglomeration of plywood shacks and tarpaulin lean-tos, mostly blue, stamped with international acronyms, the camp had grown like a vast fungus, creeping swiftly outwards from one morne to the next, overlaying each in turn with a thick carpet of displaced lives. Beneath the evident chaos, a subtle discipline instilled order in the area. Already there were Canaan 1 and Canaan 2 and, as the human occupation advanced, so new Canaans would go on reaching out into the thirstiest sinkholes on earth. Here and there, a few solid houses had put down roots, anchoring the place in its official topography as a slum under construction. And the dust was everywhere, in hair, in eyes, in handshakes and arse-cracks, between legs, encrusting the most intimate parts of these lives. A dry and solitary place. Canaan: invaded and proclaimed the promised land only a day after the earthquake by a few hundred people displaced from the afflicted zone. A year later, and according to unreliable statistics, there were 80,000 of them. An ngo was looking for water sources and, for some months now, had been promising to install a system for piping in water. In the mean time, the precious liquid had to be bought. In the early days, a few charity-sponsored water tankers came to dispense their loads into the peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s drums and buckets. Each one sparked fights, which the strongest fighters generally won. This water was then doled out like tiny packets of lard and re-sold at a premium. Everything had its price in Canaan: the squares of stripped earth; the water like gold-dust; kitchenware, cosmetics, bread, the internet; security, however improbable; marijuana and rocks of crack; sex in all its forms. The path came to an end at a clump of mesquite trees; they had to continue on foot. Fito flicked his cigarette away and it fell in a stream of sparks. He put his keys in his right trouser pocket. He felt the grip of his rubber soles on the stony path. A brisk but mild breeze was blowing, clearing the sky above them. The inhabitants of Canaan always abandoned the camp during daylight hours. It was impossible to stay even an hour in one of the tents without dying from the heat or going into a kind of thirst coma. Where did they go? Some had regular work in the few factories in Vareux; others sold all kinds of nick-nacks in BonRepos, in Damien, on the route to the Toussaint-Louverture airport or as far away as Port-au-Prince; still others were mixed up in dealing illegal substances. But the rest, the old people, the children, in what dehydrated silence did they make it through the day? Fito sometimes wondered but he had never mustered the courage to ask someone from the camp. When night fell and a cool wind came up from the sea, the place came to life again. It seemed there was a fine life in Canaan just a few dozen metres further up. Through the solitude of the

mornes, bursts of music and chatter were already filtering down. It was a steep climb and Fito panted shallowly. Gas lamps and candles lit some of the tents; from this distance they could have been on fire. A few small generators chugged away, allowing business to go on, small-scale commerce, honest and dishonest. The light around these spots attracted the people of Canaan. Behind the flimsy tarpaulins, every one of the shelters withstood extreme conditions. One tent was maintained for worship by a protestant pastor. Further up, a blind clairvoyant told the tarot for twenty-five gourdes a time. Canaan was getting itself together to face the future. A committee of concerned men and women inhabitants had even formed a supervision team and put themselves forward as the camp’s political representation. This committee strove to establish its authority, to compensate the absence of the State, which knew nothing of the lives of the displaced. It attempted to set up security patrols: petty thieves and rapists ran a low-down racket in the camps; a razor-blade was all you needed to get inside a tent … Without real resources, however, all this remained no more than a well-intentioned pipe dream. Yet already they had been visited by spokespeople for the candidates in the second round of elections that would take place in a few weeks. Canaan was a sleeping giant, a malè pandye—a massive time bomb. The young guy with dreadlocks stayed back, to keep an eye on the Jeep. Uncle went ahead, turning off into a passage to the left. Following behind, Fito put one foot into the alley and tumbled into another dimension. Now everything changed. Every face he saw was carrying him towards a paradise at the heart of hell, an unspeakable pleasure into which he advanced like a sleepwalker. He risked losing himself then, within that dense promiscuity, in the perilous, fascinating proximity experienced in this most intense intimacy with the people; he risked, ultimately, pure oblivion. He was no-one, nowhere. His pulse adjusted to the pulse of the camp, to the shouts and shadows, to the odour of urine that rose in waves on the breeze. To the heavy shock of slaps occasionally resounding off women’s skin, to the deep yells, to the everyday pain, dulled by fear. He knew the giggles of the girls as they gossiped among themselves, dreaming of love or of one day going to join a relative in America or Canada or France; the sombre eyes of men sitting through their boredom or waiting for the winning numbers to be called in the local lottery; the children in knickers, hanging onto their mothers’ legs or playing with broken toys, made in China. He was mixing with men and women who made it their business to survive, from each day to the next, Bible under one arm and giving thanks to God for simple gift of breathing. They pimped children in some of the canvas houses. There were gangs, guns and the unspoken intention of taking life, always for money. He knew he was in danger in this place, but the danger itself brought him new life, it slipped into his bloodstream like a drug, a powerful stimulant. Fito knew the very breath of the camp, its shape and its smells, its bursts of

Kettly Mars

At the Frontiers of Thirst

speech and its whispers. The people of Canaan had not made the streets too narrow, should they ever want to build a town there, or should there ever be a fire. Should there ever … This evening was his sixth time; he always came on Fridays. Each of his visits was his beginning and his end. Afterwards he would emerge from Canaan exalted, but anxious. The camp’s white dust all over his shoes. Burning from the stigmata of his own disgust. Already alone. Already struggling with his demons. Already knowing the inevitability of return. Each time his guide would take him by a different route, to a different part of the camp. Uncle was not much given to talk, only pointing out the hazards of the path. Except sometimes to whisper something to him, to make him wait: ‘Boss, we’ve found a nice little plaything for you!’ Occasionally, Uncle came across men he recognised in the shadows of the night. A brief moment’s complicity. They would greet each other abruptly, knocking their fists together: ‘Hey bro’. Out for a stroll?’ ‘S’all good bro’. Easy …’ Fito never knew in advance who they would take him to. But the surprise was always worth the wait. He had visited several of the camps for the research into the establishment of social housing that he was meant to be carrying out: the ones in Port-au-Prince, the super-camp at Bowen Field, the former airfield, another at Santo in the Cul-de-Sac plain, and finally Canaan, the unspeakable. He had made technical assessments, topographical surveys, he had interviewed the inhabitants about their way of life, their access to water, their transport problems, on what they wanted from a new place to live. He understood the need to provide a local and rational response to their needs. What was needed here was a different kind of work, that would respect these people’s suffering. There was no point showing up with one-size-fits-all projects that didn’t work. They needed to be educated, to learn how to live under different conditions and in different kinds of housing. They needed sufficient energy and faith to move mountains in order to combat the corruption that rotted all their institutions from inside, that allowed hope to wither, stillborn. Fito enthused, worked hard, made proposals, tilted against the windmills of the system, slogged, grew disillusioned, lost heart. The weight of the status quo pressed down on him. Canaan sucked him in.

Éric Marty

The Chinese Girl’s Heart

Publisher: Éd. du Seuil Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Martine Heissat martineheissat@seuil.com Number of Pages: 384

Translation: Annette David annettedavid99@gmail.com

You may already know Éric Marty through his literary essays. Discover another side of him in this surprising novel, a fantastically forceful thriller with ultra-violent urban scenes, unfolding at breathtaking pace through the streets of Paris. Marty creates a story set within a world of militant intellectuals around the figure of a devilishly handsome and brilliant leader. A reflection on evil and perversion. Biography

Éric Marty was born in 1955 in Paris and lives in Meudon. He is a lecturer of contemporary literature at University of Paris-Diderot. His first novel, Sacrifice, was published by Seuil in 2005. As an essayist and writer he has published a dozen works. Publications Pourquoi le xxe siècle a-t-il pris Sade au sérieux ? , 2011 ; Roland Barthes, la littérature et le droit à la mort, 2010.

A clandestine group of revolutionary extremists shock France with a series of abductions and murders, while deceiving the police and the media. With its equally terrifying and endearing, strong characters and the sublime figure of a young Chinese prostitute the novel reads first and foremost as an excellent thriller, full of plot twists, violence and suspense. In addition, the more informed reader will find references to France’s intellectual and political life, spot certain ideologies and appreciate its caustic humour.

1 Good thought for the day Bad conscience doesn’t always explain sudden awakenings. Perhaps Politzer quite simply needed to pee. Besides, there was something else. Slightly strange. An unpleasant wet sensation that made the leg of his pyjamas stick to his real leg. How bizarre, seeing that he always slept naked … But it was still night, with the innumerable confusions of night-time. That bitter taste at the back of the mouth, the tongue thickened from sleep. And this time, it was more than acridness or bitterness. But what …? Najla, who was there, warm, soft, a little bit mean, and who would make a fool of him if she discovered … he could no longer quite remember, something from the dream he just had, no doubt. The sheet seemed humid. The week before they had made love for a very long time in the dark. And in the morning as they woke up they had discovered on the white sheets, surprised, the rosy mixture of pleasure and blood that had trickled from her genitals during the night. A kind of big, beautiful, abstract smudge. But if Najla had had her period the previous week, then it couldn’t be her blood. He ran his hand along his leg and over the sheets. It was like blood though. The viscosity of fresh blood, but already almost dry in places. And then there was the smell. The agonizing smell of blood. He sat up. It was dark. What time

was it? Najla was lying on her front, the shock of her black hair, shiny and curly, turned towards him like a speechless face, with no eyes. Was he sure that she really was lying on her front? Slowly, while trying to keep visual contact with this form that vanished without contours in the dark of the night, he searched for the bedside light with his left hand. Found straight away the lead, pummelling it with his thumb and forefinger as he worked his way up to the switch. And there was light. Dazzling. So bright that he immediately closed his eyes. He waited a second. Then he forced himself to look. Eyes soon wide open. The black and shiny mass was indeed her hair, but she wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t lying on her front. Like a veil her hair was folded over her face that one could no longer make out. What one saw, what Politzer was looking at, aghast, was the naked bust, covered in blood already black in places, thick, coagulated. But red, bright red, at the hollow of her neck. He no longer moved. Only his eyes flickered. In all directions. The blood had run with no apparent order, partly dividing the breasts. But on the shoulders, arms and even the right hand there were long trickles, now brown. He felt a sudden impulse to laugh, as if confronted with a half-baked Punch and Judy show, and this urge was so pressing that he abruptly began to vomit. It was brief. A small, thick flow of saliva, turned green from bile, and evil-smelling. Burning tears came, a result of the spasms. He wanted to say something. Made some uncoordinated gestures into empty space. Then, very delicately, he drew aside a fold in the sheet and uncovered the smile of the wound. That of a whore, where the red has brimmed over, by dint of having been screwed for too long. Above the gash was now her face that her hair no longer concealed. The mouth was open. As were her eyes. What did she have to hide from him, she who was now so definitively silent? To promise? Outside was the night. Maybe it was still raining. Not that it mattered. There was nothing to be heard. The night seemed to have swallowed all possible sensations. All things. Events even. Indifferent to it all. As if nothing had taken place yet. Unfair and impervious. It felt like it was too early. He would need the morning, the first glow of dawn, the first car horns tooting, dustcarts passing, idiots shouting. And the indifference would stop, be replaced by the bustling activity of people. Of cops. The shops would open, and with them the trading of things. So, he had to wait. Be patient. Politzer had never been capable of waiting. But this time, it was different. He kept still. At the same time completely un-concentrated and tense. Tensed towards nothing. And this heart that was pounding, that he tried to slow down, quieten. The silence above all. The background noise that prevented it from prevailing, or, on the contrary, contributed to its omnipotence, one never knows.

Ă&#x2030;ric Marty

The Chinese Girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Heart

A minuscule interference, having come from nowhere, maybe emanating from silence itself. Waiting can only be measured once it’s ended. A bit like those sieges, interminable at first, from where the assailants one day break camp. The besieged scrutinize the horizon, cannot believe their eyes, then, after a while, agree to rejoice, to celebrate their victory, and finally, to carry on with life as before, with only the most lucid not being completely certain that the enemy hasn’t quite simply hidden a little way away, in that old spiky forest where the sun never enters. Politzer got up and began, after having milled around aimlessly for a moment in the kitchen, to tidy up, to meticulously clean the small apartment. It was no doubt pointless. They had left too many traces. But it had to be done. A matter of discipline. He tidied up. That took some time. The radio was on. A female voice with a perfectly stupid intonation reeled off the news, right from the announcement of food poisoning in an old peoples’ home having provoked vomiting and diarrhoea, to the accident of a coach carrying Belgian tourists, the feeble rainfall this winter, results of basketball tournament pools … until one no longer knew what to think. And had stopped listening. But Politzer turned up the volume. It had just been revealed—by a reporter who happened to be in the 9th arrondissement—that a coordinator from the extreme left organization Red Line, a certain Carlos Ryman, had got away early in the morning from the special unit having come to question him … Politzer walked towards the window, drew the curtains very slightly. An assemblage of mirrors of which the closest was a magnifying one made it possible, if there happened to be a cop outside the apartment block, to identify him. And he saw a man. Forty something, black raincoat, blond moustache, slightly drooping, and a short goatee under the lower lip. Looked like a jerk. Politzer grabbed his mobile and photographed the face revealing itself so accurately in the oval mirror fixed to the guardrail of the balcony. Everything was ready. In a small night-blue rucksack he had placed the kit prepared by the so-called “Vomito” section, led by Eva directly under Mao’s orders: a weapon, magazines, two mobile phones, money, a bank card, a passport and an identity card in the name of Paul Mesnard, a master key, the keys to the hide-out. He added the razor he’d found on the floor at the end of the bed, two thirds open, and which he’d carefully cleaned, with everything else in the apartment that he thought to be important. Politzer was already washed and clean-shaven, having left nevertheless an emerging moustache so as to match perfectly, within a few days, the photo on his new identity papers. He went out through the back door, climbed the five stairs right up to the attic, snapped off the chain that held the metal ladder in place, and reached without difficulty a small window opening onto the roofs.

