Nur

Translated by Sue Boswell 

In a town in the East which enchants him and drags him well beyond the disreputable exoticism which he had feared, a man meets a woman, and the love which then takes them by surprise threatens to carry everything away. Secretly he calls her Nur, which means "only" in German and is pronounced like the word for "light" in Arabic. Only her, only them, only their bodies, only a few days, only that. Only the radiance of their meeting, a conflagration, a future overturned. In a bedroom at the centre of a town devastated by war, they live the intensity of each instant of their impossible, ephemeral, absolute love. With the lacerating poetry of this text, Arnaud Rykner brings to life a sensual voice, pulsating and pure in order to speak of the mysterious alchemy of passion and the urgent need to give oneself up to it.

About the Author : Arnaud Rykner is a writer and academic. He has published eight novels, several of which have appeared in paperback including Le Wagon which won the Jean d’Heurs prize for historical fiction in 2011; he has also published two plays. In 2019 he was awarded a residency at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, a cultural centre run by the Institut Français, where he began work on his next novel. He is a Professor and Director of Research at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and has also authored a dozen essays and edited many collected works. He was responsible for the critical edition of the theatrical works of Nathalie Sarraute in the prestigious Pléiade series, as well as those of various other modern authors (such as Marguerite Duras) or older works (Marivaux, Maeterlinck), in paperback collections. As a theatrical producer he has notably put on the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Maurice Maeterlinck and Bernard-Marie Koltès. He is a Visiting Professor at Rutgers University (NJ) and a Senior Research Fellow of the University of Durham (UK).