03: A Novel: A Novel

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

Overview

"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."

A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams—full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up—reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.

03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer—one of the great stylists of his generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374100216
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/22/2010
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	920,558
Product dimensions:	7.52(w) x 5.12(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Jean-Christophe Valtat teaches comparative literature at Clermont-Ferrand University. He is the author of two novels and a story collection.

Mitzi Angel is the publisher of Faber and Faber, Inc.

Editorial Reviews

A disaffected French teenager identifies with the "slightly retarded" girl he watches from a distance in this elegant and strangely absorbing novella. The text is one very long paragraph, in which the 12th-grade narrator, stuck in the uninspired backwater town of Montpérilleux, observes the girl, "locked in her state of unteachable ignorance," being led each morning by her mother to the bus stop. The narrator finds "ineluctable similarities between her predicament and my own," namely that the two are bound as outcasts against a harshly critical, unjust world that doesn't understand or appreciate them. The drab, oppressive society-- full of phony adults, misunderstanding, wasted talent, and general failure--grates against this youth who, save a nascent desire to become a writer, feels generally deficient and finds a kind of tormented reprieve in the "sorrowful compassion" he feels for the girl who can't return his love. Valtat's narrative proves to be a moving experience of being in someone else's shoes. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Jean-Christophe Valtat's novella 03 . . . written in one unbroken paragraph, about a teenage boy's unrequited love for a mentally handicapped girl he sees every day at the bus stop, has an enormous, controlled rage. It roars, from the shallows of the dreariest French suburb, against such received ideas as the religion of childhood ‘innocence,' the comforting notion that we all ‘grow' and ‘develop,' and the solace, offered by our teachers and our parents, that if we observe the proper rites our futures will be meaningful and wholesome . . . His book is at once Proustian and anti- Proustian: childhood and adolescence minutely, lyrically, philosophically examined, only to be given a contemptuous failing grade . . . It is a risky and ambitious book, though it does not seem "experimental" as such, in part because it is so grounded in the real, in the boredom and self-aggrandizement of being a teen-ager. The narrator is morose, aggressive, silly, defiant, as we all were; unlike some of us, he is also funny, intelligent, lyrically precise, and frequently self-aware.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“[Valtat's] hypersensitive high-school student listens to the Cure's Pornography but speaks like someone out of Proust ...Valtat manages to re-create the exact unhappiness of lost youth.” —Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles

“A slim Proustian recollection with a vitriolic backbeat, Jean-Christophe Valtat's novella 03 captures the obsessions of its teen narrator . . . Intellectually fierce . . . the story hits its stride when the narrator starts talking about songs by the Cure, at which point the prose turns so lucid, circuitous, and loaded with undetonated angst that it becomes an outright performance.” —Bookforum

“If there's any justice in the world—and of course, 03's narrator would insist that there isn't—this beautifully bitter little book will become as instantly classic as the work of Morrissey and Marr.” —Emma Garman, Words Without Borders

“A book that's a unique and insightful ... rumination on youth. 03 is a mix of beautiful and soiled thoughts presented in an unformed mess of confusion and truth. And, if memory serves, that's exactly what the high school years were like.” —Kyle Olsen, Hipster Book Club

From the Publisher

A man looks back on his awkward, insecure adolescence, specifically his obsession with a special-needs girl, in this novella from French writer Valtat. This thin book is composed of one long paragraph, which helps emphasize the singular, solipsistic focus of its narrator. As the story opens, he recalls growing up in a small French town, waiting to catch the bus to school while across the street a special-needs girl waits for a different bus. He's attracted to her, though the attraction isn't especially emotional, let alone erotic. Pretentious and condescending is more like it: He ponders her "smeary stigmata of idiocy" and figures that "while she might seem to be a young person, she was also this thing." The subsequent pages don't make the narrator much more likable, though it becomes more obvious that Valtat strives to capture the stray thoughts, moral and immoral, that swarm in a teenager's mind while he finds his emotional footing. To that end, the book is more affecting when the boy stops pondering his questionable feelings about the girl across the street and instead considers the physical and sexual abuse some of his classmates have suffered, or describes the music and books he enjoys. Valtat has a nice eye for metaphor, but the book's tone is static. As the narrator considers his youth there's little evidence that he's matured; at best, he's just grown capable of articulating his condescension in philosophical terms.

Kirkus Reviews