Philippe Forest: une vie à écrire by d'Aurélie Foglia, Catherine Mayaux, Anne-Gaëlle Saliot et Laurent Zimmerman (review)

Philippe Forest as literary figure has not always had the visibility he deserves: in France, his close association with Philippe Sollers drew disdain from Pierre Bourdieu and his acolytes, while little of his work has been translated into English. But the author of the compelling debut novel, L'Enfant éternel, as well as a history of Tel Quel and one of the finest biographies of Louis Aragon, is well worthy of further discovery and study. This volume brings together the proceedings of the international conference devoted to Forest in 2016. It begins by arguing that Forest returns unfashionable themes of death, loss, catastrophe, and cataclysm to contemporary French literature, practising what Maïté Snauwaert calls 'une poétique du pathétique'. Moving on from this 'autofiction', attention is given to Forest's contribution to biography, notably with Tiphaine Samoyault's comparing his Aragon with her own experience writing a biography of Roland Barthes. Another dialogue explored is that between Forest and the Far East, and especially Japan, as illustrated in Sarinagara. Indeed, it is in Japan and China that his work has found the most resonance and been most frequently translated. In the concluding part, his Japanese and Chinese (as well as Italian) translators explain the challenges involved in rendering Forest's prose, and provide insights into the reception of his work in their respective countries. Forest could be considered one of the most important French practitioners of autofiction since Serge Doubrowsky. However, in a long interview that offers the reader an added bonus to this valuable collection of essays, Forest robustly expounds the originality of his literary approach. He is a partisan of what he calls réelisme, rather than an egotistical and perpetually self-demystifying autofiction: 'Ma position est double. Elle consiste à soutenir simultanément que tout est fait et que tout est fiction' (p. 289). Thus, Forest may not be an écrivain engagé as represented by Aragon but, throughout his now considerable œuvre, he is very much on the side of the ill and the dying.