Up there, he looked straight ahead of him. The sky was heavy with thick, grey clouds. He knew by heart the itinerary allowing him to escape the cops. Thanks to the cold, his trainers stuck brilliantly to the frozen zinc on the rooftop and to the slates. He moved with the right speed, the one he’d been told to adopt and that he’d practised well over a dozen times. He was lighter than a fox … “Renard doesn’t rhyme with Godard.” Politzer smiled and then winced. He must not think of Najla. He hadn’t concerned himself with her body while leaving the apartment. Over the hours to come, he ought to forget her. Forget her completely. He arrived on the roof of number 56 in another street. Rue Pierre-Semard. A sharp, fierce kick on a very battered kind of skylight. He slipped his hand inside and opened it. Now he just had to jump. It was less high than he’d thought. The pane deformed everything. Glass is like ideology, Mao said, because it’s transparent, it deforms all the more so. He was right. Stop thinking. Act. He hurtled down the stairs. Go down to ground level, to the flattest level, as close as possible to zero. Meaning, to reality. There, where everything is equal. Where everything merges with everything else. Where the luck of the draw reigns. The street. The narrow pavement. A gang of noisy highschool girls, with little bare bellies despite it being December, gave him the chance to vanish for a moment. The street climbed slightly. He turned left, very quickly. Rue de Maubeuge. He went down Rue de Chantilly, then immediately along Rue de Bellefond—climbing too—into Rue Rochechouart. He knew he was being followed. Ten or so meters behind him, an exact copy of the cop in the mirror. His stupid face. Pig-eyed. It was him. The same one. The technique in case you’re being followed is very simple: most importantly, you do not run, or only when all other solutions have failed. Your escape must be smooth. Go where the crowds take you, know an apartment block with double entrance in every neighbourhood of Paris, locate very quickly a department store, a hypermarket, a metro station that opens onto another space, another street, another reality. Politzer knew all this. Najla’s body had perhaps been discovered … Who had killed her? How, during their sleep? He did the contrary to what he’d been taught. He began to run. Not very fast, to begin with, so as to not make the cop panic. Surprise him, that’s all.

Éric Marty

The Chinese Girl’s Heart

Patrick-Olivier Meyer

Muscle and Flesh

Publisher: Calmann-Lévy Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Patricia Roussel proussel@calmann-levy.fr Number of Pages: 240

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

A French voice, fresh and inventive, the kind of voice you wish you could hear more frequently. The universal appeal of the theme of the father-son relationship and of the figure of the sports medallist. A quest for the father, beginning in France and continuing in Poland, the United States and Israel. Biography

Patrick-Olivier Meyer was born in 1969 under the Californian sun. At the age of two he ended up in Montmorency. Since then he has been writing, looking for a way out. Muscle and Flesh is his second novel. Publications Nevrospiral, Calmann-Lévy, 2010.

As he looks forward to becoming a father himself, Ewad Kubicz, a thirty-one-year-old Parisian photographer, learns of the death of his own father, from whom he has been estranged for fifteen years. Kazimierz Kubicz, former pole-vaulting champion, had many times reinvented himself, moving from his native Poland to the United States, without ever settling anywhere: a national hero later seen as a traitor to his

country, an unfaithful husband, a disloyal father, a capricious seducer, and a man who remained an enigma to his son. When Kazimierz’s death is announced, his son refuses to believe it. It opens up old wounds and drives Ewad to go in search of him and to look up the women in his father’s life. The search for the father becomes a personal quest: how far can one forgive those loved ones who have betrayed you?

His first contact with the pole was hardly a revelation. What was he supposed to do with this thing that stood almost three times higher than he did? After several weeks practising in the sand pit without major incident, he decided to confront the issue head-on. His run-ups were gauche, his positioning of the pole inexact, his attempts at lifting his body risky. Kazimierz the kamikaze. Aleksander showed him how to place his hands and thrust his shoulders forward to avoid falling backwards. He told him how to lift his pelvis and when to make the leap. If Aleksander accepted his presence and was unstinting in giving advice (‘don’t forget, it’s always you that makes the bar bend’), it was mainly in order to please his niece. And if it happened that thanks to a winter whim Irena wanted to abandon pole-vaulting for hockey, Kaz was still game once more to bite the ice. He would, however, also learn to flirt with those inverted precipices, those summits. After training sessions, Kazimierz and Irena became ordinary kids again, and choosing narrow lanes rather than main streets, lost themselves deliberately in the town. In spite of the pitiless cold, she accompanied him almost to his house, and he walked her back almost to hers, talking about what they’d got up to during the day. Kazimierz got better and better from one session to the next, to such an extent that Aleksander, impressed by his keenness, viewed him in a different light. Irena was half a head taller and used a pole some five inches longer, but in their world of shared values and competitiveness, it mattered little if she was first and he second. He imagined the scene later on: the

pride of a whole people, the national anthem playing and flags waving, the two of them choking back the tears, standing to great applause side by side on the podium at the awards ceremony, with all the spectators in the stadium leaping to their feet. As for Irena, she dreamt of certificates and medals gracing their house deep in the country, and of hordes of kids milling round. One Monday Irena had a slight headache and he hastened to pay her a visit. It was the first time he’d been invited indoors. In the kitchen they ate star-shaped cinnamon cakes. Kaz’s gaze kept drifting back to the legs of Irena’s mother, Jolanta. In the house classical music was playing. Sitting facing Irena on the floor in her bedroom, he repeated word for word Aleksander’s encouraging remarks. With her face close to his she listened with rapt attention. He had considerable potential. If he carried on training hard, he could go far. Destiny beckoned. They closed the door. Irena placed her lips on his and Kaz’s heart began beating fit to burst. The air was suddenly filled with pulsating atoms. It was perhaps the effect of light or just the projection of his own feelings, but even the elegant Wolfgang Nordwig, the East German pole-vaulting legend whose giant poster hung on the wall above Irena’s bed, was pale with envy. Even though he’d been crowned European champion in Athens the previous summer, with a bar set at 5.3 metres, he could do nothing to halt Kazimierz’s conquest of Irena’s heart. It was their first kiss. At first, just on the lips, and then, to the accompaniment of heavy breathing, there followed very quickly the tongue’s tentative exploration of the palate. Rare oxygen. “Don’t forget you’ve got homework to do” Jolanta said, pretending not to have noticed anything when she entered the room without knocking. Kaz went as red as a beetroot. Yes, he would return—he said to himself on the way home—his head full of stars that bathed the hostile structures of the railway station with a dappled light. He would be counting the days until he could see her again, at training the following Monday. He would stick it out, only seven days to go. Kazimierz was not only perfecting his jumps, he was making progress in the art of kissing, and his hands were now exploring what lay under her sweater. As he embraced Irena he felt a current running from head to toe. Sometimes he would close his eyes and think of Jolanta. He dreamt of finding himself in bed between mother and daughter, even if he didn’t know what he’d do if that were to happen. The thrill he felt on leaping over the bar was, however, more intense. Jubilation when the pole responded, lifting him to ever greater heights. He doubled the training sessions, then tripled them. He became the best in the group, and requested private lessons. The eyes of his coach shone when he spoke of him. While Kazimierz’s father still lived in fear of a broken neck, of damaged vertebrae, of years spent in a wheelchair, Brygida was starting to reconsider his potential and regain hope. She gave him his first carbon-fibre pole. It could just about fit into his room.

Feeling neglected, Irena developed an unusual kind of jealousy, not vis-à-vis other girls, but vis-à-vis the pole. It was unwieldy, it got between them, it took up too much space, it occupied all of Kazimierz’s thoughts, it was the sole object of his desires, the source of all his sorrows. The thing that had brought them together in the early days was now gradually driving them apart. Irena was kicking herself: it was she after all who had introduced them to each other, so she had only herself to blame. But how could she have guessed? It was like inviting a plain, lanky, gangling, stiff-legged beanpole of a girl to your first party. Except that the giantess played on an air of mystery, showed an attitude of defiance, dazzled people with her wit, looked the boys haughtily up and down, threw out challenges, veiled appeals at first, then acts of pure bravado. Arrogant, intimidating. A rival whom one could only curse. Or grovel to.

Patrick-Olivier Meyer

Muscle and Flesh

As is often the case with those who enjoy a startling debut, Kazimierz soon came up against his own limitations. He had struggled with fatigue and bad weather, he had kept fit throughout his journey. ‘If you manage to leap over that bar, you will be champion of Poland. Champion of Poland if you leap over that bar’, he kept repeating to himself. But there was nothing to be done: he was stuck at 3.2 metres. It had been like that since the beginning of the year. 1971 refused to smile on him, the path to sporting glory was blocked, all because his twist lacked dynamism. Aleksander urged him to be patient. ‘You won’t get the bolt to shift just by banging on the lock. You have to turn slowly, methodically.’ Bolts be damned. If he was going to win gold at the Olympics, he hadn’t a moment to lose. When he went back to the changing room he hurled his trainers against the wall. Everybody fell silent except for two boys. ‘So, Kaz, problems at take off? Arse stuck to the grass?’ ‘Light as you are, you should be nudging the stratosphere’. The other laughed like a drain. ‘You can climb on my shoulders. Otherwise, I think my grandfather’s still got his stilts.’ ‘He’d better not climb too high, else there’s a risk we won’t be able to see him any more.’ Kazimierz got up, went towards the smart-arses, grabbed the bigger of the two, and executed a furious maïte tsuki, a memory from judo. The boy’s head banged against the metal locker and his broken nose spurted blood. No one could take the mickey out of Kazimierz Kubicz and hope to get away with it. Irena took stock each day of her disappointment and of the centimetres that separated them. Her heart was no longer in jumping. One Thursday he refused her invitation to go to the pictures, preferring to refine his technique in the stadium, the laboratory for his future exploits, so she went to wait for him outside, wrapped in her scarf, the warm air coming out of her mouth like the smoke of

a cigarette which she’d soon be smoking, the first, a passport to adolescence, at the point where their paths were diverging. ‘Put your sweater on, you’ll catch cold.’ ‘I’ve got the bolt to shift’, he said with a broad grin. ‘You’re the most gifted boy I’ve ever seen, I’m sure you’ll go far.’ She banged her gloves together to keep warm and to bolster her spirits. There was a melancholy note in her voice. ‘We could go out at least one night during the week. You choose the day. We could go for a walk, go bowling … I was your first supporter, you know.’ The snowflakes were falling in slow motion but everything was accelerating in his head. The fire was burning in his veins; on the inside Kazimierz was alight. Fever, a temperature shock, his scalding sweat. With her eyes fixed on his, Irena hoped for a crumb of comfort. Kaz’s words bumped into each other on his lips: ‘ Cos don’t get this wrong, I’m very keen on you, it’s just that from now on, I can’t help it, what I want isn’t to go further, it’s to go higher, you see, ever higher, one notch more’

Hoai Huong Nguyen

Soft Shadows

Publisher: Viviane Hamy Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Maylis Vauterin maylis.vauterin@viviane-hamy.fr Number of Pages: 150

Translation: Ros Schwartz schwartz@btinternet.com

A “Romeo and Juliet” story against the backdrop of the Indochina War. A historical novel written with great lyricism. The author’s name means “remembering our home country” (her parents fled Indochina just before she was born), a mission which her writing fulfils admirably. Italian rights sold to Ugo Guanda. Biography

Born in France in 1976 to Vietnamese parents, Hoai Huong Nguyen’s name means “remembering our home country”, a reference to her family’s exile. Her first language was Vietnamese but she learned French at school. She has a doctorate in contemporary literature, having written a thesis entitled “Water in the poetry of Paul Claudel and that of Chinese and Japanese poets”. Hoai Huong Nguyen has already published two poetry collections: Parfums and Déserts. Soft Shadows is her first novel.

1954, the Indochina War, and the Viet Minh relentlessly attack the French troops. Mai, a young Annamese volunteer, is working at the Lanessan hospital in Hanoi where the wounded French soldiers are taken. Yann, a young Breton soldier, has been injured in the chest. Mai falls in love with him and shows astonishing inventiveness in finding ways to prevent Yann from being sent back to the front, even lying to the doctor about his medical condition. Yann becomes aware of her energetic efforts to delay his departure and falls in love with her. Their precarious happiness

is soon disrupted. Mai’s father, an influential judge, has other ideas for his daughter’s future and plans to marry her off against her will. Her obstinate refusal estranges her from her family. She believes she will now be free to follow her heart. Anxious to make the most of every moment together, the two lovers marry in haste, the day before Yann is sent back to Dien Bien Phu. Now it is the war that keeps the couple apart. To save Yann and rescue him from this limbo, Mai is prepared to put herself through hell.

