For many in France, it is the literary event of the new school year. Dear asshole (Grasset, 21 September), 11e novel of Virginie Despentes marks his return after the end of his trilogy Vernon Subutex in 2017.
An epistolary novel (yes) in which a writer, caught in the turmoil of social networks after a former publishing press secretary had “meetooized” him, exchanges letters with a famous actress who at first pushes him away .
The perfect pretext found by the author of King Kong Theory to indulge in all-out social commentary: confinement, feminism, drug addiction or rap music.
After The House (Albin Michel, 2019), in which she shamelessly recounted the two years she spent prostituting herself in a Berlin brothel, Emma Becker continues to dig its furrow with Misconduct (Albin Michel, in bookshops). As in her three previous novels, she wonders about her relationship with men and desire.
In the light, this time, of motherhood, which can also transform the relationship with men and with desire, the writer with the “sulphurous aura” wished, she says, to write about “the heartbreak that it is to be a mother and not to be satisfied for all that”.
The narrow and squared territory of adolescence
With Fief in 2017, winner of the 2018 Inter Book Prize, David Lopez explored the narrow and squared territory of adolescence, of its inventive and composite language, in a novel with an inventive and radical form.
In Livelihood (Seuil, October 12), his second opus, he sets off once again to peripheral France to share with us the daily life of a man who recounts his wanderings and his aimless quest in a kind of no man’s land green which vibrates with sensations.
Winner in 2021 of the Goncourt for the first novel with That the Tiger laments over you, Emilienne Malfatto33-year-old photographer, novelist and journalist, signs a second novel where, in the big city of a country at war, an interrogation specialist carries out his relentless work every day, while an army of ghosts has taken possession of his nights.
Thinking, it is said, of Tartar Desert by Dino Buzzati and four soldiers by Hubert Mingarelli, The colonel does not sleep (Sous-Sol, September 28) was the subject of wild bidding between a dozen publishers.
In “Misconduct”, Emma Becker wonders about her relationship with men and desire, as in her three previous novels. In light, this time, of motherhood.
In Attack the earth and the sun (Le Tripod, October 12), Mathieu Belezi recounts the fate of a handful of settlers and soldiers caught up in Algeria in the 1840s. through the voices of a woman and a soldier, the madness, the hell, that this colonization was”.
From colonization to the struggle for independence
Also taking Algeria as her subject and setting, where she was born in 1986, Kaouther Adimi (Our riches, 2017) returns with a fifth novel. In In the bad wind (Seuil, October 12), through the crossed destinies of three characters, the novelist paints a great fresco of Algeria that spans a century, from colonization to the struggle for independence, until the summer of 1992, when the country descended into civil war.
We will remember that Warthe unpublished novel by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (journey to the Edge of the Night) published shortly before the summer and which sold 140,000 copies, ended with the departure of Brigadier Ferdinand to England at the end of his convalescence. Part of the batch of manuscripts found in 2020, more than 70 years after their disappearance, London (Gallimard, November) is the direct result, when Ferdinand takes up residence in an attic of Leicester Pension, “where Cantaloup, a mackerel from Montpellier, organizes intense sex trafficking with the complicity of a policeman”.
The novel of more than 500 pages, written in 1934, stands out according to the publisher “like the great story of a double vocation: that of writing and that of medicine. Or how to stand as close as possible to the truth of men, right in the middle of this outrageous and deceitful farce that is life”.
A novel with fierce humor
Franco-Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou sign with The elongated trade (Threshold, October 12) a 13e novel with fierce humor. A carnivalesque rise in the life and the last hours of a young man who hugged a dark angel a little too closely, before attending his own four-day funeral wake and his funeral.
Immediately buried, he emerges from his grave to survey Pointe-Noire, the economic capital of the Republic of Congo, and settle some outstanding accounts. The publisher: “In this great social, political and visionary novel, the class struggle continues even in the realm of the dead, where they are also strangely alive. »
Two years after the disorienting Sous vide chicken song, Lucia Rico blurs our bearings again. In GPS (POL, September 28), a young woman receives the coordinates of a friend’s engagement place on her mobile phone.
Written like a thriller, slathered once again with dark humor and derailments, this novel about friendship and death, about social and psychological fragility, “crosses the illusions of mourning in the light of our digital addictions”. ” Turn right. »
In “In the bad wind”, Kaouther Adimi paints a great fresco of Algeria that spans a century
In the early 1990s, a student stopped studying philosophy to enroll in a business school and landed his first job in Béthune, in Pas-de-Calais, in the branch of the Banque de France. Haunted by the ghost of Georges Bataille, by reflections on contemporary art and by a subversive eroticism, with The paymaster (Gallimard, October), sound 9e novel, Yannick Haenel (Circle, Jan Karsky) wonders if one can be an anarchist and work in a bank. For the publisher, “Yannick Haenel tells how it is possible, through charity and eroticism, to resist the world of calculation from within”.
The Forgotten of History
In The inventor (Rivages, in bookshops), miguel bonnefoy (black sugar and Legacy2017 and 2020) puts all his imagination at the service of a character this time very real, but who figures today among the forgotten of history, recounting with the tone of a tale the destiny of Augustin Mouchot, son of a locksmith and professor of mathematics, who, in the middle of the 19th century, discovered solar energy.
Finally, Olivia Rosenthal turns into a ghost hunter in Japan. Twenty-five years after the sarin gas attacks committed by the Aum sect in the Tokyo metro in 1995, a writer arrives on the island to freely investigate the consequences of this tragic event.
In any case, this is what the narrator thinks she is telling in A monkey at my window (Verticales, September 19), while struggling to decipher the equivocal signs that reach him. From meeting to meeting, she will let herself be crossed by what the country hides and reveals. A learning of abandonment and letting go.