There are books that we leaf through, those that amuse and those that stay in a corner of the mind for years. Here is a small selection of our favorites for 2024.
Essays, novels, fictionalized essays and essayistic novels. This year the choices of shapes are varied for our small mazesque selection. The substance, on the other hand, resolutely gravitates around common themes, dear to the editorial team for years: an arrogant and joyful feminist reflection, books which speak of life, in its most elusive and fragile aspects at the same time. A beautiful literary assessment for 2024, to welcome the following year.
The last book by a novelist who knew he was dying, Baumgartner is neither a testament nor a “summa” work. On the contrary, this old-age portrait of a university professor is striking in its lightness. As always with Paul Auster, small issues arise from a tiny life. Having a body is always a problem when you get older. This short text calmly explores the inseparable sensations and memories of its hero at the end of his journey. This latest opus punctuates the New Yorker’s work with a restraint and elegance that make it one of the very beautiful novels of this year.
Enzo Hanart
Baumgartnerby Paul Auster, translated from English (America) by Anne-Laure Tissut, Actes Sud editions, 208 p, €21.80.
It must be hammered, written, repeated, hammered again: shame must change sides. With Pour Britneya short text of less than 150 pages, Louise Chennevière unites her journey with that of Britney Spears and Nelly Arcan. Three seemingly irreconcilable trajectories, which the author nevertheless clearly associates. It is not only the blondness that is common to them – a detail which is important if we consider all the sexist clichés that this simple hair color carries – there are also the numerous sexist and sexual violence, which lead the author to anger, Britney Spears to confinement and Nelly Arcan to suicide. It is in a single breath, almost in one piece, that Louise Chennevière constructs her sentences and her story. With urgency and reflection. This is also feminism.
Anaïs Dinarque
Pour Britney by Louise Chennevière, POL editions, 144 p., €15
Second novel by Lune Vuillemin, Border the beast is a novel about human ambivalence: injuring, hunting but also repairing, lending aid. Jeff and Arden, responsible for a shelter for injured wild animals, welcome the narrator who is spending a stay in the middle of this frozen Canadian moor. This text says our wounds as reparation. Welcomed by Arden – the woman with spider fingers – she feels the birth and swelling of an ardent desire always mixed with dry distress. Ladybugs swarm like a nightmare. In the wake of nature writing the forest speaks, the animals engage in nuptial dances, the skin of the lake wrinkles. A very beautiful novel that we don’t let go of the tenacious desire to give the living a chance to survive.
Marie Viguier
Border the beast by Lune Vuillemin, editions La Contre Allée, 19 euros.
This book is built like a castle, where each chapter is a room, a small open door towards a path of reflection for thinking about sorories. Even if he does not carry it as a standard, the test My sisters castle has the merit of dusting off a little-known term, of putting the finger on the missing word “sororie”, barely present in dictionaries when its masculine counterpart, “siblings” and its derivative are an integral part of our national motto. Summoning both the sisters of flesh such as Woolf, de Beauvoir or Dorléac and those of fiction like the March, de Fleurville and the sisters in FleabagBlanche Leridon paints a portrait of the sisters, between rivalry constructed by the patriarchy and real sorority. A very beautiful, accessible, unexpected and enriching essay!
Anaïs Dinarque
My Sisters’ Castle, from the Brontës to the Kardashians, investigates female siblingsby Blanche Leridon, editions Les Pérégrines, 240 p., €20
The art of taking action – Leah Bismuth
Summary of his thesis, The art of taking action by Léa Bismuth is a clear and demanding essay. She reverses the psychoanalytic concept of “acting out”. From this “acting out”, initially conceptualized as pure negativity, death drive and thoughtless action, the author thinks of its positive counterpart: taking action could be a creative choice, a gesture of life but also the conscious desire for an event. The most beautiful thought exercise of this year.
Marie Viguier
The art of taking action by Léa Bismuth, PUF editions, 176p., 14euros.
In the room – Claire Baglin
During a meal at MacDonald’s or another similar fast-food restaurant, everything seems transparent. We see the team member who assembles the burgers in the open kitchens, the one who cleans the tables in the dining room or the manager who smilingly hands us our order in a kraft paper bag. However, what we do not see is the alienation of employees between frantic pace, unhealthy competition and mechanical repetition of gestures until all sense is exhausted. With his first novel In RoomClaire Baglin takes us behind the scenes of a fast-food restaurant like any other where the heroine begins her first small job. The reader goes back and forth between this dystopian world of fast food and his childhood memories marked by the figure of a working father. After In Roomyou’ll never order fries the same way again.
Lisette Pouvreau
In the room by Claire Bagin, Les éditions de midnight, 144 p., €8.50
Become a female dog – Itziar Ziga
Itziar Ziga grew up in the noisy streets of the Basque Country, where she learned to rebel against the norms imposed on women. With Become a female dogshe signs a radical and insolent firebrand that explodes codes, shakes up certainties and gives voice to the margins. Translated for the first time into French, this text published in 2009 is a declaration of war on wise and compliant femininity, on patriarchy and on bourgeois and civilized feminism.
