France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In September 2007, a group of ethnic minority authors in France released a literary manifesto under their group's name, Qui fait la France?. In it, they call into question the premise and intention of mainstream, introverted fiction in France, and ask for a place in the world of French letters as authors who believe in committed and realist fiction. In keeping with their literary manifesto and intention, the authors of the collective Qui fait la France? engage in outwardly committed writing that explores broadly the themes of human suffering and aspiration.
Simultaneous to the publication of their manifesto in two French magazines, Les Inrockuptibles and Le Nouvel Observateur, the authors of the collective headed by Mohamed Razane released a livre-manifeste with Editions Stock, Chroniques d'une société annoncée, in which each member of the collective contributed a story. For their second collective publication, each author of Qui fait la France? decided to write a short story revolving around the same imagined fait divers: "The following day, the papers will publish Agence France Presse content in their headlines: ‘An eighteen-year-old man was sentenced to prison for eight months on the charge of breaking storefront windows during an anti-Sarkozy demonstration, which unraveled Monday evening in the Bastille neighborhood' AFP 11/05/07." Mohamed Razane has tied his story to the incident that provoked the riots in 2005 on the periphery of France's largest metropolitan centers.
In Mohamed Razane's story, "Au loin, près de nous" ("So far so close by"), the unnamed narrator's identity remains less important than the identity and circumstances of the two male characters, Toni and Abdel, who ultimately are confounded in her mind. Toni is a young man of North African descent who has an accrued sensibility to the injustices around him; the primary space he occupies in the story is the Parisian subway system, where he takes stock of a disempowered humanity and lashes out against the political class. Abdel is a young Moroccan man whose backstory we learn much more about: the narrator falls in love with Abdel during a trip to Morocco, then convinces him to join her in France. Abdel's outcome is tragic, and part of the narrator's dilemma is to decide if she is in some way guilty for his demise. Meanwhile, through the story's juxtaposed narration, Toni comes before a judge in France, who has to decide if he is guilty of vandalism and violent conduct. What brings the two male characters together is their powerlessness to change their destiny. What separates them in the context of the story are two very different registers, poetic and militant.
In the end, the alienation expressed by the story's title resonates doubly in Abdel's alienation from his homeland of Morocco, which becomes a sort of lost idyll, and Abdel's inner alienation. Razane's story is at once committed writing (through its themes), artistic exploration (through its juxtaposed images, registers, and narration), and a call to action--to attend to those near and far.
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is sui generis among French poets, although sometimes classified as a purveyor of "Symbolism." As the featured sonnet shows, his verse was tinted by the emphasis on spleen and ennui with which French poetry has been largely identified since Baudelaire's time. Reading "Angoisse," I got a funny feeling that, if Mallarmé had lived in the 20th century, he might have enjoyed getting drunk with the likes of Charles Bukowski. (Jenna Le)
Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) is typically classified among the French Romantics. The narrowness of the gap between his birth year and death year can be attributed to depressive tendencies, which led him to hang himself, leaving a suicide note for his family: "Don't wait up for me, for this night will be a black-and-white one." Alongside his extraordinary poetry, Nerval should also be remembered for the tender affection he showed his pet lobster, Thibault. All crustacean-admirers cannot help but agree with his vehement declaration that "Lobsters are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do." Nerval's sonnet "El Desdichado" takes its title from Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott's Romantic novel about the Crusades, in which "El Desdichado" is the alias adopted by the knight Ivanhoe after he is disinherited by his father for falling in love with the wrong woman. In Spanish, "el desdichado" means "the unfortunate one."
Paul Valéry was born 1871. Raised in Montpellier, he studied law there, then moved to Paris and began writing. He quickly became famous as a disciple of Stéphane Mallarmé. At the age of twenty-one, he experienced what he called an existential crisis, and six years later, he ceased writing for about twenty years, a period known as his "great silence." When he returned to writing, he produced La Jeune Parque and le Cimitière marin, two long poems considered central to French modernism. He also wrote essays and worked on philosophy of mind. Throughout his life, even during his silence, he conducted thought experiments in his Cahiers (Notebooks), using drawing and writing as research into consciousness. They are considered by some to be his greatest work. In 1925, he was elected to the Académie française, and in the late 1930s, he was appointed the first Chair of Poetics at the Collège de France. Though it cost him some of his professional distinctions, he refused to collaborate with the Vichy regime and the Nazis and continued to write and publish during the war, until his death in 1945. His unique position in France can be seen in the fact that he was never attacked by the surrealists.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2010"We're going through some difficult times, as you surely know. Who can tell what the future holds for us, for you, me, the planet? Nothing's simple. Care for some water? No? As you wish. After all, if you'll allow me, I believe I can confide in you, a person in my position is very much alone, terribly alone, and you're some kind of doctor, aren't you?"
"Not really..." the Investigator murmured.
"Come, don't be so modest!" said the Manager, tapping his visitor on the thigh. Then he took a long, deep breath, shut his eyes, exhaled, and opened his eyes again. "Remind me, what's the exact purpose of your visit?"
"To tell the truth, it's not really a visit. I'm here to conduct an investigation into the suicides that have affected the Enterprise."
"Suicides? News to me... I've been kept out of the loop, no doubt. My Coworkers know it's best not to cross me. Suicides, imagine that! If I had been aware of them, God only knows what I might have done! Suicides?"
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Anne Plantagenet is the author of two previous novels and biographies of Marilyn Monroe and Manolete. Her latest book was a collection of short stories, Pour des siècles et des siècles, published by Éditions Stock in 2008.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Patrick Besson published his first book at the age of 17. He has since published a total of 40 books, including Dara, winner of the Prix de l'Académie Française in 1985, and Les Braban, winner of the Prix Renaudot in 1995. He is also a journalist for leading French newspapers Le Figaro, L'Humanité, and VSD.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Born in 1947 in Poitiers, Michèle Lesbre was a schoolteacher for several years before deciding to take up writing. She published detective novels until 2001, when she published her first work of literary fiction, Nina, par hasard. Since then she has published Boléro (Actes Sud, 2003), Un certain Felloni (Actes Sud, 2004), La petite trotteuse (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2005), and Le canapé rouge (Sabine Wespieser Editeur, 2007), which was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and translated into eight languages.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
August, 2010Born in Paris in 1979, Minh Tran Huy is a deputy editor of Le Magazine Littéraire and a literary critic. La double vie d'Anna Song is her third novel after La Princesse et le pêcheur (Actes Sud, 2007) and Le Lac né en une nuit (Actes Sud, 2008).
France | French | Short Fiction
August, 2010Jacques Barbéri is a French author of more than fifteen novels and numerous short stories. Thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, or the fringes of literature—nothing is off limits to his perpetually mutating imagination. He is also a musician (with the group Palo Alto), screenplay writer, and translator.
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
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