Jude Cook

A Tale of Two Sams

The Age of Reinvention

By

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.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us