10 Dien Bien Phu’s verdant plain surrounded by hills lay in a wild, mountainous region. Running northwards, the Black River cut through the massifs of sculpted peaks and chasms, while to the south flowed the Nam Ou and the Nam Seng. It was like a turbulent sea of vegetation and rocks, where tigers feasted on their prey and insects on rotting carcases, an encounter between shadowy lands and eternal spirits. For centuries, a supreme calm had reigned over the plain, a balance between nature and the people who cultivated the fields and grazed their animals. During the war, this calm had been disrupted by the invasion of the Japanese and violent battles; then, after their defeat, the Viet Minh had taken their place, hiding out among the craggy rocks. Even so, at no point had man managed to destroy the harmony of the place. In November 1953, it felt as if nothing would ever change. A brood of egrets was roosting among the branches of a grapefruit tree growing on the banks of the Nam Youn, the river that snaked across the entire basin. The tree was as tall as three men, laden with green and yellow fruits. Concealed among its double leaves, the egrets watched in astonishment as dancing white patches appeared in the sky towards late November, their domed forms like inverted lotus flowers. There was one, then two, and it was like a shower of white blossoms; they floated in the air, their silk skirts becoming more and more visible. Some were solitary and pathetically small; others fell in clusters of three, four or five, with a bigger, heavier object dangling from

them; they were followed by many others, the dancing rain lasted three days. When the flowers reached the ground with a dull thud, they crumpled softly inwards. Then came the sound of voices shouting in a language that had never been heard in these parts; sometimes there were bullet holes, and the white sails were stained with mud and blood; it was the beginning of the disruption. The tiny forms were men, not very different from those who had lived until now in the hills. The minute they dropped onto the ground, they hastily gathered up their parachutes and set to work. During those three days, they arrived in vast numbers; very soon, there were thousands of them. What they did within a few weeks seemed deliberately unreal. They worked with the application of meticulous and highly disciplined ants. The grapefruit tree was pulled up along with the lemon and tamarind and all the other surrounding trees. The birds vanished, and many other animals fled too; the villagers scattered. The verdant landscape was soon obliterated and transformed into a building site of ditches and metal brambles. Soon all that was left was the bare, yellow earth, a field of scrub planted with mines and spiked with metal. As if in ironic homage from death to life, the positions invaded by the the French troops who assembled in a circle for battle were given the names of women—Claudine, Béatrice, Éliane, Huguette, Françoise, Anne-Marie … Those names became part of the soldiers’ dreamscape, taking on an intensely carnal reality; they formed a living tableau that merged with their surroundings scenery. Yann was among the newly landed troops after New Year, arriving in this desolate place at the end of February. He was posted to Isabelle, the remotest position to the south. At first, things were relatively calm, sniping from the paddy fields, a few skirmishes and the first deaths. The incidences of harassment gradually increased, so as not to take the men too abruptly by surprise; patience, and the worst would come.

Hoai Huong Nguyen

Soft Shadows

Little information about events in the basin filtered through to Hanoi. The French army was considered to be the most powerful in the world; the Japanese occupation had dented its reputation, but, after the routing of the enemy, the former power had returned with full force. The Vietnamese generally had mixed feelings towards France. Even though the colonisation was unjust, many people refused to fight for independence under the Viet Minh banner. Some had chosen to side with the French, out of opportunism, because France was reputed to be less ruthless than China or Japan; the sad reality of the colonised was to favour the master who was the least cruel. Some, enamoured of French culture, fought or at least hoped for a peaceful emancipation. And others, concerned solely with their survival or their pleasures, had no interest in these matters. By February, it was rumoured that in Dien Bien Phu the fighting would only end up reinforcing French domination, even though some were beginning

to believe that the resistance might possibly win. Mai wanted her country to be free, but she also feared that whatever the outcome, it would not be good. Ordinary people felt that the Viet Minh’s struggle was not just for independence but was a cover for unspoken resentments, and that the first to pay for a Communist victory would be the educated, the wealthy, the man who had a beautiful wife or who had provided a suckling pig at his son’s wedding. Mai had not received any political education, but she shared this vague feeling. If the French won, that would be the end of nationalism for a long time; but a Communist victory would signal the beginning of a reign of the arbitrary and terror. Mai would not have used these words, but she feared the reality: she had heard what the Viet Minh had done to a man in the countryside close to Hanoi. They had buried him in a field, leaving only his head poking out of the ground, then they had driven a plough over him. His head had been crushed and torn out of the ground, and there had been dances and shouts of victory. She certainly did not want the tyranny of those people. No one had any illusions as to how the Viet Minh leaders would treat their fellow countrymen if they gained power. Faced with the impossibility of the situation, and to stop herself from giving in to despair, Mai had obscurely resolved to think only of her husband. When there is nothing to be salvaged from a house, you realise that the only thing that matters is human lives. A few days after Yann’s departure, Mai had returned to the Ngoc Son Temple. She stood for a long time in front of the altar. She asked the temple spirits for her husband’s safe return, and made a vow that she would do anything they asked of her. The spirits seemed to have heard her prayers, a bright sun was shining that day, as if the sky had approved her words. What good fortune, she thought, perhaps, the bitter fortune given to innocents allowing them to change the course of events, or was it rather the sign that they needed this illusion while the fighting continued. For Yann and Mai, the wait had a new character and location. While Yann was at Lanessan, he was almost certain that she would come once or twice in the day. During his stay in hospital, only once had she failed to show up. He knew that she was not far away, he could fill her absence with images. In the morning, she was at home, or already on the way on her moped; if it was raining, she would always open an umbrella for protection. He would picture the countryside flashing past her eyes, the trees in the city, the colourful market stalls, the cries of street, the smells rising from steaming cooking pots; or, if she was still at home getting ready, he visualised her putting on her dress, brushing her long hair, covering up with a shawl, stepping outside the house. Now, everything was different. Mai did not know where he was or what he was doing. She could not imagine his life at the front, she had heard soldiers’ tales, but words do not convey a true picture. To anyone who has not experienced the horrors of war, it is like a closed box whose lock cannot be forced. She tried to attach images to

the grim words, shell, explosions, but those images were vague and eventually dissolved. Or was it that her mind did not have the strength to imagine such things, because they were too terrifying? Mai had seen injured, mutilated and dying men brought in on stretchers or operated on in their hospital beds. She had smelled the stench of their burnt flesh and heard their screams; she had seen sick men who preferred death to pain, men who were lost and for whom courage meant to finish dying. She could not imagine Yann among those men, the idea of pain and death was unbearable to her; she chose rather to recall his voice, his face, his ash-blond hair. During the daytime, she managed to forget the fighting. But at night, that was no longer possible. She was haunted by the same images and nightmares. Yann was caught in an ambush, or someone was firing at him with a machinegun, blowing off his arm; or he was on a battlefield, she was always imprisoned in the house that she had seen in a dream before his departure, she could find no way out, while he was waiting for her, wounded, perhaps fatally, his face covered in blood, he was waiting for her and she couldn’t find the way out. She talked, shouted sometimes in her sleep, the words echoed in the silence of her room, if he isn’t going to come back, please don’t let him suffer—if he must die, let him die peacefully—let him fall down and then lose consciousness— let another man bring back his body—let him not lie alone in the mud in the dark—but no, he must live, stay alive until the end, victory and defeat no longer mattered. Such thoughts would torment her until morning.

Hoai Huong Nguyen

Soft Shadows

Caroline Pochon

The Second Wife

Publisher: Buchet/Chastel Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Christine Legrand christine.legrand@libella.fr Number of Pages: 272

Translation: Georgina Collins glcollins@hotmail.co.uk

A story of passionate love and worlds colliding. Can two people truly commit to each other despite overwhelming cultural differences? The Second Wife is based on the author’s own extraordinary life. But this is more than a short and simple personal tale: Pochon has developed her story into an authentic but profound autobiographical novel. Hortense is the main character in ‘The Second Wife’. She may be from the West, but she never casts judgement on the African realities she describes. Instead, she draws the reader into her story in a way that is extremely moving. Biography

Caroline Pochon was born in 1970. At the age of 15, she played the role of Johnny Halliday’s daughter in the film Conseil de famille directed by Costas Gavras. She then studied at the Sciences Po university of social sciences in Paris before attending La Fémis film school and the Langues O institute of oriental languages and civilisations. It was there she learnt to speak Wolof. In 2005, Pochon started directing short films and documentaries. The Second Wife was initially a 46 minute autobiographical documentary broadcast on TV5 Afrique. She has also co-directed a number of films with Allan Rothschild: La Face cachée des fesses achieved the Arte channel’s highest viewing figures for 2009, followed by Du culte des seins and Des pieds et des mains. Democratic Books released publications to accompany each of these films. In 2012, Pochon’s documentary Stimulation cérébrale: un nouvel espoir pour les TOC ? was broadcast on Arte. The Second Wife is her first novel.

Hortense is fed up with her family, society in general and her home town of Caen in France. Fascinated by Africa, she decides to leave it all behind, flying out to Burkina Faso to attend a film festival in the capital city of Ouagadougou. There, liberated from her past, she begins a period of exploration and discovery. At the festival she meets Seydou, the ‘Keur Massar Poet’, and falls head over heels in love. He wants to marry her, so she has to convert to Islam and become Aïcha. But more importantly, she will be his second wife. The first wife is called Awa; she is pregnant and about to give birth.

With a gift for sharp and lucid expression, the author analyses the emotions that motivate Seydou and his two wives. Pochon reveals how Senegalese women live their lives and invites us to discover, from within, African polygamy in all its complexity. The Second Wife is a first novel that combines adventure, love, hate and violence. It has an authentic charm while revealing a passionate love story that may be difficult to accept.

3rd March Anna-Maria finally stops to talk on the poolside terrace at Hôtel Indépendence. With deep brown hair and jewellery jangling on her wrists, she doesn’t look out of place in the swarm of people buzzing around her. Everyone seems to know her and nods in her direction when passing nearby. As we sit in the shadow of a large palm tree, she offers to buy me an exotic fruit cocktail with the vouchers the festival organisers have given her: she’s a permanent guest. She won’t stop talking about this year’s films but grants me just a few minutes from her ‘busy high-priestess schedule’ to listen distractedly to my story. When I mention the ‘Keur Massar Poet’, her face freezes. News of my great romance is greeted with frosty irony. “So, you’ve brought love at first sight to Ouagadougou, have you Hortense?” Her tone seems so harsh to me. There was a time that she too had experienced the same kind of ‘exotic’ adventure with African film makers ... Seydou is really nice but he’s a dreamer, not to say a loser. His career had begun well in France, but when he returned to Senegal, he wasn’t inspired any more. “Everyone says he should do a quick stint in France to relaunch his career. Maybe that’s what you want to be? A French quickie for the big shot film maker?” To make matters worse ... she’d heard he was married. “You need to learn how to say I-love-you-bye!” says a flabby White woman

in her sixties to her two African companions sitting beside us, endlessly echoing my disillusion. The excessively glammed-up young sirens demand another drink, like little girls. Is it right to be annoyed by my wicked godmother for lacking any kind of restraint on this occasion? Or is it simply that truth hurts? I rush out to the street, taking a Xanax without water to ease the pain. I trip and tumble to the ground, resting there a moment amid the indifferent crowd. The noise, the poverty, the foreignness, suddenly it all seems insufferable.

That evening 1. An outdoor café-bar and popular hangout.

But it’s true, Seydou is married. We meet up outside a small maquis.1 A neon street lamp is casting a weak green-coloured light over our location. We sit uncomfortably around a rickety table. Me, all mixed up, and him, thinking through the barefaced truths. Beside me, an obese, frumpy woman leans over to sweep the floor with a short-handled broom. I cling to the rhythm of the broom as it beats in my brain. He’s ordered a Fanta and offers me brochettes. His hand is trembling. Impossible to eat. The absurd little broom going back and forth, the ample body of this woman leaning over us, the idea of the other woman, all pound in my head. He’s been mulling things over since we met up. He needs to tell me something. He takes my hand. I quiver. “Come with me to Keur Massar and be my wife. My second wife.” My chair breaks, I fall flat on my back, my body hurts, I burst into tears. He takes me in his arms. The woman who’s sweeping continues her job without batting an eyelid, shoving her broom right up to us, her heavy body sagging towards the ground. Out comes a packet of Xanax. Essential. He snatches it from my feeble hands. “Hortense, now you’ve got me you don’t need these pills to be ok any more, can’t you see they keep you in a state of dependency?” I should burst into bitter laughter at the absurdity of this ultimate misconception, but I watch him throw away my beloved pills. He squeezes me in his arms and leads me, alongside him, into the street, his body interlaced with mine. For a lingering moment we say nothing. And I know that he loves me. He speaks to me about his wife, with whom no intellectual exchange of words is possible, since she’s almost illiterate (but her talent for managing her family’s everyday life means she’s out of the ordinary). She’s precious to him because she connects him to Africa and for that reason precisely he’ll never be able to leave her. Her education has prepared her to have one or more co-wives. Whereas with me he’d be one half of an artistic couple that transcends geographical and cultural borders! I imagine a frumpy middle-aged woman who’s ugly, equipped

with a broom, with a cooking pot, with an apron round her waist, speaking loudly, like all those women you see selling fritters or fabrics at Ouagadougou market. A small cynical assessment brings me to the conclusion that when compared to me, ultimately this woman doesn’t stand a chance. I am young, I am white, I am rich. I have everything, she has nothing. Caroline Pochon

By the pool at Hôtel Indépendence Everything had been so intense, unpredictable and inevitable. I have my first moment of solitude after three days swimming at a hundred miles an hour in a total synthesis of bodies, spirits, anxieties! I listen intently to the frenetic sabars,2 which for me embody the fire of passion and the Senegalese spirit, which I know I’m now bound to. Forever. The Keur Massar Poet. His smile, animated by expressions that are already familiar to me. The way he speaks, rolling his ‘r’s, constructing sentences, laughing! His purity, his spirituality. His lyricism captivates me. His outrage. The way he dares to speak when others stay quiet. The impulsive way we discovered each other—or rediscovered—as if as one in another life. Two beings aware they’ve each found their other half—one a man, the other a woman, the same suffering, the same quicksilver liveliness, the same way of handling things, the ability to see from more than one perspective. I run into Anna-Maria for the last time on the poolside terrace at Hôtel Indépendence, amidst the disorder and disarray of the last party. With the radio still playing the lackadaisical fespaco3 film festival jingle in the background, I announce to the high priestess that I’m staying in Africa to marry Seydou. “Well, if that’s what you’ve decided, good luck to you! He’s rather handsome and likeable, but what are you going to do about his wife?” I explain to her that Seydou shares nothing with his first wife, that she won’t be a rival because we come from different worlds. And in saying this I consider myself to be extremely modern for accepting polygamy in this way, and proud not to be racially prejudiced. Anna-Maria finally wishes me a safe trip before disappearing in a flutter of fabric and the fragrance of an Yves Saint Laurent perfume. I find Seydou again on the terrace. “Don’t worry about it, she’s part of the old generation of Francophone African paternalists and doesn’t understand a thing about love between an African man and a French woman: she’s never really dared to live.” So, this time I suggest that if he wants, after Keur Massar, he can come and join me in France to relaunch his filmmaking career.

