Laurent Binet: Hhhh

Michel Houellbecq: Serotonin

Nathalie Leger: A Suite for Barbara Loden

“I used to hide behind doors. I spent my childhood hiding behind my grandmother’s stove. I was very lonely.’ Later, still in Positive: “I’ve gone through my while life like I was autistic, convinced I was worth nothing. I didn’t know who I was. I was all over the place, I had no pride.”

I also discover that she liked “Journey to the End of the Night” by Céline, “Nana” by Zola, “Breathless “by Godard, Maupassant’s short stories and Andy Warhol’s films.


The iconic woman of the 70’s is nothing but a woman wondering what she will do with her so-called liberty. She wonders what kind of lie she will be forced to invent in order to hide, at ease, from men, so that she will – finally – be left alone.

Georges Simenon: The Train

The idea of going back to my street, my house, my workshop, my garden, my habits, the labeled radios waiting on the shelves to be repaired, struck me as unbearable.

Annie Ernaux: The Years

Virginie Despentes: Vernon Subutex 2

He is pleasantly surprised by her spelling and syntax. It is much better than he would have imagined from the way she spoke. The comma between 'Die' and 'fucker' is full-on grammar-Nazi.


"We are the defeated - and we are thousands. We are searching for a way."

Virginie Despentes: Vernon Subutex 1

But he never makes a call to ask for help. He cannot put his finger on precisely what is stopping him. He has had time to think about it. It remains an enigma. He scoured the internet in search of advice for pathological procrastinators. He drew up lists of what he had to lose, what he would be risking, and what he had to gain. It made no difference. He calls no-one.


And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young — still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city.

Anna Seghers: Transit

Communist stuck in Marseilles with other refugees fleeing the Nazis.

“What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.”


When you're young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different — it paralyzes you.

Marc Auge: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets. airports and hotels. on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls 'non-space' results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Auge uses the concept of 'supermodernity' to describe the logic of these late capitalist phenomena - a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity. Starting with an attempt to disentangle anthropology from history. Auge goes on to map the distinction between place, encrusted with historical monuments and creative of social life. and non-place. to which individuals are connected in a uniform manner and where no organic social life is possible. Unlike Baudelairean modernity. where old and new are interwoven, Supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft. local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle.



On the way to his car Pierre Dupont stopped at the cash dispenser to draw some money. The device accepted his card and told him he could have 1800 francs. Pierre Dupont pressed the button beside this figure on the screen. The device asked him to wait a moment and then delivered the sum requested, reminding him as it did so to withdraw his card.'Thank you for your custom,' it added as Pierre Dupont arranged the banknotes in his wallet. It was a trouble-free drive, the trip to Paris on the All autoroute presenting no problems on a Sunday morning. There was no tailback at the junction where he joined it. He paid at the Dourdan tollbooth using his blue card, skirted Paris on the peripherique and took the A 1 to Roissy. He parked in row J of underground level 2, slid his parking ticket into his wallet and hurried to the Air France check-in desks. With some relief he deposited his suitcase (exactly 20 kilos) and handed his flight ticket to the hostess, asking if it would be possible to have a smoking seat next to the gangway. Silent and smiling, she assented with an inclination of her head, after first consulting her computer, then gave him back his ticket along with a boarding pass. 'Boarding from Satellite B at eighteen hundred; she told him. He went early through Passport Control to do a little duty-free shopping. He bought a bottle of cognac (something French for his Asian clients) and a box of cigars (for himself). Meticulously, he put the receipt away next to his blue card. He strolled past the window-displays of luxury goods, glancing briefly at their jewellery, clothing and scent bottles, then called at the bookshop where he leafed through a couple of magazines before choosing an undemanding book: travel, adventure, spy fiction. Then he resumed his unhurried progress. He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted by having got rid of his luggage and at the same time, more intimately, by the certainty that, now that he was 'sorted out', his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.

