Literary season: three essential novels

While from 16 August there are almost 500 new items in the bookstore, on the occasion of the traditional literary season, Lose offers you a first selection of highly anticipated novels.

Virginie Despentes, Dear asshole

Five years after the end of the trilogy Vernon Subutex, Virginie Despentes returns to the bookstore with Dear asshole. And as always, it sends heavy. We find his style decisive, abrupt, sometimes trashy, pulsing with contagious rage and exposing the evils and springs of our time through the voice of three skinned people. Rebecca, former eternal lover, sublime movie star, in decline because her fifty years exclude her from the movie sets. Oscar, mediocre father, writer tortured with relative success, recently “ met by his former press officer. And the latter, Zoé, a very popular young feminist blogger, accuses her of harassment. Between Rebecca and Oscar it is an understatement to say that things had started badly. However, a casual correspondence conversation begins between them, interrupted by Zoé’s posts. Gender relations, sexism, ageism, feminism, absence of horizon, rape, violence of social networks, drugs, loneliness, various addictions, masculinity, desire, confinement, class deserters, motherhood, hypocrisy …: their exchanges dissect, illuminate and perhaps even ahead, which makes the air of time. Dizzy as gurgling, Dear assholegreat fresco post Me too it is also a hymn to friendship, imbued with a surprising sweetness.

Dear assholeby Virginie Despentes, Editions Grasset, 353 pages, € 22

S.ally Rooney, Where are you admirable world ?, translated by Laetitia Devaux

If you loved Normal people – both the series and the book – run to Sally Rooney’s new novel. A true literary phenomenon from across the Channel, the Irish writer, who became the muse of Generation Y, retraces, in an introspective key, the dreams and disillusions of young adults with Where are you admirable world? It portrays four shaky but lucid thirty-somethings who love each other, seek each other, distance themselves and desire each other in a background of torments around the collapse of our world. How to be happy when everything is falling apart? What to do with our helplessness and our guilt? Alternating narration and correspondence between a successful writer exiled in the Irish countryside and her best friend, assistant editor of a literary magazine, this novel explores themes dear to the novelist. And in particular, mental health, the sources of desire (with some sex scenes as explicit as they are successful), masculinity, the emptiness of our lives, capitalism, but also, of course, the friendly and romantic relationships of which he dissects the uproar. A text full of irony, at the crossroads of the existential novel and the bittersweet romantic comedy, which will delight the many fans of the novelist.

where are you admirable worldby Sally Rooney, De l’Olivier Editions, 384 pages, € 23.50

Emma Becker, Bad behavior

How to reconcile the intensity of motherhood and that of carnal impulses? How to keep wanting and being wanted? What remains of oneself when one becomes a mother? With Bad behavior, the writer Emma Becker signs a novel of rejection. That of having to choose between being a mother and a wife. To let you lock yourself into a unique role that stifles your life impulses. ” What I wish my son understood is that I tried to distract myself from the huge place he took in me by filling a whole bunch of kids who made me feel alive – that is – let’s say in danger. writes the narrator, the author’s perfect literary double. The latter takes us into an existential and sexual quest through which the heroine tries to drown her eternal dissatisfaction. The result is many rather raw sex scenes and a gallery of unflattering portraits of this forest of more or less mediocre lovers in whose arms she always ends up disappointed. After The Housefor which the writer had immersed herself in a Berlin brothel for two years, Emma Becker is writing a new subversive novel, at the same time amusing and melancholy, but above all carried by a proud breath of freedom.

Bad behaviorby Emma Becker, Éditions Albin Michel, 368 pages, € 21.90