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"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams-full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up-reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer-one of the great stylists of his generation.
A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams-full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up-reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.
03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer-one of the great stylists of his generation.
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Reviews
"It is a risky and ambitious book, though it does not seem "experimental" as such, in part because it is so grounded in the real, in the boredom and self-aggrandizement of being a teen-ager. The narrator is morose, aggressive, silly, defiant, as we all were; unlike some of us, he is also funny, intelligent, lyrically precise, and frequently self-aware."
James Wood, The New Yorker
"[Valtat's] hypersensitive high-school student listens to the Cure's Pornography but speaks like someone out of Proust ...Valtat manages to re-create the exact unhappiness of lost youth."
Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles
"A slim Proustian recollection with a vitriolic backbeat, Jean-Christophe Valtat's novella 03 captures the obsessions of its teen narrator . . . Intellectually fierce . . . the story hits its stride when the narrator starts talking about songs by the Cure, at which point the prose turns so lucid, circuitous, and loaded with undetonated angst that it becomes an outright performance."
Bookforum