J’envie la félicité des bêtes
Christophe Bataille
Novel
124pp
The Author
Christophe Bataille is thirty. He has been working with Grasset since 1995, writing at night. He has written four novels: Annam ( Arléa, 1993, Prix du premier roman, Prix des deux Magots), Absinthe (Arléa, 1994, Prix de la Vocation) Le Maître des heures (Grasset, 1997), Vive l’enfer (Grasset, 1999).   
The Book
“A winter evening, it was three years ago. Four hundred pupils of the Ecole Polytechnique attended a session of hypnotism. Four hundred descartes, white hands placed on their skinny thighs, snickering in front of a magi who was speaking, gently, tenderly. He repeated himself. Played with them. Provoked them. Before long, about thirty students joined him on the stage. One by one they crawled, grunted, took off their clothes. Forget the number 2. Cast aside all rationality. How droll they are, my little pigs! 
When they awoke, the students had forgotten everything. They had brushed shoulders with…what, exactly? A magician? A prophet? They had floundered in a horrendous kind of mud, of which there remained not a trace. 
My brother, who was present in the hall, told me the story. I believed it because I believe in words. I was scared.
Maël Jargeau was a prostitute in London. She was the icon of Vive l’enfer – a young woman lost, unreachable. Jocelyn was the fervent raconteur of that hell… In London, we came upon him sticking up posters. Flesh was for sale there, torn apart, repetitive, dispatched from the East. Then the fragrance.
For Maël, Jocelyn upset his whole life. He became a hypnotist, under the name of Abraca Mola Stermione. Maël was his assistant. They left London, went on the road, reached Vilenne where they were born. They wrought chaos, set the place alight.”
C.B.    
This is the story of a man who tears his existence asunder for a woman, plays with other people’s reason, and becomes a prophet. The style is flamboyant, lyrical and matter-of-fact, elegiac and charnel, sharp as a razor edge. Christophe Bataille brings us a fable that digs into the unconscious and rings out, arousing some distant memory.
Sumptuous, nocturnal, no reader will forget it.
 
L’enfant rouge
Elise Fontenaille
Novel
260 pp
The Author
Elise Fontenaille is the author of La Gommeuse (1997), Le palais de la femme (1999) and Demain les filles on va tuer Papa (2001), all published by Grasset.
 The Book
“I knew the opium dens of Vienna and Paris, glittering hovels for socialites out for a bit of dirt. I went there mostly to immerse myself in women of the world, livid and masked, sprawled over sofas, to be enjoyed quickly and shamelessly. In the murky mist of the morning, they pretend they’ve forgotten. In the garrets of Vancouver, it was misery that sprawled, over bodies, misery and terror, and the shadow of death. I was sure of nothing.”
At the end of the last century, Isodore, a young doctor, left France for Vancouver and the Queen Charlotte Islands, just off British Columbia. With him went thirteen orphans, thirteen ‘vaccin-children’ who carried in their bodies the antidote for the red death, the dreaded smallpox. The illness had been brought from Europe with the gold hunters, and it was devastating the Indian peoples of North America. By the time Isodore got to the islands, it was too late. Crushed by the feeling of his own inadequacy, he was saved from despair by a young Indian girl, Lala, she as talkative as he was silent. He ended up in an opium den. There, where the light of day never penetrates, he met Franz, an anthropologist from Vienna. Reality was exchanged for the intoxication of memory, and between two dreams he told Franz his story.
A novel that steers between reality and dream through the 19^th century French countryside with its obscure beliefs, to the Rain Forest with its huge trees, living woods where the magic and wisdom of the Indian world reign eternal, where grimacing masks and totems tell of a lost civilisation.
There is enchantment in this novel, classic and modern in tone, that resuscitates the  magic of the Indians of the Great North.   
 
