Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001–2010) ed. by Bruno Blankeman and Barbara Havercroft (review)

This collective volume, the proceedings of a 2011 Colloque de Cerisy, joins the growing number of academic studies devoted to twenty-first-century literature. It sets itself apart through its ambition to survey the century’s opening decade in all its diversity, tracing preoccupations and trends where they are present (but taking care not to distort or homogenize the period with a sweeping thesis of what the decade is all about), as well as through the calibre of its contributors and the quality of their interventions, as we have come to expect from a Cerisy publication. French critics are outnumbered by those from other countries, including Germany and the UK, with half the chapters written by academics based in North America, which testifies to the broad international scholarly interest in contemporary French fiction, or perhaps to the traditionalism of literary studies in France itself. An introduction by the editors and an opening survey-chapter from Anne Roche attempt to sketch in some general themes: the French literature of the century’s first decade is seen as existing in an ever more culturally diverse environment, both through cultural globalization and the explosion in visual and text-based media; Roche discerns in recent novels a new questioning of their relationship to literature of the past and to the novel as a genre, as well as a foregrounding of the real, historical, and personal (and, in several cases, both). The chapters that follow very much bear out her analysis. Among established authors, Annie Ernaux is the most frequently referenced in the later chapters: her Les Années (2008) is without doubt one of the most significant works of the decade, and also, in its melding of autobiography and social history, at the nexus of many of the concerns of other contemporary writers. Other writers building on a strong twentieth-century presence include Pascal Quignard, Pierre Bergounioux, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Christine Angot, Camille Laurens, and Michel Houellebecq, but the emphasis is firmly on new and less familiar names. Yannick Haenel, Laurent Mauvignier, and Chloé Delaume appear in several chapters, while an entire essay is devoted to each of Philippe Forest, Pierre Senges, Pierre Bayard, Anne Garréta, Yves Ravey, and Éric Laurrent. Algerian and other francophone writing is explored in chapters dealing with Nina Bouraoui, Leïla Sebbar, François Cheng, Nancy Huston, and Agota Kristof, among others. The absences are also interesting: François Bon, who received much attention in the middle of the decade, is barely mentioned, and Jean Echenoz is similarly elusive. Women writers are perhaps underrepresented, with no discussion of Marie NDiaye or Marie Darrieussecq and little on Amélie Nothomb. The volume is also deliberately high-culture in its remit, with no room for Muriel Barbery, Nicolas Fargues, or David Foenkinos, let alone Fred Vargas, Marc Levy, or Guillaume Musso. These last omissions are regrettable: it is hard to grasp the shape of a decade of fiction while paying so little attention to the novels actually being read. But where the collection succeeds, particularly in its analyses of the decade’s new writers of great promise, it does so admirably.