| Sumario: | Christine Montalbetti has published twenty-odd texts at the Éditions P.O.L over the years, beginning with Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine, which appeared in 2001. While she has practiced short forms and theater (with several plays produced at the Comédie-Française), her central literary concern has been the novel. Her novels are innovative, engaging, and exceptionally canny constructions. Each of them testifies to a smart, sustained reflection on narrative art, upon its possibilities and its limits, upon its articulative power. Those novels are moreover "critical" in character. That is, they display a broad recognition of the tradition out of which they arise. They invite their reader to share that recognition, and to exercise his or her critical faculties in a very conscious manner. These are generous texts, granted the way in which Christine Montalbetti welcomes her reader into the fictional world, and encourages her or him to participate in a shared meditation on literature and its uses. Her books constitute one of the key sites where contemporary French literature takes full account of its potential and seeks new expressive avenues.
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