 
Pas un jour
Anne F. Garreta
Novel
240 pp
The Author
Anne F. Garetta is a graduate of the Ecole Normale and a writer. Her works published by Grasset include Sphinx (1986, published in paperback 1988, translated into Finnish, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese), Ciels liquids (1990, translated into Finnish), La Décomposition (1999, published in paperback in 2002, translated into Italian). Also some short stories, Vol, Nuits, in Le Serpent à plumes.
 The Book
“What’s to be done about these penchants? You’ve made up your mind to go down the slope that’s considered to be a natural one today, to deliberately force yourself into the genre of writing that used to be called ‘intimate’. You oblige yourself to work five hours a day in front of your computer for a whole month: you give yourself the task of recounting what you remember about a woman - or whatever - that you once desired or who desired you. You take them, day after day, one after the other as they present themselves to your recollection. Then you put them down in the impersonal order of the alphabet. With your keyboard, you will annihilate your memories with pure procedure.
What is the reason for this exercise, melancholic and ironic, perhaps cruelly so?
Let’s say it’s a fine summer’s evening, an evening when your body, at last free of too much pain, recovers all its appetites in disorder, appetite for dancing, for other bodies, for women. All you have to do is go and sit at the terrace of a café, look at the women passing by, and without realising it you’ll have made yourself more memories. Life’s too short to give yourself up to badly written books, and sleep with women you don’t love. A question of style. The dissipation or digression of your desires, that is the finality of this mental libertinage you practise at regular times.
But, when you believe you are putting a distance between yourself and the morals of your epoch and its idolatry of desire, isn’t there a risk of producing propaganda for those very things – as do so many of your contemporaries, as devout as they are smug. Can one escape the publicity of desire? Who assured you that your criticism, your fleeing, isn’t just another one of its tricks?  And what if, though you believe you’re holding out against submission, you are really only practising that - so very French - form of resistance, that’s called collaboration?
A.G.    

Le Cosmonaute
Philippe Jaenada
Novel
260 pages
The Author
Philippe Jaenada was born in 1964 in Saint Germain en Laye. He did lots of little jobs (including writing false ‘porno’ letters on a free-lance basis for Voici), before becoming a writer. His books include Le Chameau sauvage (Julliard, Prix de Flore 1997) and La Grande à bouche molle (Julliard, 2001).  
  The Book
When Hector met Pimprenelle, he thought she was “the lightest woman in the universe, a girl who was irresistible and alone”. A hardened bachelor and compulsive seducer always to be found in a bar of an evening, wandering around Paris in the day doing - nobody quite knew what – detective, freelance journalist for the gutter press… Hector accepted to change his ways for love. Like in a modern fairy tale, they moved in together, made love endlessly and had a child, Oscar. But…Hector then found himself with a different woman, an obsessively tidy Pimprenelle, a psychopath of the duster and an bossy Gorgon for good measure. “It sounds stupid, I’m ashamed to talk like that, but she betrayed me”.  Beyond the couple’s differences - the daily boxing matches - what keeps the reader’s attention in this the most controlled of Philippe Jaenada’s novels, is the desperately comic side, the dark, sharp humour, the digressions, the incisions. The reader attends the baby’s birth ‘live’, the father completely overcome by the event like some Hugh Grant; there’s a chase after a blind horse that is galloping toward a certain death; we observe the ruin of a man who was once free, and now only has the conversation of anonymous interlocutors, little bribes of stories that blend with his own solitude. All that’s left is to flee, “like a cosmonaut, with infinite space all around”.
 

