without value

gaëlle obiégly

(bayard, 144 pages, 2024)

***Long-listed for The 2024 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature***

*** TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE ***

There is something of Georges Perec in the way Obiégly picks away at the mundane, in the precision and the delight of words, the anxiety of annihilation draped in a smile, the cult of the pirouette above the void.

—Télérama

On the way to her morning jog, the narrator of Without Value chances upon a little pile of detritus abandoned on the sidewalk. On her return, it is still there—enigmatic, mysterious. She cannot resist the desire to collect it and bring it home, even though she is in the midst of moving and certainly does not need to weigh herself down with more clutter, not least the discarded fragments of some anonymous life.

For a couple of months, she has been laboriously sorting through her belongings, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, mulling over “what is destined for the paradise of archives; and what is doomed to disappear into the nothingness of rubbish.” She examines the content of the small heap: poorly framed photos; postcards; the diary (1941–43) of Etty Hillesum, who perished in Auschwitz; a bus ticket; a torn paperback; and a still valid lottery ticket. The material stirs up her writer’s imagination and fuels a “transfer of intimacy” in which she gets lost as much as finds herself.

Departing from an initially whimsical gesture, and with vivacious intelligence, Gaëlle Obiégly unravels a series of deeper reflections on the value of things and their circulation. In Without Value, we meet ragpickers, New Yorker garbage collectors, and archivists. We open cupboards, boxes, and trash cans. We hear about art, archaeology, photography, literature, and the creative process. In this original short novel, bordering on autobiographical essay, in turn playful, strange, and poignant, she interrogates the essence of our human condition, the whole of it doomed to disappear.

Gaëlle Obiégly has built a distinctive oeuvre composed of a dozen novels, including the critically acclaimed Totalement inconnu (Christian Bourgois, 2022), Une Chose sérieuse (Verticales, Gallimard, 2019), N’être personne (Verticales, 2017), and Petite figurine en biscuit qui tourne sur elle-même dans sa boîte à musique (Gallimard, 2000).