Yannick Haenel's new novel turns a teacher's memories into a tribute to the classroom

Le Temps has reviewed Yannick Haenel's latest novel, "La Solitude des professeurs est infinie," describing it as an impassioned tribute to teaching and to literature itself. According to the Swiss daily, Haenel writes with his characteristic fervor and a recurring clownish flair, drawing on his own experience as a teacher in the Paris suburbs thirty years ago.

The novel is narrated once again by Jean Deichel, the author's recurring double who appears in nearly all of his books. Le Temps notes that the book resonates with current student protests in France and with broader anxieties about the place schools, teachers and young people occupy in a tense, fearful society.

The reviewer situates the novel within a question the paper sees running through Haenel's entire body of work since his 1995 debut "Les Petits Soldats": what can save us from catastrophe, both personal and collective. In "La Solitude des professeurs est infinie," that question is explored through a narrative bathed in light, skies and color, according to Le Temps.

Drawing on his own memories as a young teacher in the 1990s, Haenel reconstructs isolated moments of grace pulled out of what the paper describes as the already-neglected state of middle and high schools, particularly in the Paris suburbs. The book is built around two opposing forces, Le Temps writes: the fervent vocation of a committed young teacher, and the inertia, suspicion and contempt of the school administration. The narrator must also contend with his own clumsiness, which the review says triggers a minor incident with outsized consequences in the story.