La Mélancolie des innocents
Jean-Pierre Milovanoff
Novel
300pp
The Author
Jean-Pierre Milovanoff was born in Nîmes. A man of the theatre, a poet and a novelist, whose books include La Splendeur d’Antonia (Julliard, 1996, Prix Delteil and Prix France Culture), Le Maître des paons (Julliard, 1997, Prix Goncourt des Lycéens), L’Offrande sauvage (Grasset, Prix des Libraires 1999) and Auréline (Grasset, 2000). 
The Book
For Victorin Louve, story-hunter and immobile dreamer of Solignargues, “touching the old vines with the tip of your fingers, still impregnated with the smell of bitter must, is to me what crossing the Takla-Makan is to a fit man”. Stuck in his wheelchair, his only company a young journalist, Victorin’s sole future project is to tell the lives of dead men and women: his own imagined family, haunting the shadows, made of “chimera, dreams of each night that inexplicably disappear before dawn”. Then begins a long backward journey, that stretches over the period between the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century and the year 2000.
It would be impossible to tell all the things that make up the luminous density of this Saga of Innocents, sad and playful  children, fragile beings who trip in the courtyard of the Mas des Turcs, in the light of the warm hours. There’s Saturnin, the founder of the family line, former horse thief and pleasure merchant who made copies of monumental statues that his still young widow later smashed to smithereens. And Baptistine, the loveliest woman in Istanbul, who left the Bosphorus for Languedoc, bought the domain of Solignargues, renaming it Mas des Turcs. Her daughter Rosalie, whose double-buttoned white dress Paulin the photographer unfastened with all the dexterity off a pea-sheller. Their child was the mother of the narrator. And his uncle, Léonce, strung up to a tree by the militia. When he came down, body broken, it was to join the bees that the half-witted keeper caressed for hours on end.
Like an old sepia photograph that suddenly comes to life, this family saga, peppered by the narrator’s imagination, weaves together their fates. Jean-Pierre Milovanoff, a native of Languedoc, has written a generous, warm book full of humanity and tenderness and caressed by the wind of history - yet not lacking in dark irony.         

Podium
Yann Moix
Novel
400 pp  
The Author
Yann Moix has already written three novels: Jubilations vers le ciel, Les cimitières sont des champs des fleurs, Anissa Corto. He is also the literary critic for Elle magazine and is often invited to appear on TV and radio shows.
The Book
For his fourth novel Yann Moix has chosen to explore modern times, where the question is no longer Hamlet’s to be or not to be, rather ‘to be famous or not to be famous’. Celebrity, the desire for celebrity and all the consequences, are the real subject of this book. Who am I? Wouldn’t I be better off if I were someone else? 
The story is one of a pathetic creature who decides to become famous as a look-alike of a pop singer, Claude François. With his impresario, Couscous, and his troop of pretty girls to fill in the background vocally and visually, he sets off to create a real identity for himself as a look-alike. Claude was his idol, why shouldn’t he be a prophet?
From then on, the story moves into the sad and poignant world of the fans, lost youngsters who are trapped in an endless circle of reliving the idol’s gestures, replaying old songs and recreating fringed and sequined clothes. It’s a strange universe, where he meets other look-alikes, of Elvis, Johnny Halliday etc… None of them really know who they are. They have usurped an identity in order to live a little, between concerts at a supermarket, and sordid encounters in motorway parking lots.
Yann Moix plays on two modes, humour (his hero invents a language that is truly hilarious) melancholy (looking back, whatever became of those ‘Yeah Yeah’ years?) erudition ( Moix is unparalleled when describing this or that live concert, the biography of an obscure backing guitarist) and even religion, (the idol is a god, the look-alike lives his resemblance like a Christ figure, the impresario is like John the Baptist).
Behind this fable of clones, Yann Moix is telling us a story that has depth, creating a fantastic universe as he can do so well.

Les ombres errantes,
Dernier Royaume I
Sur le jadis, Dernier Royaume II
Abîmes, Dernier Royaume III
Paul Quignard
Novels
260pp
The Author
Pascal Quignard was born in 1948. His works include : Le salon du Wurtemberg, Le sexe et l’effroi, Rhétorique speculative, La haine de la musique, Vie secrète, Terrasse à Rome.  
  The Book
“Twenty years ago, I wrote the eight tomes of Petits Traités. They were published by Editions Maeght. Dernier Royaume is a series of volumes that are much more extensive and strange. Neither philosophical argument, nor learned, sparse little essays, nor Romanesque narratives, all the ‘genres’ have gradually dissolved for me.
As a child - all during my childhood - every night I used to turn my head from dusk to dawn. Much more interesting than sleeping, I thought. It was perhaps a sign of a deficiency, but it was exciting to me. That’s what these books are - a head turning rapidly. The flash of a head. It isn’t a judgement on our times, or the world, or society or human evolution, it’s the small effort of thinking everything.
A small, very modern vision of the world.
A totally secular vision of the world.
A totally abnormal vision of the world.”
Pascal Quignard
  Les ombres errantes, Sur le jadis, and Abîmes, have much in common with Vie Secrète (Gallimard, 1998) which was warmly received by the public and critics, and has sold 50.000 copies to date.