The Second Wife

2. A type of traditional West African drum.

3. The Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou (Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou).

“You’re so thoughtful! It’s a quality one admires in Senegal. It shows nobleness of heart.” But what he really wants, is just for me to come and see where he lives, modestly, with his family. In the real Africa. 6 March, Ouagadougou Bus Station

4. A traditionally nomadic population from the Saharan interior of North Africa.

5. A griot is a traditional African orator, storyteller and musician.

Keur Massar is two days from here, God willing. The heat is already unbearable. Dust there permeates the air of the bus station, a place dismissed to the outskirts of the city where sophisticated figures fade into the distance with the diverse fruits of their labour from fespaco. A feverish commotion reigns over the bus and lots of sweaty men are loading up enormous bags of merchandise. The cargo seems to be bulging out of the vehicle from all sides. Strings hold together what could be described as an enormous floppy hat made of hessian and tarpaulin, holding bags and cases crushed one against the other all higgledy-piggledy. I’m the only White woman. The only woman. I watch these men dash around, selecting a bus at random and embarking upon crazy journeys across the Sahara to the banks of Lampedusa or Barcelona, whilst Seydou and I prolong our honeymoon. They look at my legs. My knees emerge from the folds of my skirt. “Don’t worry about people looking, you’ll have to put up with that quite a bit.” The driver sits behind his fake leather steering wheel opposite a sticker of Mecca. He looks tough, skin darkened with the sun and wearing a loose blue turban like the Touaregs4 do. He’s bartering with customers for seats. My purse is empty. The bus is about to leave. Seydou had very little money coming here but pulls his last note from his pocket and asks the driver how much the journey will cost. “30,000,” states the man in blue without even turning his head, staring at a fixed point on the horizon. “50,000 for two people then, chief?” “The White woman can’t pay the same as everyone else! They colonise us and then ask for a friends’ discount!” Seydou launches into a griotic5 tirade complete with arm gestures. I stop myself from smiling and pray that he wins. “Chief! You need to understand, we’ve no time left to go to the bank. They’re waiting for us in Dakar where we’re getting married. All our family members are there, she’s already had a long journey from France to get here... It’s a marriage between the Black race and the White race; do you not support peace between different populations? God is great, he will not forget you. “OK, hop in!” Seydou hands the Touareg his last note and winks at me victoriously. We share a quiet little chuckle. “You won’t need money anymore when you’re in Keur Massar,” he says.

Raphaëlle Riol

Amazons

Publisher: Le Rouergue Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Brigitte Reydel brigitte.reydel@lerouergue.com Number of Pages: 192

Translation: Josephine Bacon bacon@langservice.com

An inter-generational, escapist novel in the tradition of ‘Thelma and Louise’ whose heroine is an old lady who is devilishly comforting. A book combining humour, irony and fantasy, that is a pleasure to read. Raphaëlle Riol asserts her iconoclastic free-spiritedness in this amusing, feminist novel that carries the reader along at top speed. Biography

Raphaëlle Riol was born in 1980 and studied literature in Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, gaining a master’s degree in contemporary poetry. She lives and works in Paris. Amazons is her second novel. Publications Comme elle vient, Le Rouergue, ‘La Brune’ collection, 2011.

It is late summer at ‘Repos fleuri’, a retirement home for old ladies who have outlived their deceased husbands. One of them, Alphonsine Guerini, aged 89, cannot stand the hospice any longer. Then there is Alice, aged 3, who has come to visit her grandmother. Do the two women have nothing in common? Quite the contrary. Both of them have a lot to share, their hatred of the country, for instance. No sooner have they met than here they are, running away from Repos Fleuri, to one of Alice’s childhood homes, which actually happens to be in the country … In a few days, each of them will try and re-appropriate her

life and memories because, as they put it, ‘we aren’t living among women just to be broken down’. We discover the miserable life led by Alphonsine, married to a dignitary who went off hunting on Sunday and was a tyrant at home. We see Alice, a Parisian working in event management, whose lover has just died and who dreams of ditching everything, including her job. They are real warriors, these Amazons, who have but one alternative ‘to become Madame Bovary or to kill’ … They are against resignation to their fate, but very much in favour of the revolution—at 30 as much as at 89!

I lift the receiver. My mother demands explanations for my sudden departure. Yes, demands! Yet the whole family is used to them, and these are often exceeded by my uncontrollable and rude ill temper. No allusion to my sidekick. No one has yet made the connection between her disappearance from the Repos Fleuri and my departure. All the better. That leaves me time to consider what is going to happen next. I improvise by explaining that I am off for a break to Loupiac. I need to take important decisions and get my breath back. She thinks I am referring to Robin’s recent death, convinced, like the rest of the family, that his sudden death traumatised me. Her comfortable platitudes prevent her from imagining for a moment my relief at the present time and even more so the curative necessity to commit murder, vindictive and obsessive as I was until his death. In any case, I am well aware that I can reassure no one about my states of mind, I would be judged indecent. So I keep quiet … The truth is that only a moment ago I was indeed intending to spend a few days in Loupiac to consider whether to resign from my job. I hate my shitty job. And it would give me the opportunity to see Max again and look after the grapefruit tree. What with all this, I forgot to make the compulsory introductions. My name is Alice, I am thirty years old. I deserve better than crying for a lover or killing myself by being shut away in a retirement home. Apparently, I am still young and pretty. Yet, people are always telling themselves, I’ll never grow old. Because I deserve better. So, in order to deserve it, I’m running away.

2 My name is Alphonsine Guerini. I am 89 years old and I hate the countryside. I saved the life of a young girl who was about to do something irreparable. Her name was Alice. At the time I climbed into her car, that is all I knew about her. I didn’t know how old she was or where she lived, nor why she had considered taking pills. I hate the countryside, and yet today, I am going back in the same daze as when I went there for the first time. The countryside is such a stultified and insipid landscape … And it is the same hackneyed stereotype as it was the first time round … Lingering on a single image. No doubt the first colour photo I had seen in my life. A last clear one, as well. My husband, triumphant. And at his feet, a pig with its throat cut. My husband, his feet submerged in blood-soaked mud. There could be no more miserable panorama than that of ordinary life. My husband, the pig, the swine, a meeting, a first time. Throughout his life, or almost, he would cut the throats of pigs and kill wild boars so that in the end, in my eyes, he became an old, fat pig himself. And against a din of terrified screams, imploring vainly to prevent the death of the innocents, how many times had I hoped for his? I am not ashamed to say so.

Raphaëlle Riol

Amazons

Is there a duty of memory in marriage? I must admit that as for his death, I hoped for it. I would also prefer to forget him as well. Animals scream against death long before the cold contact of the knife blade. It’s instinctive in them. They foresee the end even before they feel it across their hide. These pigs are such necromancers! On that day, I was wearing a virginal white lace dress. It was Chantilly lace, if you please. It was a mild spring day. The rays of the sun pierced through my dress. The day could be seen passing in the chiselling of the fine fabric that lifted with the wind. Daisies swayed amidst the poppies that covered the meadows. A few white and red splashes in a meadow that I had barely contemplated so deeply was I thinking about what to expect. A little of the probable and so much of what was uncertain … Because happiness is always unnameable before it has been tasted. Even as early as this, I found the countryside uninteresting. I was born by mistake in Rome, of a mother whose name was Borghese and a French father. I came from a family in which, strangely, women had quite a lot to say for themselves. Apparently, I may be descended from Pauline Borghese, so you see … Pomp and artifice are in my veins. The taste for independence as well …

The vein just behind the ears is fairly vulnerable. That is the one that needs to be sliced through if the animal is not to struggle to the bitter end. If it is paralysed and can be turned on its back, the neck artery is in the perfect position. In the past, the knives were sharpened. Very quickly. Steel must be impatient. The choreography needs to be arranged to the millimetre. When he kissed me in the church, his kiss was moist and fearful. He seemed to be afraid of being bitten. That was his sole mark of affection for the day. No night of love, he was too tired. Too drunk, above all. In the cool of the night, when the frail petals of the poppies had shrivelled, he was already snoring on my numbed arm. A thin trickle of dribble flowed into his brown beard, close cut for the occasion. All cats are grey at night and all poppies are crimson. Once an animal has been brought down, there should be no delay. The blood should then be collected in a brass bowl and stirred with the delicate amplitude of a female forearm. Because the splashes that soil are reserved for the women, once the throat has been successfully cut. It is the women who will make the black puddings, once the intestines have been cleaned for sausage casings. It is traditional for the men to do the slaughtering and for the women to clean up after them. I stroked his hair to the sound of the hooting owls. The window was halfopen. An acrid smell rose from the damp earth. It was the daisies, apparently … I swear to you that I would very much liked to have been loved. My intentions were pure, until that famous morning. Above all, don’t throw out the heart. Keep it, either for the black pudding or for the dogs. It arouses them before the hunt. It gives them an appetite for it. Finally, scrape the skin. Clean it. Burn the hairs off with a blow-torch unless this has been done already. Rinse in hot water. Fold the skin in four. That’s done. Along the nerves that stood out on his strong neck, I drew exclamation marks that were strident with the cries of the rodents who fought in the meadow between the daisies and the poppies. He didn’t wake up. Instead, his nostrils blew an alcoholic mist. It is strange to discover an odour which you know will never release you. Close up, he wasn’t ugly. But he looked his best from afar and that is how he impressed me … Due to my scrutinising him attentively, I woke him up. That is when he went into action. He sniffed at my armpits. Noisily. Then my chest, the curve of my breasts. That is how he grabbed them, like fruits for squeezing at breakfast. Like a pig’s heart from which you squeeze the last drop of liquid.

No waste, please. Do not discard the offal. I didn’t cry out. I continued to study him, to examine all his actions and gestures. And soon his body was entirely tattooed with invisible punctuation marks. The animals roared so that night. Oh, such languid exclamation marks … He penetrated me.

Raphaëlle Riol

Amazons

Wash the intestines in hot water and stuff them with the flesh which must first be cut into tiny pieces. Above all, do not remove the fat. Do it well, the large intestines will be made into big sausages. The little ones will be kept for ordinary sausages. In the blue-black night of a dawn that was still uncertain, his eyes shone like the honed metal of the knives. My flesh bent but did not concede. The intestines are normally robust. But if the membrane tears, just tie it in a knot, cut a piece off the intestine and place this empty casing over the spout of the sausage-maker. Continue. It wasn’t rape because I was expecting it. (I think I am making you dream). It had been arranged since my birth as a girl, I am telling you. Continue. Don’t forget the brains. Continue. Look, I’ve taught you the lesson of how to be a perfect wife. There’s no need to feel sorry. At the end, he leapt up after wiping his sexual organ on a starched pillow slip embroidered with our two initials delicately entwined. (Do you remember the trousseaus of young married women and their candid probity?). The practised swiftness of this gesture made me realise that he was no beginner. In those days, this is what prostitutes and drunken or mentally deficient peasant-women were for. They were for taking virginity. As far as I was concerned, it had been done. Arrange the hams in the troughs, cover them with coarse salt and massage them regularly. As for the sausages, hang them up on a string in the cellar so as to let them dry. He finally left to hunt wild boar. I never heard it cry out, that one. A wild board must be brought down swiftly, like a tree struck by lightning.

Whereas a pig is killed. The pig is first chosen, then felt all over meticulously before being sacrificed. The flesh is worked, it is caressed. Only after this is the knife plunged in. The wild boar, on the other hand is not approached immediately. Hours are spent in a hide waiting for it. It is desired and expected, it is even prayed for when one can no longer bear crouching in the undergrowth. It is waited for, I tell you. It comes or doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come. It depends on whatever the animal wants to do. One doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t win every time. Certain encounters can even prove fatal.

Isabelle Stibbe

Bérénice 34-44

Publisher: Serge Safran Éditeur Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Marie Sorlot et Marie-Pierre Garro right@pierreastier.com Number of Pages: 336

Translation: Clémence Sebag clemencesebag@gmail.com

Stibbe’s debut novel ‘Bérénice 34-44’ is impressive in its maturity. The author guides us deep into the velour, brocade, and mysteries of the Comédie-Française. Through the prism of an extraordinary destiny we are immersed in the murky waters of this period of history. A spellbinding artistic journey, Bérénice does justice to the fates broken by the murderous madness of World War II. Biography

Isabelle Stibbe was born in Paris in 1974. She began her career in international law, before working in theatre PR, first at the Comédie-Française then at the Grand Palais. Stibbe is also an opera critic. She is currently Secretary General of the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, and teaches at université Paris 3’s Institute of Theatre Studies. Bérénice 34-44 is her first novel.

