The Osnabrück witch trials echo down the centuries

Absent mothers resonate in the latest offerings from two heavyweights of French literature. Getting Lost is the diary kept by the prize-winning novelist Annie Ernaux while she was having an affair with a married man in 1989. Ernaux has already written a novel about this relationship. Now we have a more immediate and intimate account. Meanwhile, the octogenarian feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous continues her own brand of écriture féminine in Well-Kept Ruins. For the uninitiated, Cixous’s stream of consciousness is like reading Molly Bloom with a PhD from the Sorbonne, a raft of awards and a keen eye for cognitive dissonance.

Cixous’s new book hinges on her arrival in Osnabrück, Germany, to receive the Justus Möser Medal, awarded by the city council to writers who commemorate the place. (Erich Maria Remarque was a previous recipient.) The author has written about Osnabrück before, as the birthplace of her mother Ève, an Ashkenazi Jew, born in 1910.