Régis Jauffret's 'Univers, univers' Explores Human Existence Through Fiction

Régis Jauffret's new novel 'Univers, univers' continues his exploration of human existence within societal mechanisms. The book invents characters—a woman at the center, a husband, and others—who shift identities, with a highly original catalog of names comparable to Jouhandeau. Jauffret's work is described as an encyclopedia of drifting humans, whose lives are reinvented by the novel. The narrative treats psychological attitudes and universes of thought as gears of a mechanism that crushes those who animate it. Characters traverse time and epochs until death, while the author observes, comments, and thinks their actions. Everything changes with Jauffret's swift sentences, creating a polyphony. The novel sweeps up the universe of things and takes on the entire human species, pushing to the existential limits of each character. Jauffret's intense imagination and implacable style recreate a world populated by models, where illusion has no time to wander into behavioral stereotypes. The work is radical and without equivalent, serving a literature that, in the author's words, is 'a way of refusing to take life seriously, of honoring it, of dragging oneself at its feet to thank it for being in the world.' The review was written by Patrick Amine and published in artpress.