It’s 1934. Bérénice Capel, a young Jewish girl with a ‘dramatic’ first name, passes the entrance audition of the Conservatoire de Paris entrance auditions, against her father’s wishes. Estranged from her family but with the help of her protector—Madame de Lignières who gives Bérénice her stage name –, the young girl begins acting under the tutelage of the famous film and theatre actor and director Louis Jouvet. Bérénice de Lignières is gifted, hard-working and passionate about the stage. She studies the most prestigious roles in the repertoire. In 1937, she is accepted into the Comédie-Française theatre company.

Neither the rise of fascism in Europe, nor political tension in France, professional rivalry, or liaisons can sully Bérénice’s happiness— she quickly becomes an acclaimed actress. In the early days of the Occupation, even before the promulgation of the Race Laws, the House of Molière excludes Jews from its company. The past of this beautiful and remarkable Comédie-Française associate starts catching up with her. Will she continue to hide her past, at the risk of losing more than her identity? Or will she emigrate with composer Nathan Adelman and build a new life in America?

1 Of the meaningful looks, the knowing smiles, she will not speak a word. “No such thing as chance,” “it was bound to happen”—a familiar tune that never did quite go over her head. And so was born the family myth that the call of theatre—which fell upon her when she was six, never to leave her again—sprang from her first name: Bérénice. There was only one person who dared to say otherwise, whether speaking her mind or in jest or—most likely—merely to play devil’s advocate. Bérénice’s grand-mother Mathilde—an educated woman with a fondness for pithy remarks—would often quip: “Jolly good job you didn’t call her Sappho, or she would have been a lesbian”; she sometimes added a variant: “Do you think if you had called her Isabelle, she would have become a Catholic?” Alluding to Isabel the Catholic—the damnable queen who chased the Jews from the Spanish kingdom—brought bad blood without fail: Catholic, in the Capel family’s hierarchy of values being nearly as reprehensible as lesbian. But it was to be neither Sappho, nor Isabelle, it was Bérénice, Gott zu dank, thank God—well, nearly. She will not tell her grand-children, nor even her children that she was brought forth on 28 June of the year of our Lord 1919, which was all the more sacred for being the year—better still, the very day—of the Treaty of Versailles. In the early twentieth century, France was busy convincing herself that the newly created League of Nations would bring world peace. “It had been downright lousy, but it was the war to end all wars, we’ve had a terrible time of it. The end. Europe would be pacifist from now on,” her father and thousands of others like him said in unison.

On that Saturday 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, France was glued to the news—newspapers or radios the ersatz for witnessing the arrival of the plenipotentiaries in the Hall of Mirrors, gravely soaking up the historical Versailles ceremony—solemnly awaiting the signature of the Treaty to wash France of the humiliation in 1871. It wouldn’t bring back the dead, it wouldn’t erase the cold, the worms, the suffering, the hell, but still, they would pay. Even though he had fought as early as 1914—and with pride too, don’t you know, for what could be more honourable for a Jewish immigrant than serving France? –, even though he had two wounds, a Mention in Orders and a Croix de Guerre to show for it, on that day Mr Capel had other things to worry about than the fate of the Huns : would his wife give birth to a boy or a girl? If it was a boy, he would be named Philippe, naturally—after the saviour of Verdun. If it was a girl, case closed just as surely: she would be named Bérénice. Just so—after Racine’s heroine, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen! He hadn’t read much, had Mr Capel, but in the war he had chummed up with a schoolteacher. A smashing young guy who had read scores of books and knew entire poems from memory. Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine—Verlaine especially. A long time ago, in the cheder in Russia where he had learned to read and write, Mr Capel had met a chaver like him who could recite the Torah off by heart. You’d tell him the number of a chapter or verse, and hey presto, he’d reel off the passage in question without ever getting it wrong. Even the rabbi was bowled over. The schoolteacher was a goy and an atheist (he might even have been a freemason, which goes to show it can happen to very respectable people) so practised his skills on French literature—which, when you thought about it, was even more impressive than the Bible. And not a bit pretentious either, a simple man, who didn’t turn his nose up when it came to doing chores; a decent chap. Louis was his name, a good French name, a king’s name. They stupefied you, the trenches, so to kill time and escape exhaustion, the heebie-jeebies, and the hunger, they would tell each other about their lives. They got along well, those two, even though from the outside they didn’t appear to have much in common—one being of French extraction, and the other a Jew exiled from his native Russia to avoid serving the Tsar, whose army was known for its virulent anti-Semitism. It hadn’t stopped Maurice Capel from enlisting in the French army on the very first day of the war: “Here they allow me to be Jewish, they allow me to work and feed my wife, now my turn has come to bring my contribution to France.” As a rule, Louis was a bon vivant, full of banter, always with a joke or a story to tell; but sometimes, when it was freezing, or when there was nothing to do, when the routine of military life crushed their spirits, when they felt suffocated by the narrow tunnels and stacked up sandbags, a little sentence would escape

Isabelle Stibbe

Bérénice 34-44

from him, one that was an enigma to Mr Capel’s ears: “when the day begins and the sun climbs the sky and then declines”... Just those words, always conjuring away the end, always with a hint of a sad smile tinged with irony—as if he himself were surprised by the flippancy of his subconscious. Realising that Mr Capel did not understand the reference to the Racine verse, he recounted him the Bérénice tragedy, told him how Titus burned for Bérénice, and how the Roman Emperor had promised marriage to the Queen of Palestine, and how he renounced her—dared not disobey the laws of Rome—and how Titus sighed and how Bérénice wailed, told him everything that makes Racine what he is. He also explained about the context—how the former Port-Royal student had written into his play Louis XIV’s love for Mazarin’s niece Marie Mancini, and how the king had given her up, bowing to State expediency. And how Alexandre Dumas echoed this same renunciation in his Vicomte de Bragelonne—but fictionalised of course: with musketeer d’Artagnan and his disdain for the prince’s cowardice brought into the real-life lovers’ rendezvous. French literature really was quite fascinating, thought Mr Capel… Cross my heart and hope to die, as the boys would say, if he came through this war, he would read all the books the schoolteacher had introduced him to. “When the day begins and the sun climbs the sky and then declines...” it was quite something, and no denying it—sounded so French… “And Titus will not see his Berenice”. Such concision in the French language: in one sentence everything was said. What a shame there weren’t more books in the barracks library. You couldn’t find plays in there, so that Mr Capel had no choice but to ask Louis to recite Bérénice to him again and again, the way children demand stories before they fall asleep— always the same one—banning the adults from changing so much as a single comma. By dint of it, without realising, ‘Bérénice’ had become their code name for peace, for their dreams of homecoming, of returning to normal life, for the caress of daily routine, for the wives they could hold in their arms again, for the jobs they could take up again—one going back to his pupils, badly dressed little rascals in their grey overalls, back to their mischief and their ink stains; the other to his furs and his clients, bourgeoises with their strings of pearls, their airs and graces, their minks, their expectations. What’s more, Bérénice, Mr Capel thought gleefully, Bérénice, tee-hee, well she was the Queen of Palestine. Not that Mr Capel had ever considered living there, like those meshuggene who wanted to recreate a nation and revive a dead language, oïe abro’h! no, Sir, not him, he was no madman but still, the country of milk and honey, “next year in Jerusalem,” repeated every year during Passover, it meant something, so he liked that Racine fellow for having made a Jewish woman a dramatic heroine. That wasn’t something he dared tell his chum Louis, he wanted to show he was integrated, that he was French first, and Jewish after. It was his own little secret, one that filled him with mirth. No doubt

about it, Bérénice was the most beautiful name in the world for his little girl. The schoolteacher would have liked that, killed though he was in the trenches in 1918, just a few days before the end of the war. Poor bugger! He was only twenty-five and left a widow, a lovely little lady he had shown him a picture of. Twenty-five, what a waste. The best are always the first to go. Louis would never see the young imps from his school, the winsome little monkeys Mr Capel felt he knew—the schoolteacher had told him about them so. Camille, the little redhead whose work was full of spelling mistakes but who was so smart and, most of all, good as gold; Charles, the great big ninny who had grown too fast so that his long pants ended up looking like short pants; Léon, who showed off because his father was loaded and drove a Torpedo; Victor, who was bosseyed… Louis would never know what these little fellows would become when they grew up. War was a nasty piece of work and no mistake.

Isabelle Stibbe

Bérénice 34-44

It was the day of the Treaty of Versailles, and it was a girl. The little lady was born in good health, a big seven-pound baby with huge eyes that ate up her whole face, a head of hair just as full as a one-week baby, and darling little nails, so long and smooth they seemed to have been manicured. And what a cry, what a cry... No doubt about it, she would be a real Capel, a wilful girl who wouldn’t let anyone tell her what to do. Oh, she would give men no end of trouble, the happy father thought cheerily. When she had discovered the sex of the baby, for a moment its mother was apprehensive of her husband’s reaction. In Jewish law, does not morning prayer make the man say: “Thank you, my God, for not making me a woman”? Mr Capel knew it all too well, he’d heard the prayer in the synagogue in his youth enough times, but even though he could hardly be said to have studied for long, he wasn’t backward enough to believe in such nonsense. Girl or boy, no matter, he would love his child just the same. After the pogroms, the death of his first wife in Russia, the trouble finding work in France, everything was going well, at last. His second wife was industrious and attentive, and now they had a little girl who would grow up in the land of human rights, the land of Zola,—a country where one put revolutionary ideas and melodious verses in writing,—a country where Racine could write about a Jewess and his play could become a masterpiece, where a splendid chap like Louis the schoolteacher could exist, where you could move around freely, laugh, and sing, without having the Cossacks or the Tsar’s police on your back. Halleluiah, the era of pogroms was well and truly over, the French Section of the Workers’ International was sure to win the general elections soon. What more could one want? He was a happy Jew in France.

Michelle Tourneur

Death by Beauty

Publisher: Fayard Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Carole Saudejaud csaudejaud@editions-fayard.fr Number of Pages: 308

Translation: Imogen Forster imogen.forster@talktalk.net

Michelle Tourneur is, of course, paying homage to Delacroix in her novel, but she is less interested in claiming to enter his private world, or to unlock the secret of his genius, than in marvelling over and over again at the excitement it creates. It would perhaps be more accurate to speak of a novel of wonder, or quite simply, a declaration of love. “Michelle Tourneur offers us a thrilling romantic story, written in taut, resonant language that never puts a foot wrong. The passions it depicts are fleshed out in a wealth of exquisite detail. The writing has a wild, almost drunken energy.” La Vie nouvelle “With its almost visionary insight, Michelle Tourneur’s novel reaches dizzying heights, revealing how a person may burn, drown, lose, and then find themselves again in a painting; how they may be intoxicated by a facial feature or a colour, discovering things they had not seen and will never see again. How that may be a matter of life or death.” Télérama Biography

Michelle Tourneur was born in Grenoble. After writing her dissertation on Delacroix and George Sand, she gave up teaching to do what she had always wanted to do—become a creative writer. She has worked in radio and television and in publishing, and has written some thirty plays and serial episodes for radio, as well as film and television scripts. The television adaptation of Les Mouettes sur la Saône won the Prix de la Fondation de France, and her play La Burette was awarded the Plume d’or de la ville de Genève. In addition to the solitary activity of writing she likes to meet audiences at performances which use text, piano and visual images to bring to life an artist in his or her historical setting. They include Haendel le voyant and Le Trio d’un siècle: George Sand-Delacroix-Chopin. In Thrall to Beauty is her fifth novel. Publications Her most recent novels with Gallimard include Nuit d’or et de neige, 2002, and Lumières d’alcôve, 1999.

When she presents herself at Eugène Delacroix’s studio, Florentine knows only one thing: she wants to spend as much time there as she can, among his completed works and those still in progress, surrounded by the aura and charisma of a man who encompasses entire worlds within himself. She offers him her services. He has already realised she is no domestic servant, and though mistrustful and wedded to his solitary way of life, he allows himself to be won over without understanding why.

Florentine is an orphan, brought up by a priest and his sister in a small presbytery in the Landes, lashed by the wind from the ocean, and the illuminations in an old book of hours have taught her that to live is to see. An uncle in Paris, the wealthy owner of a shop selling de-luxe fabrics, takes her into his home, and she realises that she will never see the world more vividly than through Delacroix’s paintings. And patiently, in secret, she devises the most ingenious and unexpected way of convincing him of that fact.