'Roissy, just the two of us!': these days, surely, it was in these crowded places where thousands of individual itineraries converged for a moment, unaware of one another, that there survived something of the uncertain charm of the waste lands, the yards and building sites, the station platforms and waiting rooms where travellers break step, of all the chance meeting places where fugitive feelings occur of the possibility of continuing adventure, the feeling that all there is to do is to 'see what happens'.

The passengers boarded without problems. Those whose boarding passes bore the letter Z were requested to board last, and he observed with a certain amusement the muted, unnecessary josding of the XS and Y s around the door to the boarding gangway. Waiting for take-off, while newspapers were being distributed, he glanced through the company's in-flight magazine and ran his finger along the imagined route of the journey: Heraklion, Larnaca, Beirut, Dhahran, Dubai, Bombay, Bangkok ... more than nine thousand kilometres in the blink of an eye, and a few names which had cropped up in the news over the years. He cast his eye down the duty-free price list, noted that credit cards were accepted on intercontinental flights, and read with a certain smugness the advantages conferred by the 'business class' in which he was travelling thanks to the intelligent generosity of his firm ('At Charles de Gaulle 2 and New York, Club lounges are provided where you can rest, make telephone calls, use a photocopier or Minitel .... Apart from a personal welcome and constant attentive service, the new Espace 2000 seat has been designed for extra width and has separately adjustable backrest and headrest .. .').

He examined briefly the digitally labelled control panel of his Espace 2000 seat and then, drifting back into the advertisements in the magazine, admired the aerodynamic lines of a few late-model roadsters and gazed at the pictures of some large hotels belonging to an international chain, somewhat pompously described as 'the surroundings of civilization' (the Mammounia in Marrakesh, 'once a palace, now the quintessence of five-star luxury', the Brussels Metropole, 'where the
splendours of the nineteenth century remain very much alive'). Then he came across an advertisement for a car with the same name as his seat, the Renault Espace: 'One day, the need for space makes itself felt .... It comes to us without warning. And never goes away. The irresistible wish for a space of our own.
A mobile space which can take us anywhere. A space where everything is to hand and nothing is lacking ... .' Just like the aircraft really. 'Already, space is
inside you .... You've never been so firmly on the ground as you are in (the E)space,' the advertisement ended pleasingly. They were taking off. He flicked rapidly through the rest of the magazine, giving a few seconds to a piece on 'the hippopotamus - lord of the river' which began with an evocation of Africa as 'cradle of legends' and 'continent of magic and sorcery'; glancing at an article about Bologna ('You can be in love anywhere, but in Bologna you fall in love with the city'). A brightly coloured advertisement in English for a Japanese 'videomovie' held his attention for a moment ('Vivid colors, vibrant sound and non-stop action. Make them yours forever'). A Trenet song, heard that afternoon over the car radio on the autoroute, had been running through his head, and he mused that its line about the 'photo, the old photo of my youth' would soon become meaningless to future generations. The colours of the present preserved for ever: the camera as freezer.

An advertisement for the Visa card managed to reassure him (,Accepted in Dubai and wherever you travel .... Travel in full confidence with your Visa card'). He glanced distractedly through a few book reviews, pausing for a moment on the review of a work called Euromarketing which aroused his professional interest:
The homogenization of needs and consumption patterns is one of the overall trends characterizing the new international business environment . . . . Starting from an examination of the effects of the globalization phenomenon on European b:lsiness, on the validity and content of Euromarketing and on predictable developments in the international marketing environment, numerous issues are discussed. The review ended with an evocation of 'the conditions suitable for the: development of a mix that would be as standardized as possible' and 'the architecture of a European communication'. Somewhat dreamily, Pierre Dupont put down his magazine. The 'Fasten seat belt' notice had gone out. He adjusted his earphones, selected Channel 5 and allowed himself to be invaded by the adagio of Joseph Haydn's Concerto No.1 in E major. For a few hours (the time it would take to fly over the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), he would be alone at last.

Julien Gracq: A Balcony in the Forest

On its own, having escaped my grasp, the spool I had loosed was unwinding.


