France | French | Novel (excerpt)
June, 2013"The story starts where all stories should end: in bed." With this opening line, Zeller tips the first domino in Nicolas and Pauline's crumbling love story. They have been together for two years but they do not agree on their future. Pauline has high expectations for the relationship; Nicolas is not sure if monogamy is really for him. He finds it hard not to follow his friend Sofia's hedonistic philosophy, her belief in pleasing herself first and living freely without being committed to anyone. But Pauline's pregnancy, and the birth of their daughter Louise, changes everything.
La Jouissance (in English translation: Climax) is the leitmotif of a generation whose lack of any sense of sacrifice works to the detriment of relationships. Why this strong sense of selfish individualism? Zeller underscores one reason: they have never been confronted by history and with their minds fixed on the present, the collective ideal of their parents has been replaced by instant gratification. To hear the heartbeat of this influential generation, Zeller incorporates the views of an eclectic mix of thinkers, politicians and artists, from Beethoven, Milan Kundera, and Godard, to Lenine and Jean-Paul Sartre.
An existential romance that unfolds during the recent European economic crisis, Climax explores the psychological frivolity of fleeting happiness against an ominous backdrop of changing times.
Gérard de Nerval was born in Paris in 1808. His published works include translations of Goethe and Heinrich Heine, numerous plays and operettas (some of which were co-authored with Alexandre Dumas), the travelogue Voyage en Orient (Voyage to the Orient, 1851), the poetry collection Les chimères (Chimeras, 1854), and the prose work Aurélie (1855). He committed suicide in Paris in 1855.
France | French | Play (excerpts)
April, 2013Under the cover of one of her many aliases--"M. Auberte the Mad"--the author takes the stage and conjures up a whirlwind of scenes. This comedy about power relations presents some thirty characters at the dinner table, in the bedroom, and in the boardroom--at work and at play, but always in trouble. Witness domestic drama, national scandal, and capital crimes--in a word, the everyday insanity of the world we live in. The Chonchons, dramatis personae of this play, come directly from Borgès' book El libro de los seres imaginarios. They can be full of humanity, and then all of a sudden they will sin, out of pride, stupidity or fragility.
Ariane Drefyfus, born in 1958, has published Les miettes de Décembre (Le Dé Bleu, 1997), La durée des plantes (Tarabuste, 1998 and 2007 (revised edition)), Une histoire passera ici (Flammarion, 1999), Quelques branches vivantes and Les compagnies silencieuses (Flammarion, 2001), La belle vitesse (Le Dé Bleu, 2002), La bouche de quelqu'un (Tarabuste, 2003), L'inhabitable (Flammarion, 2006), Iris, c'est votre bleu (Le Castor Astral, 2008), La terre voudrait recommencer (Flammarion, 2010), Nous nous attendons (Le Castor Astral, 2012), and La lampe allumée si souvent dans l'ombre (forthcoming from José Corti, 2013).
Critical Stories | France | French
November, 2012Les Invisibles brings together texts written by Luc Lang over the last fifteen years: a selection of pieces that together seem best to express the coherence and the particular obsession of a certain way of thinking. It is a way of thinking that develops over time and by means of a certain group of works and artists that together come to define a posteriori something like a force field, a shared sensibility and certain modes of questioning belonging to it. We have here twelve narratives. The author is, after all, a novelist, someone whose approach to these works involves first and foremost a narrative form of thought or, in other words, an approach to reality, a way of capturing reality, that is specific to the novel.
First published in 1924, Pierre Mac Orlan's "Simone de Montmartre" takes us along on a dash through the Paris of the First World War. The underbelly of Paris opens up for our inspection as we follow first Simone, and then her jealous and worried lover Georges and his associate Léon the Marseillais, through the Montmartre night. Penned around the same time as Dashiel Hammet's first published stories, "Simone de Montmartre" is a wonderful example of early French noir stylization packed full of the rich imagery often found in the narrative poetry of the post-Symbolist era.
France | French | Novel (excerpt)
November, 2011McCash, though no longer a cop, is still one-eyed and consumed by an anger as old as his first Clash concert, in Belfast, before Bobby Sands's hunger strikes and the victims of Bloody Sunday... No more wife, no future, illusions lost... An ophthalmologist informs him that if he persists in taking care of everything that surrounds him by destruction, he will quickly and permanently be blind. A fine reason to end it all with a brilliant bullet to his head! The spark, however, will come from somewhere else. A letter reveals to him that he's the father of Alice. The mother is dead and it's now up to him to look after the little girl... McCash has scarcely arrived in his daughter's village when he finds another little girl drowned. Alice comes to see him. She's the bothersome witness. As the dead pile up, McCash rediscovers fear and hope intermingled. He who wanted to die crashes headlong into the need to weigh up the value of a life. That of his child...
France | French | Short Fiction
July, 2011In a collection of six short stories, Véronique Bizot explores, with humor and a remarkable eye for the absurd in daily life, the themes of solitude and anxiety. In "The Gardeners," an old man living on a grand estate watches the gardeners around him with mistrust. In "The Hotel," young newlyweds under the watchful eye of an elegant elderly lady have their honeymoon disrupted by an invasion of rats. "George's Wife" tells of two friends, the tragic accident that leaves one paralyzed, and the ensuing and unavoidable vengeance. Another story tells of Lamirault, a sworn enemy of the narrator: his funeral proves that loathing, like loving, is stronger than death.
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)
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).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).