For the first time since his visitor had entered the room, he looked up at her, and felt a sudden stab of pain, the return of an old, deep-seated turmoil. He saw the room with new eyes—the faded wallpaper, the notebook full of drawings lying on the bed—and framed in the doorway he saw a face whose features were so mobile it was impossible to retain them. His pulse raced and he was no longer aware that he was holding a pestle in his hand. The powder spilled, dirtying his fingers and falling over his cuff. ‘If we were to start this weekend, you’d have to leave me a key, Sir. Or else decide on a hiding-place for when you were out.’ ‘Start this weekend?’ In a state of shock, he dropped the empty pig’s bladder and grabbed a rag to wipe his hands. He studied this golden vision who had come in out of the fog, with her little mud-spattered shoes, her childlike mouth and wide bluegrey eyes, her uncovered hair tied loosely at the nape of her neck. Nothing about her appearance, neither the dark cloth cape nor the black mittens that exposed fingers red with cold, gave any hint as to this young laundry-woman’s social standing. How old was she? About twenty, not much more. She wanted to know where the key was hidden so that she could come and get rid of the dust. So many of them knew that dust, so many who passed through, modest or brazen, dark-complexioned or fair like this one, leaving the key after willingly agreeing to do whatever he asked of them. This one had arrived uninvited, but he studied her closely, and the more he studied her, the more he felt her

presence was something uncanny, conjured up by his weariness or by the turpentine fumes that hung suspended in the air. Had she vanished into the folds of the portière he would not have been so very surprised. He recalled that he had spoken to Elise about hiding the key. He thought of her—old Elise from the washhouse—as a formidable warrior, someone who had been clever enough to withstand poverty and ill-health, managing her little team of laundresses with an expert hand. Whenever he thought of her, he saw her surrounded by a dazzling aura, an heroic figure of the city streets. Out of respect for Elise, he felt obliged to reply. ‘The models know where the key is,’ he said curtly. ‘If they find it, it means I’m busy. They wait. Elise knows too, but she’s tactful. Everyone holds their tongue. Apart from the sort of people who hang around the studios. You sometimes get them here. It’s the nature of the beast. You have to …’ ‘Watch out?’ He decided she was quick, and corrected her: ‘You have to protect yourself! Yourself, and the work. The kind of people who rub shoulders at the studios—dealers, casual visitors, cranks—they think they’re at the circus. And they think we’re acrobats, all hanging from our flying trapeze. It’s dangerous, a free spectacle. Some people can’t get enough of it. I avoid that sort of mayhem, myself.’ He shrugged and concluded: ‘And as for taking care of this room, there’s a maid who comes in. She’s accustomed to it. I’ve no need of anyone else.’ ‘I understand. My name’s Florentine. Florentine Victorine Marie Galien.’ She had taken a piece of paper out of her pocket. She wrote her name on it, with all her forenames, and passed it to him. Struck by her alacrity and surprised that she could write, surprised at her tone of voice and even more at the ease with which she conducted herself among the enormous canvases whose force she felt without apparently being unnerved by it, he took the piece of paper. She must have prepared for her visit. He could have sworn this wasn’t her first impression. Besides, it wasn’t a good moment for a long discussion. There were a dozen canvases to be finished for the Salon at the Grand Louvre. For weeks he had been getting up at crack of dawn, painting for seven hours at a stretch, eating badly or not at all, only putting down his brush to fall into his armchair, consider the overall effect and decide whether the dominant tone wasn’t weakened by the profusion of colours. The work met his expectations, and he was satisfied with it as a whole. But that didn’t mean his paintings had been accepted. The forty members of the jury were taking their time about announcing a date. That was their usual tactic, and faced with their silence, you had to keep a low profile, stay out of sight, along with anything you were working on. In no circumstances let your ideas seep out.

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And that being so, to let a stranger wander about his workplace was certainly not a good idea. That was obvious, obvious. For a moment he repeated the word to himself. But even so, at the same time, the idea of genuinely useful assistance hovered about him, took him back to the polished silver and sparkling glasses in the well-kept drawing-room of his childhood. He heard himself ask: ‘Have you been employed before?’ ‘Me?’ She gave a start at his question. She had missed nothing. He did not speak to servants in a familiar way. Why not? That was strange. She was surprised at his formality and even a little frightened. ‘For three years I was employed as a lady’s maid by the Baron de Chanfreneuse, in Normandy,’ she said. ‘You left your position, then.’ ‘To come to Paris.’ ‘With a clear idea in mind?’ ‘We all have our reasons, Sir.’ ‘It’s dangerous to arrive in Paris on the off-chance. The city’s full of unsavoury characters. Where do you live?’ ‘In a little attic not far from here, with a friend who’s found work at the washhouse.’ ‘Why didn’t you have a look there, too?’ She looked straight at him with her blue-grey eyes, then looked away. He had the feeling he was being interrogated, bluntly and forthrightly. He met her gaze. ‘I prefer working by myself.’ Her expression was confident, almost haughty, although her tone of voice was respectful. From her cape, fitting loosely round her long neck, drifted the fragrance of someone who keeps herself clean and tidy. It was very different from the unpleasant odours left by the maid each time she came to clean up in the studio. ‘You should find something near here,’ he said. ‘Take a look by the footbridge. Ask. It’s a busy neighbourhood—plenty of people live around here.’ She shook her head, and like a chess-player moving his last pawn when he decides the game isn’t yet lost, she said, ‘I also like taking care of evening clothes. Satin lapels, fine velvet … I know how to do it, and I enjoy it’ She hadn’t given up hope. The drop of oil the painter had poured into the mortar was beginning to liquefy the pigments. His movements became slower as he worked. He was thinking about his visitor’s voice, and the paleness of her skin. Raising his head, he saw that she was drawing the ribbons of her cape more tightly round her neck. He picked up the bag lying at the foot of the chest, and offered it to her.

Michelle Tourneur

Death by Beauty

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‘Don’t forget. A studio can’t abide a mess. I’m a stickler about things left lying around.’ There was no more to be said. She felt herself at the centre of a vacuum that the overcharged atmosphere did not fill but opened up still further, turning it into a yawning abyss with each passing second. The gilt frames lying on the floor, the canvases, the prints, the sketches, the big portrait of a tiger on the wall, all seemed to surge wildly towards her, set on driving her to the edge of that bottomless pit. But at that very moment, an answer came to her. Through all her confusion and the rapid pounding of her heart, she felt herself filled with strength and light, and suddenly before her eyes appeared the warmth and brilliance of an object she had never seen, one that glittered. She took a breath before leaping into the depths. ‘For the seated woman, Sir, you should give her a gold bracelet.’ ‘The seated woman?’ She looked at him, eyebrows raised, strong, taller now, sure about what she was suggesting, more luminous still. ‘On the carpet.’ He had the curious feeling that the words were coming out of his own mouth. For months he had kept this elusive image before his mind’s eye, nourishing in secret the idea of the woman seated on the carpet, under the hooked-up curtain, in the small, rather warm room. Sleeping with the seated woman, living and breathing with the seated woman and her companions. Apart from a few colour-notes, some quick references, there was no actual sketch of the subject in the studio, nothing substantial anywhere. Nothing. But the seated woman of his imagination was, in fact, wearing a gold bracelet on her bare ankle. Swept along by that force, incapable of stopping it since it emanated from his own painting, and somehow overcome, under a compulsion, in thrall to the thing that was trying to come to him but which he could not identify, he said: ‘The key’s over there … behind the door, under the skirting-board. You just have to slip your hand in.’

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Philippe Vilain

The Unfaithful Wife

Publisher: Grasset & Fasquelle Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Heidi Warneke hwarneke@grasset.fr Number of Pages: 160

Translation: Ian Monk ian.monk@wanadoo.fr

Philippe Vilain is back with a novel which is rather evocative of the world of Alberto Moravia: the story of a man who, when he discovers that he is being cheated on, decides to remain silent. In fact, do we ever really know the person we share a bed with? Biography

Philippe Vilain was born in 1969. He is the author of several novels and essays. The Unfaithful Wife is his eighth novel. Publications Among his most recent novels: Pas son genre, 2011 (republished: J’ai lu, 2013); Faux-père, 2008; Paris l’après-midi, 2006.

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It is the story of a couple like so many others: a man and a woman, whose love has become worn out over time. One evening, she goes out for a moment and carelessly leaves her mobile phone on a shelf. Her husband glances at it and discovers a text message which has clearly been sent to her by a lover. When his wife comes back home, instead of confronting her, he decides to remain silent. Nothing has changed in her behaviour, except

that the person who goes to sleep and wakes up beside him has now become unfaithful to him. Or has she always been so? Is she even the person he thought he knew? Will choosing secrecy save their life as a couple? In the end, if a man is being deceived, hasn’t he also been deceiving himself? This finely crafted novel constantly alternates between farce and tragedy.

I shall never forget the day I found out that my wife was cheating on me. It was a Saturday afternoon in November last year, in our flat on Rue Laffitte. I was smoking a cigarette by the window, when my wife popped out for a moment. The rain seemed to be whitewashing the streets and buildings, while the shopsigns were glittering between them, as though isolated from the rest of the city. I finished my cigarette, watching her as she went, with her red umbrella, then I closed the window and switched on the television. I ran through the channels, without managing to settle on anything, surfing from a programme about politics to a football match between Milan and Rome, while saying to myself that I had no desire to watch tv, in fact no desire to do anything in particular, and that being on my own in the flat was so tedious. I ended up turning off the sound. Watching tv with no sound had become a habit: that way, things looked less ridiculous to me. The images lit up the living-room, and the footballers danced, distorted by the reflexions from the window panes. The rain intensified. I thought of phoning my wife, to ask her where she was, and if she’d found some shelter, but just as I was about to do so, I noticed that she’d left her mobile phone on a shelf in the bookcase. I picked it up and, for no real reason, or no other reason, honestly, than to kill time, and without really understanding why, as I had never once suspected my wife during the eight years we’d been married, or mistrusted her in any way, it was as if I were being called by her telephone. Of the hundred or so text messages recorded on it, most of them were from me or her girlfriends, except for one, which dated from the previous week, was unnamed and had been stored under the initial ‘F’: ‘Every night I dream of you,

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of your body …’, then, below it, came my wife’s answer: ‘I belong to you, I’m your slut’. I then put the phone back down where I had found it and returned to the television. I couldn’t believe what I’d just read. I looked at the things around me without seeing them, the living-room, the rain behind the window, the match, red against white—an entire scene that I no longer recognised, to which I felt alien. I don’t know how long I waited, about thirty minutes perhaps. When my wife came back, I forced myself to remain natural and focus my attention on the match, but I couldn’t stop looking at her, staring at her even: ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked. ‘I don’t know. Like what?’ ‘Like that!’ she said opening her eyes wide to imitate my strange stare. ‘You’re looking at me like that!’ ‘I don’t really know why I’m looking at you,’ I replied without thinking. ‘Can’t I look at my wife anymore?’

Philippe Vilain

The Unfaithful Wife

* It requires an effort to remember the next few days, and it would be hard for me to describe the feeling that then dominated me, which was neither anger nor even jealousy, but instead a sort of devastation, or stupor, which stopped me from reacting. Some men would have erupted into fury, others might have broken down, but I did nothing. I remained dumb. Mute. Oddly enough, I didn’t suffer. It was as if I were under a local anaesthetic which had smothered any sensation of pain, while I still remained conscious of what I should have been feeling, and while it was also diluting the emotion caused by this shock, but without wiping out the memories I had of it: and so I constantly went on reliving it, unable to prevent it from surging up to burst into my thought processes. What kept coming back from that scene was not the most violent moment, but the most decisive one. It was not the instant when I discovered the text messages, but instead when I noticed my wife’s mobile phone and walked over to it: each time, I saw myself going towards that phone, while imagining that it might be possible to rewind, that I still had the choice to stop right there, to go back to the window again or sit down in front of the tv, while also saying to myself that, if I decided to do so, then nothing serious would happen, our life as a couple would return to normal and be just like it had been, before my wife had gone out. What I felt above all, when playing back that inner film, was the inevitable, predestined nature of that moment, its terrifying slowness, which was leading me towards my destruction, because, in my mind’s eye, I was walking in slow motion, gliding, as if my memory had worn itself out by repeating itself or else, by slowing down my steps, it was trying to avoid tipping me instantly into misery, thus holding me back a little while longer in a ‘time before’. I have no idea how long this lasted; two weeks, a month, maybe more. I felt distant from everything. Current events, which normally interest me, left me

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indifferent. Nothing that happened during the end of that month of November attracted my attention. Autumn slipped past me. As I was still failing to recover, incapable of getting over the fact of finding out that my wife was cheating on me, it required mental force to focus my thoughts on anything else, with a feeling of exasperation at all other preoccupations, from my professional activities to my everyday pastimes, which distracted me from the essential. Not only did I feel that the time I spent on such things had been wasted, but I felt a need to think about this situation constantly, until I became numb and lost in endless deliberations which, in the end, heightened my incomprehension: for example, all I had to do was to start having doubts about my wife’s love for me, for her to start proving how much she loved me at once (by never leaving my side and continuing to discuss our future projects); however, no sooner had I noticed such proofs than I started to have fresh doubts about her because, by betraying my trust and no longer respecting any duty to remain faithful to me, she no longer embodied that form of love that we had decided on together. Without providing me with any answers, these endless reflections at least gave me the feeling that I was progressing towards the truth about love: quite clearly, if we can cheat without loving, just as we can love while cheating, or abstain from cheating but without loving, or even not love the person we are cheating with, in order to love even more the person we are cheating on, then we never love except in a contradictory way, while fidelity is no more a proof of love than infidelity is a proof of love’s non-existence. Only then was I able to conclude that cheating was meaningless. They say that thinking too much makes men mad, but I would have been driven crazy by no longer thinking about all this. It was all I could do. Applying my intelligence in this way gave me the impression that I was avoiding a sort of dementia. I felt as though I had to use my reason, to test myself out in this exercise, and that my salvation lay in sticking to this path. So it was that I investigated the question of infidelity; so it was that I read testimonies on web forums written by husbands with adulterous wives, while avidly diving into novels that dealt with what I was going through; so it was that the unpleasantness caused by this infidelity—my general lack of interest and my self-absorption—no longer worried me. It had no doubt been necessary for my wife’s infidelity to become an obsession with me, before I could feel that I still had any connection with her. * I might be thought naïve if I confess that I had always found it unimaginable that my wife would ever cheat on me, because I trusted her so much, and was so certain that we were a close, mutually-supportive couple. We had always got along fine, and had always helped each other out during difficult times: for example the first year we lived together when, as a mere junior accountant at