La Peau dure
Elisabeth Quin
Novel
260 pp
The Author
Elisabeth Quin has become the uncontested star of cinema and T.V. reviewers, thanks to her almost daily appearances on Rive droite Rive gauche, a highly popular new-style cultural chat show. She is also Elle magazine’s ‘Madame Cinema’. This is her first novel.   
  The Book
The story of a girl who dreams of true love, yet can’t help destroying it when it does come along. Or, the story of a confused and narcissist character who’s always getting her own feelings wrong. She’s cruel when she wants to be tender, unfaithful when she’s sworn to be true, rebellious when she thinks she’s being dominated, and plays the underdog while dreaming of freedom. She’s called Catherine Wu…(half-French, half-Chinese – like the author). In other words, she’s in a mess.
In this ‘novel’ – a fantasy that soon appears to be highly autobiographical – Catherine tells how she ruined her wonderful love affair with Gustave. How she can’t help ruining everything she touches. There are scenes that are droll, straight out of the life of today’s woman: sexual partners brushed off, brilliant and dreadful considerations about desire are expressed, about solitude, vexation. The result is a very funny chronicle on the difficulty of being. One thinks of Lacan’s statement: “A hysterical woman is one who is seeking a man to dominate her.” Like a mirror held up to a whole generation of ‘liberated women’, this novel works thanks to the miracle of the author’s sardonic, castrating language, full of subtlety and self-derision.  

L’Insensé
Morgan Sportès
Novel
320 pp
The Author
Morgan Sportès was born in Algiers in 1947. Outremer, a narrative, was published by Grasset in 1989 and L’Appât (1990), Rue du Japon (1999) and Une fenêtre ouverte sur la mer (2002) were published by Le Seuil.
  The Book
This absorbing and Romanesque novel is the story of Richard Sorge, who was hung by the Japanese in 1944. It is set at the end of the thirties, in Japan – then still an ally of the Nazi regime. The hero was a familiar figure in the streets of Tokyo: a bar fly, a seducer, a briber of officials, a bon vivant, blabbing loudly wherever he spent his time. Though alcohol gave him a faltering gait and late nights furrowed his face, he had the figure of an athlete. People called him Herr Doktor. This paradoxical and tormented character was the Japanese correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but also a close friend of the German ambassador and an even closer one to his wife; he knew all about the on-going military operations and was himself in the perilous position of leading of a network of spies devoted to Stalin.
In the daylight hours, he created diversions. At night, he was a communist who doubted just about everything except the eventual triumph of Stalin, sending coded messages to Moscow from Tokyo, from a town red with alcohol to one that was white with snow. But how far did his influence go? How long would he be able to divert the Nazi’s suspicions, cheat the Japanese and keep his mistresses contented? At the end of the road, he and only he knew, death was waiting.
Morgan Sportès, who knows a great deal about that crucial period of the war,  has written a true story about a man alone against the world, a hero of yesteryear, like one of Malraux’s true protagonists. The scene is peopled with Nippon “modern girls” in short skirts, devoted geishas, slick Nazis, Stalin’s spies ready to betray, shady characters who might be double or triple agents, women of the world draped in evening gowns –they all rub shoulders and hide their game in a Tokyo wrenched between modernity and its archaic traditions.
The narrative moves along to the feverish rhythm of the hero’s dangerous existence, like a torrent rushing toward the Apocalypse.  