This stretch through the fogbound forest gradually lulled Grange into his favorite daydream; in it he saw an image of his life: all that he had he carried with him; twenty feet away, the world grew dark, perspectives blurred, and there was nothing near him but this close halo of warm consciousness, this nest perched high above the vague earth.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Reticence

Already on the first day, after remaining undecided all afternoon in my hotel room, I’d realized it was more complicated than I’d thought it was going to be to make up my mind to go see them. To a certain extent of course that was why I’d come to Sasuelo, but ever since I’d felt this initial reticence at going to see them I could very well imagine that my trip to Sasuelo, although initially meant as an occasion to see the Biaggis, would in fact end without my having resolved to contact them.

It had rained a lot the night before, and nearby on the ground a large puddle of water dimly reflected the trees and rooftops of the neighboring houses in the darkness. A light gust of wind occasionally sent a ripple over the surface of the water, blurring the reflections for a moment. Then, slowly, the image recomposed on the surface, trembling for another few seconds before stabilizing, and I saw that the center of the puddle mirrored the silvery shape of the old gray Mercedes, around which, however, by I don't know what play of perspectives or blind spots, there was no trace of me at all.


Walking past the large wooden mirror in the entrance, I saw a furtive silhouette pass by in the blackness.


Before moving on I lingered for a moment on the jetty looking at the dead cat, which continued to drift slowly back and forth in the harbor, first to the left then to the right, following the imperceptible flux and reflux of the current on the surface of the water.

Antoine Volodine: Radiant Terminus

He always recovers. He hasn't been dead or alive since he was born. The radiation doesn't do anything to him.


This awful kolkhoz matchmaker, this reviver of cadavers, this horrible shadow, this giant impervious to radiation, this shamanic authority from nowhere, this president of nothing, this vampire in the form of a kulak, this strange man sitting on a stool, this abuser, this dominating man, this sleazy man, this unsettling man, this nuclear-reactor creature, this godless and lordless hypnotizer, this manipulator, this monster belonging to who knows what stinking category.


We never fill it up with fuel, Ilyushenko suddenly thought. We never stock up. We go on as if we were outside reality. The locomotive could keep going like this for years.


What's for sure is that he was the complete master of Radiant Terminus. Nobody was permitted to exist in the kolkhoz unless he'd gotten control over them in the heart of their dreams. No one was allowed to struggle in his or her own future unless he was part of it and directing it as he wished. He transformed everyone ito something like puppets, and, so as not to be bored, he created puppets that resisted him or who could deceive him or cause problems, but, in the end, he was the one with the final say on everything. Radiant Terminus wasn't really a kolkhoz, it was more a theater to keep him from spending eternity yawning and waiting for the world to break down and, for those who lived in the village, it was a filthy dream they could never escape.


— It's just theatrics, Myriam Umarik said. It's just a dream. His head skewered or not, doesn't matter. We're all neither dead nor living in Radiant Terminus. We're all bits of Solovyei's dreams. We're all ends and pieces of dreams or poems in his head. What we do to him doesn't matter to him. What Samiya Schmidt did to him that night is like a scene from a book. It doesn't count for anything. It's nothing. It'll pass.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Self Portrait Abroad

Every time I travel,I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether.


I realized that time had passed since I'd left Kyoto. And if this affected me so deeply on that day, it was not only because my senses, numbed by the prevailing grayness and the alcohol in my blood, naturally put me in a melancholic frame of mind, it was also because I suddenly felt sad and powerless at this brusque testimony to the passage of time. It was hardly the result of conscious reasoning, but rather the concrete and painful, fleeting and physical feeling that I myself was part and parcel of time and its passing. Until then, the feeling of being carried along by time had always been attenuated by the fact that I wrote - until then, in a way, writing had been a means of resisting the current that bore me along, a way of inscribing myself in time, of setting landmarks in the immateriality of its flow, incisions, scratches.


