New novels from France: self-determination in an unjust world

France is the motherland of the autofictional origin story; the queen of this genre, who was crowned with the Nobel Prize, lives here: Annie Ernaux. With male colleagues such as Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, she denounced an unfair class society, because in Europe at the end of the 1990s, social background increasingly determined one's personal fate. The windows of opportunity opened up in post-war society by educational expansion and the welfare state for those who did not have the necessary economic means due to their origins closed again.

Her novels were the first warning messages for a populist revolt that gripped all Western societies from 2016 onwards: Brexit, Trump, AfD. Literature was ahead of society, sensing the frustrations and disappointments of those who were supposedly left behind before they were present in political and media discourse. One means: literary populist indictments of the system from a left-wing perspective (“Who killed my father,” Édouard Louis).

Alone: ​​When the current US Vice President J. D. Vance published a similar book (“Hillbilly Elegy”) with a conservative tone in 2017, people became suspicious. He used the same anti-elite populism. Just under the right auspices - his means are the same. As beneficial (at least from the left) and important as the complaints were, today in a society in which populist simplification creates rifts, literary innovation that also tolerates contradictions is needed again.

This is a text from Literataz, which was published in the wochentaz on October 2nd for the Frankfurt Book Fair. The taz will be live again in Frankfurt, with readings, discussions and of course the taz stand. You can find the entire program here. All reviews from Literatz are gradually appearing online, and you can find them collected here.

Now, of all people, two young French voices have presented novels that take a different direction. With new aesthetic and content-related impulses, Laura Vazquez and Thibault Daelman breathe new life into the genre of origin stories.

The first pages of Laura Vazquez’s second novel, “The Forces,” read like a blueprint for any origin story. In it, a young queer woman from the working class suffers from the shackles that a homophobic class society has placed on her. The nameless first-person narrator gets to the bottom of the everyday expressions of this social discipline; they are noticeable in every interaction right down to the innermost family cosmos: "The flattening of personality is a normal process. It destroys the uniqueness of the individual in favor of uniform anonymity."

Thibault Daelman: “Shadow Border”. Translated from French by Nicola Denis. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2026, 240 pages, 24 euros

Laura Vazquez: “The Forces”. Translated from French by Sonja Finck. park x ullstein, Berlin 2026, 288 pages, 23 euros

This suffering from society extends over countless pages, and as you read it you become suspicious at some point - is the narrator or the author serious? Is it about their own fate? A lot of it reads like the inner monologue of a first-year Powi student who saw light in the reading course "Understanding Capital": "My parents loved the norm, and they loved it madly. Worship protects you from having to make an effort yourself. The norm sets you a goal. In our civilization, the goal that the norm sets for you is an economic one."

In discovering her queerness, the narrator sees herself forced to rebel. Her certainties about her own lack of freedom are shaken when she discovers queer dating apps. How is this possible in a heteronormative society?

She meets women in cruising areas and is introduced to the lesbian subculture in a bar. But here too she is disappointed to note that everyone thinks in pre-conceived patterns. She is finally shaken out of her self-pity by Claudie, who is introduced to her as "an old, very powerful lesbian": "You believe that 'the others' are subordinate to the community, even subjugated. You believe that 'the others' are mindlessly parroting words and ignoring their history. But what about you? With your black and white thinking? Causality or free will. Beliefs or facts. Determination or autonomy. Do you hold your own for original? This is an old shoe, as old as Saturn.”

From this point on, “The Forces” becomes a celebration. The plot veers into the surreal and leaves the wrong track of the conventional origin story. Vazquez plays with the readers' expectations of an authentic report from the gutter and skilfully subverts them - this is not about the author's life at all. Instead, the powerful lesbian sends the nameless protagonist through a portal on a journey into a parallel world in order to get to the bottom of the very question that origin literature often deliberately ignores: How can one regain self-determination in an unjust society?

Vazquez approaches this question without ideological bias à la “Everyone is the architect of his own happiness”. On her journey, your protagonist meets a social worker who is destroyed by the absurdity of bureaucracy that doesn't want to help people. He ends up in the parallel world, where he now dresses like an insurance salesman. Or even a cult representative who makes three different cults with different interpretations available to the visitor - the novel by the 40-year-old French woman with Spanish roots Laura Vazquez offers at least as many interpretations, but does not make a final decision.

Thibault Daelman is similarly virtuoso in his debut novel “Shadow Border”, albeit under very realistic circumstances. In a classic autofictional style, the 36-year-old Frenchman tells of his youth in a large working-class family in the Parisian banlieue; his father is an alcoholic. A similar initial setting, but which Daelman breaks up by opening windows of opportunity for action and self-determination.

The unjust class society and patriarchy come together in the figure of the mother. With five sons, she has to put up with her unemployed husband hanging around, she insults him every day and creates space for herself by bringing other men home. And the husband? Simply pushed onto the sofa. Of course, this doesn't go unnoticed by the sensitive son, who reports from the first-person perspective. The mother's crude language imbues everyday life with violence.

Nevertheless – another ambivalence – the mother takes care of her sons and ensures that they can go to private school. Wherever authors like Édouard Louis close windows, Daelman opens them. In the misery that the family's tiny apartment undoubtedly represents, the son takes refuge in the language that gives form to this contradiction: "I would like to hate life, but I lust after it. My brain produces thoughts that I am incapable of. My eyes hunger for a world that I dread."

This is explicitly not to be understood as sedating in the sense of: It's not that bad after all. But rather as a regaining of agency and dignity. All the characters in this novel get their due, they are portrayed lovingly and honestly at the same time: "Regardless of the type of drunkenness, the - indeed strange - lady got drunk above all and especially on poems," it says about an alcoholic French teacher who opens up her enthusiasm for literature to her students.

Ironically, the only character who gets rid of the fat is that of a class transitioner who has climbed the social ladder. This character usually dominates the plot of autofictional origin novels as the protagonist, but in Daelman he only appears in the form of a snobby brother who made it to an elite university. However, Daelman does not make his own social advancement, which the publication of this novel bears witness to, part of the plot. In this way he avoids the trap of retrospectively removing himself from his proletarian family and dissecting their otherness.

Daelman and Vazquez have succeeded in two remarkable examinations of the effectiveness of social structures. They are not tempted to make a clear judgment; on the contrary: injustices are named but not broken down to a common denominator. They do this with their very own language that finds words for the simultaneity of happiness and misery.