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Assurances Generali, my wife provided me with vital material support while I devoted my salary to paying off the mortgage, and living so thriftily, that I was reliant on her and would refuse to splash out on the sort of fun or travels that we yearned for as a young couple. This situation weighed on me, but she found it natural: ‘Look,’ she used to say, ‘I really don’t see where the problem is. You know, it’s not as if I was depriving myself of anything, and I’m sure you’d do the same thing for me!’ She had been quite right about that: later on, after she had lost her job as a consultant, and I had become a chief accountant, I was now the one on a good salary, while she could count on my help—which, to my mind, was not a sign of my being grateful, but instead the proof that I no longer dissociated the two of us, and that, in a sense, my wife had become me. Our complicity seemed faultless. Everything I shared with her gave me a sort of sensual pleasure. We were inseparable. As for me, I went out of my way to devote as much of my time to her as possible, and I missed her whenever a business trip drew us apart for a time; I would then phone her several times a day, or else send her text messages. I experienced no feeling of tedium, nor any need for independence, even though such sensations are no doubt natural after several years spent living together: whenever I was far away from her, I felt dull. When I think about what attracted me most about my wife, I must admit, ironically, that I was on the point of saying that the trait of her personality which I had always appreciated most in her, and the quality which made me esteem her, was precisely her faithfulness, her uprightness, the kind of honesty that she exhibited before one and all, but also in terms of herself, and which meant that, for example, in her professional life, she had turned down an attractive post as a consultant which her family, being influential in this field, had pushed her way, because she felt that she lacked the necessary skills; or, to take another example, in her sentimental life, she would flee from self-interested relationships and would reject suitors from her milieu, who had better jobs or more money than me. Although my wife came from a family of notaries, she possessed neither the smugness nor the insincerity of heiresses, who, so as not to diminish the extent of their successes, fly in the face of reality and deny the very advantages they have benefited from; for she had distanced herself from her family at a young age, and was proud of the fact that she now owed them nothing, while remaining aware that her education, social position, and the financial security she had enjoyed during her youth, might not have given her a guaranteed future, but had at least allowed her to approach it with equanimity—all of which seemed to her to be a ‘luxury’; but this desire to be ‘self-made’ was not associated in her with any form of individualism; on the contrary, I would say that, at work as in her family life, my wife liked nothing more than to share, cooperate and participate in a collective venture. This is why she had preferred to join an agency of consultants rather than become self-employed, even though her family had encouraged her to do so.

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The Unfaithful Wife

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Alice Zeniter

Gloomy Sunday

Publisher: Albin Michel Date of Publication: January 2013 Foreign Rights Manager: Solène Chabanais solene.chabanais@albin-michel.fr Number of Pages: 288

Translation: Naomi Colmer nay.colmer@gmail.com

A family novel with varying shades of light, nostalgia, historical drama, distance and certainty. Alice Zeniter has a true feel for narrative and its polyphony, its occasional immoderation. She understands the power of detail and anecdote, and how to paint human beings in all their contradiction and fragility. This promising young novelist has already attracted the attention of critics (Le Monde, Télérama, Le Figaro, La Vie, Libération, Rolling Stone, etc.), booksellers and literary prizes (Prix de la Cité de l’histoire de l’immigration, 2010; Prix de la Fondation Laurence Trân, 2011). Biography

Alice Zeniter was born in Basse-Normandie in 1986. In 2003, aged only 16, she published her first novel, Deux moins un égal zéro, with Éditions du Petit Véhicule. She finished her baccalauréat the following year, after which she moved to Paris to continue her studies. She spent a year in Hungary, where she taught French at the University of Budapest and interned with Árpád Schilling, artistic director of the Krétatör theatre company. The young novelist is passionate about theatre: she acts, writes her own theatrical works, and takes an interest in artistic direction. Her first play, Spécimens humains avec monstres, on the subject of war, has been chosen to receive the backing of the Centre nationale du théâtre. Publications Jusque dans nos bras, Albin Michel, 2010 (republished by Le Livre du Poche, 2011) (prix littéraire de la Porte Dorée, presented by the Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration); translated by Alison Anderson, Take this Man, Europa Editions, 2011.

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The Mándy family have lived in the same timber house next to Budapest’s railway lines for many generations, with each of its members working at the central station. Young Imre has grown up in an impenetrable world of family secrets where many things are left unspoken. At the fall of the Berlin Wall he leaves school to work in a sex shop. He meets a young woman—a German—who, for him, embodies the myth of the free and easy West. But for the Mándys, whatever the regime, life has

always been more about watching the trains go by than about becoming the passengers themselves … Through communism and consumerism, life at the Mándys’ stands still. Imre, a loser of the likeable variety—a sensitive, gentle, romantic dreamer—is the perfect embodiment of a society that expects nothing from the future, and whose tragicomic history betrays its powerlessness to command its own fate.

Gloomy Sunday, I waited for you with white bouquet, One Sunday morning, chasing after my dreams, The carriage of my sorrow returned without you … Grandfather’s voice reached the house from the furthest corner of the triangular garden. Imre didn’t need to hear the way the song’s consonants were being slurred to know that the old man was drunk: his grandfather bellowed the song with astonishing ferocity. Since then my Sundays will always be sad, Tears my only drink, sorrow my only bread … His voice was accompanied by the sound of the big rake. Dull thuds could be heard as he struck the fence with the end of the implement, again and again. Each impact must have vibrated throughout his entire body, resonating along the crooked spine that ran diagonally across his back like a road that had decided to make a detour. Grandfather’s dead leg, which he dragged behind him with great difficulty, affected his walk to such an extent that it created a bend in his spine. Any form of physical activity caused him great stabs of pain. But he refused to stop raking. Tears my only drink …

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Grandfather was now bawling even louder. Those words sounded strange on the lips of a man whose singing was the result of too much pálinka. Imre knew that his grandfather had slipped a bottle of the stuff into his back trouser pocket just before he went out into the garden: a long, tubular bottle that looked more like a cosmetic product than a liquor bottle. Imre was well acquainted with Grandfather’s eau-de-vie. A few months ago he had opened the bottle to smell it, and the fumes had burnt the insides of his nostrils. It was medicinal, brutal. It got up into your nose, attacking and cauterising the mucous membranes. Imre could see no possible connection between the plump, golden apricots that decorated the bottle and the smell of hospital inside. The disappointment had been crushing. That 2nd May began to feel familiar to the young boy as the old man drank himself into oblivion. He was conscious that none of this was new. He had seen it all before. He couldn’t remember when. His young brain could not yet perceive his life in a clearly chronological way, but that song: he knew it. He had heard it before. Every year the same scene would play itself out. The old man would swear that his grief was forgotten. That he would be fine. That he might take a walk into the town centre to keep his mind occupied. But every year the family would find him lying dead drunk in the grass amid the rubbish he had given up gathering, the rake at his side and the bottle lying empty near his hand. Imre was never allowed to see him. He would always be sent to his room. Yet he remembered seeing Grandfather’s feet protruding from the grass. They had seemed enormous; he had thought it was a dead giant. That night, he hadn’t been able to sleep. And every year, Imre would hear the accursed song, each rendition filled with more hate. One day he had asked the old man to teach him the words, but his grandfather had refused. He had said that the song was shitty, and that its composer, Rezsö Seress, was a criminal; Imre could not understand why Grandfather insisted upon singing a song that he hated. The boy would sing a few snippets that he had been able to retain, over and over, trying to unearth the hidden meaning that unleashed the old man’s fury. This last Sunday, dearest please come, A priest there will be, and a casket, a shroud, Flowers there will be, flowers and a casket … Grandfather was now launching into the most dismal verse. Imre felt the song’s sadness as a pain in his chest, a stabbing under his ribs. He moved closer to the window and looked out at the old man. He was still on his feet. It would be a while before it was over. Slowly but surely, Grandfather’s movements would become less precise and

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the rake would not reach as far. Both Grandfather and the rake would seem to shrivel and shrink. His voice would become less distinct. The song would give way to a succession of expletives. He would wish death upon everybody he did not like. I hope they all die, he would say. I hope Stalin dies again in his grave! Then he would add: And death to all gardeners! That was always his final curse: the one he would come out with just before he fell, that took the most effort to say, that hurt the most. Then he would fall asleep. Agnès, Imre’s sister, and Pál, their father, would then go out noiselessly to get him. Both of them would go over to the old man, but it was always Agnès who carried him into the little house. Pál was too sensitive; he could not bear to see him in such a state. For a moment, he would bend over his father lying in the grass, but, before he could do anything, he would suddenly become overwhelmed. He would drop down next to him, weeping silently. Ági’s shoulders would bow under Grandfather’s weight as she struggled to carry him into the living room. Inside, sat squarely in her armchair, Ildiko, the children’s mother, would refuse to budge. She had no sympathy for the old man: his yearly intoxications made her furious. Büdös disznó! she would say, spitting on the floor. Filthy swine. She hated any form of alcohol, but she hated her father-in-law’s the most. He can stay out there all night for all I care, she would say indifferently. Nobody forced him to get into that state. But Imre, Agnès and Pál had too keen a sense of family to let the old man sleep outside. He would have been exposed to the night trains and the rubbish that the passengers threw out of the windows. The little house sat among the railway tracks that streamed out of the Nyugati station, and the trains skimmed past the fence of the triangular garden. At the time the house was built, the station had been nothing but a vague proposal, and nobody had imagined that the tracks would spread as far as they had, right up to the timber house. The name of the station itself—nyugat, meaning “West”—had promised an entirely different course for the future trains. Instead, they sped northwards and eastwards, encircling the house. At the end of the 1980s, though the house was not yet completely surrounded by the tracks, the left side of the garden was already lined with long metal girders. Since then, a fence had been erected to establish a clear boundary between the dominion of the trains and that of Imre’s family. The division of land had been in the trains’ favour. It was Grandfather’s grandfather who had bought the land, in those distant days when it was nothing but a field at the city’s edge. It was also he who had built the house; his name was engraved above the door in large, shaky, black letters: imre mándy. For centuries this had been the name of every first-born male in the family. Imre felt proud each time he looked up at the gable on his way into the house. He felt, almost tangibly, the quiver of the bond that his

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name established between himself and his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his house-building ancestor, his great-great-grandfather. But not with his father. Curiously, the family name had skipped a generation and Pál was called Pál. It was a flaw in the family tree. ‘Why doesn’t Apa have the same name as you and me?’ the boy would ask his grandfather. ‘Inquisitive boys and girls grow old before their time.’ ‘Why don’t you have the same name as us?’ ‘Makes for a change,’ his father would reply, smiling sadly. But Imre thought that it couldn’t be nice for him to come home and see somebody else’s name over the door. Grandfather liked to say that Imre Mándy the Great, who had built the house, had purchased the most beautiful piece of countryside that ever existed: the triangular garden had been a green meadow, dotted with disorderly clumps of violets. A stream had run through it, and water snakes had hidden in the dark grasses at the water’s edge. In springtime there had been rabbits and frogs, and the sound of animal life had filled the house, offering up its complicity, its secret whisper, to those who lived there. There in that marshy paradise, all by himself, their ancestor had built their home. On the ground floor was the main living room with its fireplace, and the small kitchen whose walls were covered in different coloured pots; on the floor above, the two bedrooms: the master bedroom, and the children’s bedroom that could have been a miniature. Beneath the staircase was a lavatory in which it was difficult to stand. The house had been built slowly with his own two hands; it was a world without machines. Since the time of Imre’s great-great-grandfather, the modernisation of Budapest had transformed the humble dwelling into a small island amid the tracks. Despite the increasing speed of the passing trains, the house was still upright. Over the years it had been the subject of continuous dispute between Imre’s family and the local authorities, who didn’t want anything to hamper the development of the railways. The occupants of the timber house had met offers and threats with the same calm indifference. Their ancestor had decided on behalf of all future generations that the family would be rooted to this precise spot, behind a door bearing its name. His descendants had carried out his wishes with the conviction that, no matter how many laws and land registries the opposition shook at them, they were acting within their rights. They liked the idea of being a dynasty bound to their land. After decades of unsuccessful negotiation, the railway company had abandoned their plans to demolish the house, upon the condition that they could erect a substation next to it, whose upkeep would be the responsibility of the house’s occupants. It was this enormous metal box that now sat at the straight far end of the triangular garden.

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Imre was afraid of the substation. It was made of a bluish metal, covered in little rust stains that looked like dark round eyes, and wide as two men. Every now and then sparks would shoot out of it, and the family would have to inspect it for potential damage. Pál or his father would open the door bearing the sign “Danger of death” to check the cables. They would sink up to their elbows in the wiry insides of the big box, and Imre was terrified that the heap of electrical wires might suddenly pull tight around them in one great terrible spasm, swallowing them whole. When he was home alone, Imre would go out into the garden and walk around the machine, certain that one day it would reveal its demonic nature: something to do with aliens or Russian satellites. But the substation was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, and the child could find no evidence to justify his fear.

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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.