In Hanoi, the traffic punctuates each hour of the day and almost every hour of the night. The noise of car horns never stops in the streets, it forms a permanent background noise like an uninterrupted murmur that you could almost forget if it didn't keep coming back at you, it being precisely the function of horns to attract attention, to signal and warn, to drown each other out, outhonk one another. Thousands of horns blow without a moment's silence on the streets, shrill and loud, sharp and repetitive, insistent, some quick and piercing, fired off nearby in impatient salvoes, others remote, lost, muted by their distance, mainly from mopeds and motorcycles, but also from cars and taxis, tarpaulined trucks and three-wheeled vehicles, buses and vans and sometimes even—lost in the middle of an intersection, hardly audible in the surrounding turmoil— the delicate and isolated tinkle of a bicycle bell.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Naked

It was only now, more than seven months later in Paris…that I had gained the necessary distance to apprehend all the elements of the scene then underway…So where was I? Where—if not in the limbo of my own consciousness, freed from the contingencies of space and time, still and forever invoking the figure of Marie?


... an excuse to ditch everyone and slip out of the museum or even, if possible, to vanish from this story altogether, return to nothingness, from which it seemed he’d been plucked for a brief moment to beget, at his own expense, an evanescent ribbon of life, airborne, twirling, futile, and fleeting.


Developing a theoretical reflection on the very idea of haute couture, she had returned to the original meaning of the word couture as the sewing of cloth using different techniques, stitching, tacking, hooking, binding, which allow fabrics to be combined on models’ bodies, twinned to the skin, and joined together, to present this year in Tokyo a haute-couture dress without a single stitch.


Any true love and, more broadly speaking, any project, any undertaking, from the flowering of a bud to the growth of a tree to the realization of a work of art, has but one aim and intent, to persevere in being, doesn’t it always, inevitably, come down to chewing the same thing over? And a few weeks later, taking up this idea again of love as rumination or continual reprise, I would further refine my phrasing, asking Marie if the secret to lasting love was never to swallow.

Georges Simenon: The Carter of 'La Providence'

There are all kinds of bolt-holes. Some have the smell of whisky, eau de Cologne, a woman and the sounds of gramophone records…


But it fell back again weakly, gnarled, calloused, spotted with small blue dots which must have been the vestiges of old tattoos.


He cycled over 50 kilometres without once stopping for a beer.

Jean Echenoz: I'm Off

"And besides," he ventures as a last resort, "your whole deal is so cliché. They kill people like this in every TV movie in the world, there's nothing original about it."

Marcel Proust: Within a Budding Grove

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.


No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.


Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.


I wished to see storms only on those coasts where they raged with most violence.


All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.


Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.


I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.


To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

Georges Simenon: The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien

The poor are used to stifling any expression of their despair, because they must get on with life, with work, with the demands made of them day after day, hour after hour.

Georges Simenon: Pietr the Latvian

What he sought, what he waited and watched out for was the crack in the wall. In other words, the instant when the human being comes out from behind the opponent . . . 

"Good Lord! Is this the way you search for someone?" she snapped, turning to Maigret. "I'm told you're from the police. My husband may have been killed.... What are you waiting for?"
The heavy gaze that he turned on her was a hundred percent Maigret. Utterly calm. Utterly indifferent. As though he had just heard a fly buzzing. As though he were looking at some completely commonplace object.

Emmanuel Carrere: Limonov

“Whoever wants the Soviet Union back has no brain. Whoever doesn’t miss it has no heart.” - Putin


That same year the same Yakovlev explained on television that the decree rehabilitating all those who had been persecuted since 1917 was not at all a measure of clemency, as people in the Party were saying, but of repentance: “We are not pardoning them, we are asking their pardon. The goal of this decree is to rehabilitate us, who by remaining silent and looking away were accomplices to these crimes.” In short, there was a sudden consensus that for the last seventy years the country had been in the hands of a gang of criminals.


He sees himself as a hero; you might call him a scumbag; I suspend my judgment on the matter. But … I thought to myself, his romantic, dangerous life says something. Not just about him, Limonov, not just about Russia, but about everything that’s happened since the end of the second world war.


He walks home along Madison Avenue looking at the passers-by, above all the men, and judging them. Better than me? Worse? Most are better dressed: this is a rich part of town. A lot of them are taller. Some are more handsome. But he alone has the hard, determined look of someone who’s able to kill. And all of them, when they happen to make eye contact, look away in fright.