French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Lun, Les Palimpsestes
Novel and Narrative Prose
Les Palimpsestes
Aleksandra Lun
Lori Saint-Martin (Translator)
Publication date: 01/03/2018
Publisher: Sous-sol (Editions du)
Series: Feuilleton Fiction
ISBN: 978-2-36468-348-8
EAN: 9782364683488
Page count: 128 p.
Things haven't been going too well lately for Czeslaw Przesnicki. At thirty-five, this self-proclaimed "failed writer" and Polish expatriate writing in Antarctic finds himself committed to a psychiatric hospital in Liège. A frustrated veterinarian, author of a debut novel that sold all of six copies, plagued by a severe sexual drought and the angst of writer's block, Czeslaw feels his nerves are about to snap...
He wanders the corridors of a strange institution where the patients go by the names of Nabokov, Beckett, Cioran, or Ionesco. A One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest of geniuses—all of them towering figures of exile who, accused of abandoning their native tongue, must submit to an enigmatic "Bartlebyan therapy" meant to set them back on the linguistic straight and narrow. A dazzlingly whimsical and inventive cosmopolitan novel, *Les Palimpsestes* masquerades as a whimsical tribute to literature while painting a portrait of a character in crisis that is as touching as it is uproarious.
Torn between multiple languages, multiple identities, and multiple masks, this wildly eccentric descendant of Kafkaesque heroes is the tragi-comic face of our time, and his madness is our own.
Aleksandra Lun (born in Gliwice in 1979) left Poland at the age of 19, funded her language and literature studies in Spain by working in a casino, and currently lives in Belgium. She translates from English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Romanian into Polish, her mother tongue. Les Palimpsestes (written in Spanish), her debut novel, received the prestigious PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America.
She is currently learning Dutch.
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An article on this work can be read on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
"Seriously Whimsical", by Cécile Dutheil.
Samuel Beckett, Karen Blixen, Eugène Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Agota Kristof… What do these great 20th-century writers have in common? All of them wrote in a language that was not their mother tongue, but their "stepmother tongue." The phrase comes from Aleksandra Lun, a Polish polyglot who writes in Spanish and delivers a brilliantly witty, razor-sharp compendium on a question to which great scholars have dedicated massive treatises.
Aleksandra Lun’s novel playfully engages with the rich European tradition of multilingualism and exile in literature. By placing figures like Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco into a psychiatric ward, the book explores the complex emotional and artistic weight of abandoning one's native language for a adopted one. This premise taps into long-standing debates within modern literature regarding identity, cultural displacement, and the boundaries of national traditions. It is particularly relevant for readers interested in contemporary fiction that bridges linguistic borders with humor and philosophical depth.
The book will especially appeal to fans of absurdist narratives, literary satire, and works that celebrate the sheer resilience of writers caught between worlds. Scholars and enthusiasts of comparative literature will recognize echoes of Kafkaesque alienation combined with a distinctly modern cosmopolitan sensibility. Through the misadventures of Czeslaw Przesnicki, the author offers both a tender character study and a brilliant meditation on the joys and tribulations of translation, linguistic identity, and the relentless drive to create art against all odds.