Jude Cook
A Tale of Two Sams
The Age of Reinvention
By Karine Tuil (Translated by Sam Taylor)
Scribner 416pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
The figure of the plucky, upwardly mobile arriviste, as embodied by Samir Tahar in Karine Tuil’s turbo-charged, politically engaged new novel, is a familiar one in 19th-century French literature. From Stendhal’s Julien Sorel to Balzac’s Lucien Chardon and Maupassant’s Georges Duroy, the man living on his wits and looks while searching for social leverage is everywhere. These antiheroes were perhaps emblematic of French Revolutionary truculence: two fingers perpetually held up at an ancien régime of editors and critics. So it is with Samir, though his milieu is not the 1830s literary scene of Illusions perdues but the post-9/11 cultural kaleidoscope of French society.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Take advantage of our Spring offer today. Try 3 issues for £5.
Use code 'SPRING3FOR5' at checkout.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring3for5/
'The unisexual roster saves us from diatribes about the iniquity of the male gaze, and in any case the female gaze is capable of retaliating by aestheticising and eroticising the bodies of men.'
Peter Conrad on @markcousinsfilm's new documentary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/lets-get-this-show-on-the-road
Dethier 'writes about mud buildings without the telltale modulations other critics use to distance so-called vernacular construction from the canon of high architecture.'
Building with earth may be the future, says @PhinHarper.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/build-brown-go-green