Each page is an ode to subversion: femininity assumed as a role, excessive and parodic, from high heels to feathered boas, everything is staged to mock the great theater of patriarchy. But behind this apparent carnival, Ziga offers a real political arsenal. With her sharp tongue, she dismantles discrimination against sex workers, trans and racialized people, and opposes the purity of institutional feminism with an explosive femininity, “ bastard, rude, exalted, offbeat ».
Nourished by portraits and testimonies, the text constantly shifts the boundaries between sacred and profane, theory and practice. Ziga summons Saint Agatha as much as the post-porn performer Annie Sprinkle, the queer artist Pedro Lemebel or the Afghan feminist Meena Keshwar Kamal. This manifesto is also a vibrant tribute to these figures who brought it out of the shadows: Alaska, punk icon of Movida, or Nell Kimball, mistress of a brothel in the 19th century, whose transgressive memories resonate with the Barcelona street activism. In line with the SCUM Manifesto of Valerie Solanas, Become a female dog is a fiery conversation between “real sluts”, these self-confident, arrogant and exuberant women who break down the shackles. With humor, rage and tenderness, Ziga offers a space to those whom history would like to make invisible. A radical, joyful, and furiously necessary space.
Romane Fragne
Become a female dog by Itziar Ziga, translated from Spanish by Diane Moquet and Camille Massy, Cambourakis editions, 176 p., €21
What is a family? Doesn’t it always go beyond so-called “biological” links? What dynamics, happy and unhappy, does it involve? Hélène Giannecchini, author of the very beautiful See with your own eyesoffers a new book at the crossroads of literature, theory and a concrete experience of friendship. By inviting into her pages the thoughts of Butler, Wittig, Lorde but also archives and images like those of the photographer Donna Gottschalk, she thinks of the present possibility of inventing new ways of telling stories, of making friends, to make a family. An excessive desire for friendship works on this feeling to show that it is a term with wide open arms which can welcome both our emotional relationships and intellectual genealogies. Little wonder.
Marie Viguier
An excessive desire for friendship by Hélène Giannecchini, Editions du Seuil, 21 euros.
Hot Milk – Deborah Levy
August, southern Spain, 2015. Sofia accompanies her mother to receive treatment at an expensive private clinic in Almería. The stay is far from easy since mother and daughter get along like cats and dogs. Far from England and her waitress job exchanged for her unfinished thesis, Sofia meets people and sees her desire reborn. Deborah Levy returns in grace and mystery with a novel, after her autobiographical cycle exciting. Hot Milk is a book as fiery as it is heady, where jellyfish, cowboy boots and white cats form images that last long after reading.
Anaïs Dinarque
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, translation Céline Leroy, Éditions du Sous-sol, 22.50 euros.
Hit the epic – Alice Zeniter
After several years of shuttling between the mainland and Caillou (the name its inhabitants give to Kanaky-New Caledonia), Tass, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, is definitely back on her island. The young woman, who became a French teacher after the Covid crisis, is piqued with curiosity when she observes in two of her students, Kanaks, signs of belonging to a small independence group… The plot of this latest novel by Alice Zeniter fits in a pocket handkerchief: and for good reason, it serves above all to satisfy the author’s immense curiosity regarding this French island but little known to the French, that the revolts of last year have put them back at the heart of the news. Between Kanaks, Caldoches, Communards, volunteers to live the high life of a colonist and other convicts — sometimes deported from Algeria! — on this place which has long served as a prison for France, the author paints a fine portrait of these communities of destinies, which have little in common other than a land and a past punctuated by injustices.
Emma Poesy
Hit the epicby Alice Zeniter. Flammarion Editions. 22 euros.
The fierce souls – Marie Vingtras
In a small town in the United States, the lifeless body of a young girl is found along a river in the early morning. It is the newly arrived and openly lesbian town sheriff, Lauren Hobler, who leads the investigation to find the murderer. The first clues suggest that she was murdered by her French teacher, who was rumored in town to have had pedophilic inclinations. We have the impression of having already read the script of this American thriller a thousand times – the exposition scene of the brilliant series Mare of Eastownwith Kate Winslet, is almost the same – yet Marie Vingtras succeeds in carrying out this unpretentious plot with a masterful hand. Here, it is less a question of the crime than of the motive for the crime, of the interiorities of these little lives which are made and unmade in the hollow of an America which runs in isolation. A small revolution in a very virile genre, the thriller, which with small details and changes of focus, the author of this fascinating novel manages to deviate from her well-trodden path. The result is certainly feminist, but above all it is a great page-turner. Hat !
Emma Poesy
The fierce souls by Marie Vingtras. Éditions de l’Olivier, 21.50 euros.
