Eugène Savitzkaya

With the publication of his novel Fraudeur in 2015, Eugène Savitzkaya appears to return us to his first novel Mentir published in 1977. In the intervening years Minuit has published nine novels by Savitzkaya and each of them has put the form of the novel in play through a variety of devices ranging from paratextual commentary on the generic status of the novel to the integration of autobiographical materials. The focus of this chapter will be on the figure of the mother as inscribed within Mentir and Fraudeur and how she is at once both a biographème that signals the author’s past and referential horizon yet also a source of fiction that exceeds the autobiographical even as it draws upon it. In reading both these novels I want to explore the formal relationship between the novel and auto/biography in terms of fiction.