Poor fool
Chloe Delaume
Is radical feminism compatible with a heterosexual love affair? ” With Poor foola very contemporary novel with an autobiographical dimension, veined with humor and self-deprecation, Chloe Delaume (The synthetic heart, Seuil, Médicis Prize 2020) returns to us with a sort of love massacre game. Clotilde Mélisse, a writer who has “the habit of transforming her existential episodes and cycles into books”, whose “founding memories” (her father murdered her mother before her eyes as a child before taking his own life) contaminate always at the heart of his love stories, it tells a one-sided love story in a gritty way.
Threshold, October 6
Western
Maria Pourchet
In Western, Maria Pourchet recounts the shock of the meeting between a woman, living with her little boy in the countryside after the death of his mother, and a renowned actor on the run who was to play the leading role of the Dom Juan by Molière, caught in the heart of an uncomfortable Parisian media hype. An epic and improbable love story told, as with Fire (Stock, 2021), in a lively and telescoped style, where the novelist ruthlessly analyzes gender relations as well as the upheavals of our time.
Stock, September 20
Sarah, Susanne and the writer
Eric Reinhardt
A bit like in Love and forests (Gallimard, 2014), the 6th novel byEric Reinhardt — recently adapted for the big screen by Valérie Donzelli —, the narrator of Sarah, Susanne and the writer dialogue with a woman who entrusted him with her personal story so that he could turn it into a novel. A woman this time punished for wanting to impose shock therapy on her relationship. A dive into marital hell and psychological violence, a vein that the author of Household morale has been operating for a long time. We will also find a sensitive reflection on the links between readers and writers, between real characters and paper characters.
Gallimard, September 20
The alchemies
Sarah Chiche
In 2022, a forensic doctor receives a strange email in which there is talk of the painter Goya and his skull, stolen after his burial in Bordeaux in 1828. Between perverted thriller and picaresque novel, The alchemieson the 5the novel of Sarah Chiche (The dark ones, Saturn), takes head-on this story in which the narrator’s parents and godfather would have been involved. From Bordeaux in the 1960s and the creation of a secret society of doctors, through the true theft of Goya’s relics, it is also a quest where this woman must confront the troubled past of her parents, as well as a reflection on the alchemy of elective affinities and the emancipatory power of art.
Threshold, October 6
sad tiger
Snow Sinno
In sad tigeralready well noticed by critics in France, Snow Sinno tells his “sordid personal story”. This French woman who has lived in Mexico since 2006 talks about the repeated sexual violence she suffered at the hands of her stepfather as a child. But there is more: it is also an intelligent and calm exploration of evil (“It is the secret center of our world, this unthinkable evil which constitutes us.”), in which the author summons other books and other victims who have written on the subject. Even if, she writes, “literature did not save me. I am not saved.”
POL, in bookstore
The big fire
Léonor de Récondo
Born in 1699, then raised in an orphanage in Venice called La Pietà in the company of other young girls, Ilaria Tagianotte learned the violin there under the aegis of the composer Antonio Vivaldi, of whom she also became the copyist. With The big firewhere she recounts the training of a musician and the birth of the love passion which struck her at the age of fifteen, the novelist Léonor de Récondo (Loves, Manifesto), who is also a high-level baroque violinist, allows herself to combine her two passions: music and literature. While making the Serenissima, “where we hear the silence and the night”, a character of his 10e book.
Grasset, in bookstore
Watch over her
Jean-Baptiste Andrea
We will continue our journey in Italy with Watch over herthe 4e novel of Jean-Baptiste Andrea (My queen, 2017). In an Italian monastery in 1986, a man breathes his last among the monks who have hosted him for forty years in order to “watch over her”. This is the last statue he sculpted, hidden there by the Vatican to limit access. It is his life that Jean-Baptiste Andrea tells us about, that is to say an eventful journey through the 20the Italian century marked by a great and heartbreaking love story.
The Iconoclast, September 29
Proust, family novel
Laura Murat
To tell her family story and “the silent power of the code” in the declining world of French aristocracy where she grew up, the historian and essayist Laura Murat (Reread, This is not a city) summons the author ofLooking time lost. With Proust, novel familyshe evokes her own homosexuality and the break with her family in a very personal book which allows her to reflect – and the reader with her – on the emancipatory power of literature.
Robert Laffont, September 29
The chessboard
Jean-Philippe Toussaint
With The chessboardthe Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint (The camera, Make love) chose to take inspiration from the latest short story written by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, The chess player, to write his autobiography in the form of a chess game – a short story that he also translated and which appears with the same publisher. The sixty-four chapters of the book echo the sixty-four squares of a chessboard.
Midnight, October 8
On the job
Franck Courtes
Known and recognized press photographer for twenty years (Release, The Unrockuptibles), Franck Courtes abandoned a profession that had made him a good living – “the bravery of an imbecile”, he wrote – before making a name for himself with a few books. But literature feeds its man poorly and his savings eventually run out. Story of social and economic downgrading, On the job recounts his descent into the hell of poverty and “Uberized” work: laborer, bicycle deliveryman, furniture fitter in kit. Striking.
Gallimard, October 4