Joanna Biggs writes:

At the age of 29, Zeller seems to have given up writing novels and has begun to write plays, which is odd in a writer who doesn’t much like dialogue. His first two, L’Autre and Le Manège, were produced in small theatres, but his third, Si tu mourais, played on the Champs-Elysées and his fourth, Elle t’attend, starred the shiny-haired Laetitia Casta of L’Oréal shampoo ads and is the first play of his to be published by Flammarion, who also publish his novels. ‘Elle’ is a Circe figure who has brought her Odysseus to Corsica, having taken him from his Penelope and their two daughters three months before. The next morning Odysseus goes for a walk in the mountains and doesn’t come back, and now Circe has to wait. It’s Homer’s premise, via Camus’s ‘tragique solaire’ (the despair found in hot places). It’s hard not to think that Zeller’s greatest creation is himself. With the purposely messy hair and the half-open shirt, the early encouragement from Françoise Sagan, the celebrity writer friends, the actress wife who’s a close friend of Carla Bruni (they were at the Bruni-Sarkozy wedding), you would never guess that Zeller grew up in a single-parent family in Brittany. To make himself into a writer, he has borrowed from Kundera, Houellebecq, Salinger, Pinter. These borrowings have made Zeller’s life more glamorously writerly than the lives of the writers he admires. If you ignore the sunken, mournful eyes, you will never see a photograph of a writer more pleased to be himself, to keep the company he keeps (though this is perhaps too kind to Bernard-Henri Lévy). Zeller’s metaphors have been in the service of his greatest work: Florian Zeller, writer.

(LRB 12 March 2009)

Flammarion | paperback 154 pp. |ISBN: 9782081207493