THE SEER OF ETAMPES
Abel Quentin
(L’Observatoire, 380 pages, 2021)
***Recipient of the 2022 Villa Albertine Translation Fund***
***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***
***Winner of the 2021 Prix de Flore***
***Winner of the 2021 Prix de La Maison Rouge***
***Short-Listed for 2021 Prix Renaudot***
Until his recent retirement, Jean Roscoff was a history professor who specialized in the Cold War, teaching at a Parisian university. His once promising academic career fizzled when, in the mid-1990s, his research on the Rosenbergs that was to secure his tenure was discredited due to the declassification of CIA archives—a mini scandal that did not spill over the walls of academia. Now divorced from the woman he still loves, with a propensity for gin, he decides to get his act together. He begins working on the biography of a little-known African American poet, Robert Willow, who moved to Paris in the 1950s, rubbed elbows with Jean Paul Sartre, and died all but forgotten in a car accident. Barely published, Roscoff’s book is violently attacked yet proffers on his author a belated but, unfortunately, nefarious celebrity. It would seem that Roscoff has once again missed the boat, this time in a way he had not foreseen.
An early militant of SOS racisme in the 1980s, Roscoff thought he had paid his dues and earned his leftist credentials. He is soon to discover how out of touch he is with the exacting demands and novel terminology of a new generation of activists, best incarnated by his daughter’s feminist partner, who rebukes him mercilessly and despises him nearly as much as his ex-wife does. His effort to regain a bit of intellectual standing fails miserably when a web article launches a devastating critique of his book, accusing Roscoff of cultural appropriation and, most of all, of neglecting to place Willow’s blackness at the heart of his analysis. Rejected by family and friends, stigmatized by the media, Roscoff, ironically, only finds defenders on the right and extreme right of the political spectrum.
One of the most talked-about books of the 2021 French rentrée litteraire, The Seer of Etampes has been praised for the vivacity of its dialogue, its acute representation of characters and situations, and its corrosive humor that often leaves the reader doubled over with laughter at the misadventures of Quentin’s anti-hero. Like a worthy heir of Balzac, Quentin places himself as a keen observer of his times, and, with a touch of Houellebecq, goes where it is itchy and uncomfortable. The Seer of Etampes is an enormously funny satire of “woke” culture and the unforgiving nature of social-media-fueled polemics. It is also a deeper and more ambivalent reflection on intergenerational collusion through the portrait of a flawed and aging man whose youthful political engagement spared him none of the disgrace of falling out of step with rapidly evolving cultural mores.
Born in 1985, Abel Quentin is a lawyer and a writer. His acclaimed first novel, Sœur (Editions de L’Observatoire, 2019), about the Islamic radicalization of a teenager, won the Prix Première in 2020.