Valtat's slim little book is interesting and a bit dizzying. There's a Lolita vibe to it and a pretty unabashed expression of male longing heightened not only by his object's inability to speak (she's across the street) but her disability, whatever it is. So the female is voiceless and utterly defenceless, and the male voice appropriates literally everything. He's a teen too (there are some references but he could be older) and the effect on me was ooky and a little astonished at how tone-deaf the writer is to questions of having women and the disabled own their own voices. The writing is a brilliant and tone deaf tour de force of the male gaze and self-absorption, perhaps rightly so in a teen but still not my thing. ( )

I read Valtat's 'Aurorarama' and didn't really like it. But when I came across this, I was curious, especially because this was written in French, then translated, and 'Aurorarama' was written in English. I did think that the language in this came across as smoother, and with more clarity, but the styles are so very different that it's hard to compare.
It's peculiar that this was published as a stand-alone 'novel.' It comes across as a seemingly autobiographical essay.
A socially awkward teen develops a platonic crush-from-afar (or at least, from across the street) on a retarded girl that he sees every morning while waiting for the schoolbus. This setup is used as a jumping-off point to talk about the nuances of being an 'outsider,' and the parallells of being 'above' the norm and 'below' the norm... at least, that's how I saw it, as that's something I actually thought about quite a lot in high school, myself...
Interesting, but very, very short, and doesn't really explore its themes in too much depth. ( )

To say anything about this novel - that it is elegiac, that it is surreptitious in its brilliance, that it is short, or that it is a novel - is to reduce it, almost to patronize it, as if to reassure it that it too can play with the other books on the shelf.

The outline of the story ---Oops, I just said there is a story - well, lets just say this: An adolescent boy, growing up in some unspecified not-Paris town in France, falls in love with a girl waiting at a bus stop. Not just any girl. She is a girl with significant congenital cognitive delay, or, if you prefer, retarded (the narrator's own perceptively debated word). She is thin, physically disorganized, and has that special vacancy of gaze that denote a simultaneous lack of normal awareness and an egalitarian receptivity to all impressions. He, by contrast, is precociously aware, unusually intelligent, as aware of his own precocity as of his existential loneliness. Aware, too, of the madness of the world and the perverse imperative to be sane. This unlikely passion unfolds in the early eighties. But it is recounted from the vantage of nearly three decades later. What emerges in the telling is not so much a novel, or even a story, but a meditation on love, the complexity of erotic attraction, the signs and signifiers of intelligence, loneliness, and the enormous fragility of the conditions necessary to make connections in the world.

If I were to give this unbelievably beautiful book to a filmmaker, it would not, I think, be a French director. Rather, I would conjure the ghost of Kieslowski, and say to him, "Here. You're not finished yet." ( )