Bassignac Sophie

Blas de Roblès Jean-Marie

u Russian [Azbooka Atticus]

u Chinese (complex characters) [Morning Star,

Back to Back JC Lattès Bello Antoine

The Pathfinders Gallimard

u Czech [Kniha Zlin] u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Slovak [Premedia Group]

Abecassis Eliette

Sephardi Albin Michel

u Castilian [La Esfera de los Libros]

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

Adam Olivier

The Steady Heart Éd. de l’Olivier

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

Adam Olivier

Unfavourable Winds Éd. de l’Olivier

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

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

Benchetrit Samuel

A Heart Outside Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Shanghai 99

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

Her Father’s Daughter Le Seuil

u Italian [Bompiani]

u Spanish [Océano, Mexico]

Alain Delon, Japanese Superstar Hachette u Italian [Nottetempo]

Besson Philippe

u German [Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag] u Korean [Woongjin] u Polish [Muza]

Bied-Charreton

Enjoy Stock

u Czech [Euromedia Group]

Aubry Gwenaëlle

u German [Sujet Verlag]

u Croatian [Disput] u English [Tin House

A Future Actes Sud

No One Mercure de France

Books, United States] u German [Droschl]

u Hungarian [Joszoveg] u Italian [Barbès

Editore] u Korean [Open Book] u Rumanian [Pandora] Aubry Gwenaëlle

Partages

Mercure de France u Croatian [Disput] u Italian [Clichy]

114

u Swedish [Bokförlaget Opal]

Cendrey Jean-Yves

Honecker 21 Actes Sud

u Turkish [Everest Publications]

Chalandon Sorj

My Traitor Grasset & Fasquelle

Berton Benjamin

u German [Hoffmann & Campe]

Quai des Enfers Gallimard

Blondel Jean-Philippe

(Re)play! Actes Sud

My Life Unvarnished JC Lattès

u German [Knaus/Random House] u Turkish [Dogan]

The Accidental Man Julliard

Astier Ingrid

u Romanian [Trei]

u Castilian, Catalan and Basque [Alberdania]

u Vietnamese [Nha Nam]

u Greek [Livanis] u Russian [Ripol]

Taiwan] u Czech [Host] u Dutch [Ailantus]

u German [Fischer Verlag] u Italian [Frassinelli]

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

Arditi Metin

The Louganis Girl Actes Sud

The Midnight Mountain Zulma

Bizot Véronique

u German [Steidl Verlag]

Bizot Véronique

Prize Day Actes Sud

u German [Steidl Verlag]

u Norwegian [Solum forlag]

Condé Maryse

u Swedish [Leopard]

Constantine Barbara

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

u Castilian [Seix Barral] u Catalan [Grup 62] u Chinese (complex caracters) [Yuan-

Liou Publishing] u German [Blanvalet]

u Hungarian [Könyvmolyképzo Kiado] u Italian

[Fazi Editore] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Russian [Azbooka-Atticus] u Vietnamese [Maison d’édition des femmes] Dantzig Charles

My Name Is François Grasset & Fasquelle u Arabic (world rights)

Publishers]

[Arab Scientific

Darrieussecq Marie

Clèves P.O.L

u Castilian (world rights) [El Cuenco de Plata,

Argentina] u Danish [Tiderne Skifter]

u Dutch [Meulenhoff] u German [Carl Hanser] u Italian [Ugo Guanda Editore]

u Korean [The Open Books] u English [Text Publishing, United Kingdom and Australia] u Swedish [Norstedts]

Davrichewy Kéthévane

Deville Patrick

Filhol Elisabeth

u Dutch [Meulenhoff] u Georgian [Ustari]

u Castilian [El Aleph/Grup 62]

u German [Edition Nautilus] u Italian [Fazi

The Black Sea Sabine Wespieser

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

Davrichewy Kéthévane

The Separated Sabine Wespieser

u Italian [Barbès editore] u Georgian [Ustari]

Decoin Didier

Is This the Way Women Die? Grasset & Fasquelle

Kampuchea Le Seuil

u German [Bilger Verlag] u Polish [Noir sur

Blanc]

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]

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

The Stars Never Sleep Gallimard

Delecroix Vincent

u Italian [Marco Tropea] u Russian [Corpus]

The Shoe on the Roof Gallimard

u German [Ullstein] u Greek [Govostis]

u Italian [Excelsior 1881] u Korean [Changbi] u Rumanian [RAO] u Russian [Astrel]

u Serbian [Laguna] u Spanish [Lengua de Trapo]

Dugain Marc

u Hebrew [Armchair Books]

Énard Mathias

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants Actes Sud

In the Black Night Éd. de l’Olivier

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Arabic (Egypt) [National 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 [L & PM Editores, Brazil; Dom Quixote, Portugal] u Russian [Atticus] u Serbian [Geopoetika] u Turkish [Can]

Commonwealth] u German [Droemer Knaur]

Énard Mathias

Des Horts Stéphanie

The Panther JC Lattès

u Greek [Synchroni Orizontes]

u Italian [Piemme] u Serbian [Laguna]

Desarthes Agnès

u English [Portobello, United Kingdom and

Descott Régis

Caïn & Adèle JC Lattès u Spanish

Despentes Virginie

Apocalyspe Baby Grasset & Fasquelle

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Czech [Host] u Danish

[Tiderne Skiften] u Dutch [De Geus Uitgeverlj]

u English [Serpent’s tail Ltd] u Finnish [Like

Publishing Ltd] u German [Berlin Verlag] u Hungarian [Nyittott] u Italian [Einaudi Editore] u Portuguese [Sextante Editora] u Romanian [Trei Editura] u Swedish [Albert Bonniers Förlag]

Zone Actes Sud

u English [Open Letter, United States]

u German [Berlin Verlag] u Greek [Ellinika

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

You’ll See P.O.L

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

Faye Éric

Deville Patrick

The Man With No Prints Stock

u Castilian [La Otra Orilla] u German [Bilger Verlag] u Italian [Galaad] u Polish [Noir sur Blanc]

A God an Animal Actes Sud

Equatoria Le Seuil

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

Ferrari Jérôme

u Italian [E/O edizioni]

The Power Station P.O.L

Editore] u Swedish [Elisabeth Grate Bokförlag] Flipo Georges

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

u English [Felony & Mayhem, United States] u German [Blanvalet] u Italian [Ponte Alle

Grazie] u Polish [Noir sur Blanc]

u Russian [Pokolenie] u Spanish [El Aleph]

Garnier Pascal

Captive Moon in a Dead Eye Zulma

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

Garnier Pascal

The Panda Theory Zulma

u English (worldwide rights) [Gallic Books]

u German [BTB Verlag]

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

u Castilian [Siruela] u Dutch [De Arbeidespers] u German [Ammann Verlag] u Greek [Melani] u Italian [Del Vecchio]

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 (Great Britain) [Atlantic Book (Grove Atlantic)] u German [Insel Verlag] u Greek [Polis] u Italian[Salani Editore] u Korean [Munhakdongne Publishing] u Norwegian [Forlaget Press] u Russian [Azbooka] u Serbian [Carobna Knjiga] u Swedish [Norstedts Forlag]

115

Guyotat Pierre

Lalumière Jean-Claude

Lindon Mathieu

u English [Semiotexte, United States]

u Castilian [Libros del Asteroide]

u Dutch [Ailantus]

Coma Mercure de France

u 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 Hebrew [Modan] u Italian [Fazi Editore] u Norwegian [Agora] u Ukrainian [Tipovit]

Jauffret Régis

Lacrimosa Gallimard

The Russian Front Le Dilettante Lapeyre Patrick

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] Laurain Antoine

Mitterrand’s Hat Flammarion

u English [Gallic] u Italian [AtmosphereLibri]

u English [Salammbo, United Kingdom]

u Russian [Olga Morozova]

Joncour Serge

Lê Linda

How Many Ways I Love You Flammarion

In Memoriam Christian Bourgois

u Chinese [Phoenix Publishing]

u German [Amman]

u Ukrainian [Tipovit]

Le Bris Michel

u Korean [Wisdom House] u Russian [Ripol]

Khadra Yasmina

The World’s Beauty Grasset & Fasquelle

u Finnish [WSOY] u Greek [Kastaniotis]

Le Tellier Hervé

Olympus of the Unfortunate Julliard

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 Italian [Fazi Editore]

Enough About Love JC Lattès

u Chinese [Chu Chen Books] u English

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

Mexico]

The Ladettes Au diable vauvert

La Peine Bertrand (de)

Yanziyue Culture & Art Studio]

u Castilian (Latin America) [B Ediciones

Soundtrack Éd. de Minuit

u Spanish [Pasos Perdidos, Spain]

Laferrière Dany

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

116

u Chinese (simplified characters) [Baijing

Lesbre Michèle

A Huge White Lake Sabine Wespieser

u French [Héliotrope, Quebec only]

Liberati Simon

Jayne Mansfield 1967 Grasset u Italian [Fandango]

My Heart Alone Is Not Enough P.O.L 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

Garden of Love Zulma

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

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]

Mars Kettly

At the Frontiers of Thirst Mercure de France u German [Litradukt]

Martinez Carole

The Field of Les Murmures Gallimard

u Albanian [Buzuku] u Croatian [Alfa]

u Danish [Arvids] u Dutch [Van Gennep]

u English [Europa Editions, United States of

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

Milk and Honey Sabine Wespieser

u Croatian [Fraktura] u Greek [Hestia]

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

Mauvignier Laurent

Some Men Éd. de Minuit

u Chinese [Art et littérature du Hunan]

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

[University of Nebraska Press, United States]

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

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

Meur Diane

Ovaldé Véronique

u English (worldwide rights) [Seagull books]

u Albanian [Toena] u English [Portobello,

Down to the Plain Sabine Wespieser

u Italian [Barbès editore]

Miano Léonora

These Troubled Souls Plon u Swedish [Sekwa förlag]

Minghini Giulio

Fake Allia

u Italian [Piemme]

Miské Karim

Arab Jazz Viviane Hamy

u Castilian [Adriana Hidalgo] u English [McLehose Press] u German [Lübbe Verlag] u Greek [Polis] u Italian [Fazi Editore]

Monnery Romain

Free, Lonesome and Drowsy Au diable vauvert u Castilian [Grijalbo (Randomhouse)]

u Catalan [Rosa dels vents (Randomhouse)] 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 Nguyen Hoai Huong

Soft Shadows Viviane Hamy

u Castilian [Destino] u Italian [Guanda Editore]

Ollagnier Virgnie

The Uncertainty Liana Levi u Italian [Piemme]

Olmi Véronique

First Love Grasset

u Chinese (complex characters) [Asian Culture

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

And My Transparent Heart Éd. de l’Olivier

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

Childish Hands P.O.L

u German [Verlag Klaus Wagenbach]

Page Martin

Perhaps a Love Affair Éd. de l’Olivier

u English [Viking, United States] u German

[Thiele] u Greek [Patakis] u Japanese [Kindai Bungei Sha] u Korean [Yolimwom] u Portuguese [Rocco, Brazil] u Romanian [Humanitas] u Russian [Astrel/Ast] u Serbian [Nolit] Pancol Katherine

The Slow Tortoise Waltz Albin Michel

u Bulgarian [Colibri] u Castilian [La Esfera

de los libros] u Catalan [Edicions 62]

u Chinese (traditional characters) [Business

weekly] u Chinese (simplified characters) [Thnkingdom] u Czech [Jota s.r.o] u Danish [Bazar Forlag] u Dutch [WPG Belgie NV] u Finnish [Bazar Kustannus Oy] u German [Verlagsgruppe Random House GMB] u Hebrew [Keter Books] 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] u Vietnamese [Cong Tv Co Phan Truyen Thon Dan/Lao Dong] Pétel Gilles

Under the Channel Stock

u English (worldwide rights) [Gallic Books,

United Kingdom] Provost Martin

Beefsteak Phébus

u English [Whereabout Press, United States]

u Romanian [Nemira] u Spanish [Demipage]

Raoul-Duval Jacqueline

Kafka, The Eternal Fiancé Flammarion

u English [The Other Press, United Kingdom

and United States] u Estonian [Eesti Raamat]

u Hungarian [Ab Ovo] u Italian [Gremese]

u Lithuanian [Gimtasis Zodis] u Russian [Text] u Turkish [CAN]

Ravey Yves

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

Reinhardt Éric

Cinderella Stock

u Italian [Il Saggiatore] u Korean [Agora]

Révay Theresa

All the Dreams of the World Belfond

u Czech [Euromedia] u German [Der Club

Bertelsmann] u Hungarian [Athenaeum]

u Polish [Swiat Ksiazki] u Portuguese [Circulo

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

A Lion Hunter Le Seuil

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

Rolin Jean

A Dead Dog After Him P.O.L u German [Berlin Verlag]

u Polish [Czarne] u Russian [Text]

Rosenthal Olivia

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

Roux Frédéric

The Indian Winter Grasset & Fasquelle

u Chinese (complex characters) [Ye-ren,

Taiwan] u Greek [Papyros]

Ruiz Raoul

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

Sansal Boualem

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

u Catalan [Columna] u Chinese (complex

characters) [Asian Culture Company, Taiwan]

u Czech [Pistorius & Olsanska] u Danish

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

Bambi Bar Éd. de Minuit

u Greek [Agra] u Romanian [Bastion Editura]

117

Schneck Colombe

Vilain Philippe

u Chinese (complex characters) [Shanghai 99]

u Italian [Gremese]

Reparation Grasset

u German [Luchterhand] u Italian [Einaudi] u Polish [Proszynski Media]

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 Danish

[Arvids] u English [Pushkin Press]

u German [Karl Blessing Verlag] u Hebrew

[Hakibutz Hameucad] u Italian [Gremese]

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

[Can Yayinlari]

Sylvain Dominique

Dirty War Viviane Hamy

u English [MacLehose Press] u Italian [Mondadori]

Toussaint Jean-Philippe

The Truth About Marie Éd. de Minuit

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

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] Varenne Antonin

Fakirs Viviane Hamy

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

Viel Tanguy

Paris-Brest Éd. de Minuit

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

118

The Unfaithful Wife Grasset Winckler Martin

The Women’s Chorus P.O.L u Russian [Ripol-Classic]