Fiction Now
The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century
By Warren F. Motte, professor of French and comparative literature
“Fiction Now” reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre, Gérard Gavarry, Hélène Lenoir, Patrick Lapeyre, and Christine Montalbetti. Each of the authors invoked exemplified in his or her work a different set of strategies, concerns, and approaches: one of them transposes the Book of Judith to the Parisian suburbs; another imagines the most taciturn of cowboys in the American West; still another goes well beyond death, into the afterlife of a concert pianist. Despite their diversity of theme and technique, these writers share a will to make French fiction new, and demonstrate compellingly that the novel as it is practiced in France today is an extremely vigorous, deeply enthralling, and richly plural cultural form.
From the book:
“Fiction Now proposes to report on that literary experimentation in its plurality and its variety, taking a series of ‘soundings’ within the compass of innovative French fiction since 2001. It is intended to complement my ‘Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990’ (2003). I should note at the outset that my field of inquiry here is limited to the Metropolitan French novel, and that I do not pretend to deal with Francophone literature, that is, literature written in French outside of France. This is not a matter of taste, but rather a question of competency (and undoubtedly, too, the symptom of many years of academic specialization). I should admit at the outset, however, that the kind of novel I have chosen to focus on here is very much a matter of taste.”
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