Ward and Le Musée des valeurs sentimentales: Playful Novels Challenge Literary Norms

Two novels, Frédéric Werst's 'Ward' and Gaëlle Obiégly's 'Le Musée des valeurs sentimentales,' offer playful yet profound alternatives to the dominant realist fiction of the 2021 literary season. Werst's 'Ward' presents a fictional ancient people, the Wards, with their own language (wardwesân) and sacred text, the 'Versets de Margôn,' translated and annotated over 300 pages. The author claims the work was written between the 1st and 2nd centuries, though he also warns the Wards may be imaginary. The book includes maps, a lexicon, and grammar, and is framed as a defense of the French language, an 'endangered species.' Obiégly's novel, set in a château called Luxe, follows the companion of artist Pierre Weiss (a real-world figure) as she recounts absurd adventures involving his sculpture 'Bild und Porzellan II.' The narrative employs formal devices like systematic wordplay to avoid realist conventions, exploring themes of love, war, and death with humor. Both books were published in February 2011 by Éditions du Seuil and Éditions Verticales, respectively.