Aurélien Bellanger conjures a Notre-Dame novel for this year's rentrée
A review in En attendant Nadeau praises L'architecte de Notre-Dame as an erudite, tightly constructed companion piece to the writer's earlier Les derniers jours du Parti socialiste.
Among the titles crowding this year's rentrée littéraire, Aurélien Bellanger's L'architecte de Notre-Dame has drawn a notably admiring review from En attendant Nadeau. The critic describes the novel as erudite and stimulating, a kind of symbolic counterpart to Bellanger's earlier Les derniers jours du Parti socialiste.
According to the review, the book confirms Bellanger as the author of an original body of work, marked by rare coherence and what the critic calls a certain demiurgic talent — the suggestion of a writer who builds his fictions the way an architect builds a structure, from first principles up.
No further detail on plot, length or publisher appears in the source material, and none is supplied here. The review itself is the news: one more data point in how this year's rentrée is being received by French literary critics, and a reminder that Bellanger, already known for turning ideas and institutions into novels, has again produced a book reviewers are treating as a significant entry in his catalogue.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
