Elisa Shua Dusapin steps away from fiction to report on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

According to Le Temps, Elisa Shua Dusapin has left the terrain of fiction for «Sauf la frontière», a first-person narrative built around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The novelist, who has won multiple prizes for intimate, understated novels, began preparing the book two years ago, the newspaper reports, a period that came to include the peak of violence following October 7 and the bombardments of Gaza that followed.

Le Temps writes that the announcement of the project stirred mixed feelings among readers of her earlier work: curiosity at seeing her finely tuned prose confront a region marked by extreme violence, and unease at the risks of the undertaking. How, the paper asks, does a writer who is neither a conflict specialist nor a reporter find the right position from which to approach one of the world's longest-running wars?

According to Le Temps, the book answers that question through the author's own lucidity about her lack of expertise, and through what she describes as an urgent need to go and confront the situation directly. That admitted fragility becomes, in the reviewer's account, the very instrument that allows her to meet people who live with the violence, or its aftershocks, day to day.

Le Temps calls the result a text of great accuracy, and a reminder that violence is everyone's concern. Dusapin is present at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges through September 6, according to the same report.