Plusieurs fois par moi
Raphäele Vidaling
Novel
240 pages
The Author
Raphaële Vidaling is twenty-nine. She holds the aggregation in French. She has contributed to many quality illustrated books, and she published Le catalogue de vos rêves (Hachette), a list of 3000 objects found on the Internet.   The Book
Andréa Line, a twenty-eight year old Parisian, has a problem with other people. Simply to be a woman among others, while keeping her own individuality, needs a lot of effort and practice. Consumer group meetings are her training ground, where everyone pretends to be such good friends with so much in common, trying out new things… 
She shares a flat with a man who does the cooking for both of them, ‘GTFM’- the guy that feeds me. He gets all the attention she can give, the woman’s and the scientist’s, but it’s not clear who’s really playing the guinea pig. One day he disappears. Next in line is ‘GIPW’ - the guy I play with. She plays at living then tells him all about it. Food is a kind of symbolic and charnel communication between them. There are even recipes in The Book - lists, small ads, e-conversations - the style is experimental.
A totally original novel that is like a game, a laboratory: even if the subject is a familiar one: the story of painful loneliness told for once with humour, spiced with a guinea pig’s cool reflections on today’s world.    

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Non-fiction

La gauche disparue
Laurent Mauduit and Gérard Desportes
Non-fiction
250 pp
The Author
Laurent Mauduit, co-author with Gérard Desportes of La Gauche imaginaire (1999), is editor-in-chief of the business firms section of Le Monde, the famous French daily.
Gérard Desportes was editor-in-chief of Liberation.
The Book
Why has the left disappeared in France? If we look closely, we see that during its finest hours, for more than a century, the left was either resistant or reformist. Today, it is neither of those things. The left, which held up the values of socialism for almost a hundred years - the left of social change, long represented by Lionel Jospin - no longer exists.
La Gauche Disparu is essentially the behind-the-scenes story of the election where Lionel Jospin, the most orthodox leader of the left, former Trotskyite ‘mole’, dared take up a centrist position, affirming that his project was not socialist at all and announcing a few insipid liberal ambitions – like the privatisation of the French electricity board.
La Gauche Disparu, tells how all those militants -VIPs of the left, socialist, communist and trade union members – were secretly expressing their bitterness and anger to the press, because of that abandon.
La Gauche Disparu is also an essay that tries to identify the deep causes of that abandon. Who is responsible? The evolution of patrimonial capitalism that has upset the European social model? Or the dearth of ideas that is affecting all the left-wing parties in Europe, and France in particular?
Full of testimonies, this book is an extension of the investigation begun in La Gauche imaginaire. It retraces each step in the resounding defeat of a certain idea of socialism.

Ma Vie
Jacques Le Divellec
with Jean-Claude Renard
Biography
280 pages
The Author
Jacques Le Divellec was born in 1932. On his seventieth birthday, he decided to tell the story of his life.
Jean-Claude Renard is a journalist with the weekly Politis and also contributes to the Magazine Littéraire. He has written two novels. One of them, Marcello, was published in February by Fayard.  
  The Book
We all know his prestigious restaurant on the esplanade of the Invalides in Paris. It is one of the brighter stars in the Gault et Millau heavens and the Michelin guide, reputed for its seafood dishes that combine shellfish, crayfish, monkfish, turbot and dory in a nautical presentation. We know that his den of gastronomy was François Mitterrand’s eating place. Today you can see all the gourmet’s of the political world, show biz and the press ‘à table’.
Jacques Le Divellec is a tower of strength. A workaholic who has never given up learning and trying new things. He began his apprenticeship at a school in Clermont-Ferrand, then came restaurant after restaurant, from Maxeville on the ‘grands boulevards’ to Véfour next to Raymond Oliver, before he decided to open his own, in his homeland, La Rochelle. In the sixties and the seventies, his restaurant became the rendezvous of gourmets, artists, from Fernand Raynaud to Johnny Hallyday, from Rostropovitch top Bernard Blier, Robert Mitchum to Jean-Pierre Rives. When he came up to Paris, in 1983, his clientele remained faithful.
But there is also a family history: a grandfather born under the Second Empire, a father who ran a bistrot then a hotel, much coming and going between Paris and La Rochelle, Invalides and Port-des-Barques. Luck played its part of course, but there was perseverance, and determination that combined with the desire to please. A true chef de cuisine, he doesn’t only sell food, he sells moments of happiness…
A life that’s had its share of emotion and anecdotes that keep the taste buds alert.
 

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