Criticism
Close readings and reviews of specific books and authors — the modern French novel weighed with a point of view.
-
01
Ernaux · Louis · Carrère
The Confession Machine
Autofiction as the dominant contemporary French mode — Ernaux, Louis, Carrère — and the argument over whether the confessional 'I' is a breakthrough in truth-telling or a trap of narcissism.
-
02
Leïla Slimani
Slimani and the Servant Problem
Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny as a novel about class, care and the invisible labour that holds a bourgeois life together — and why it unsettled the country that crowned it.
-
03
Michel Houellebecq
Houellebecq's Diagnosis
Reading Michel Houellebecq less as a provocateur than as a diagnostician of French malaise — loneliness, spent liberalism, a country arguing about its own decline.
-
04
Albert Camus
Camus Is Still Arguing
Why Camus — the absurd, the quarrel with Sartre, Algeria — remains the most contested figure in French letters, claimed and disowned by every side of a divided country.