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With Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss offers a choral novel that interweaves the lives of several characters loosely connected by a huge, wooden desk that one of them relentlessly chases around the world. A possible symbol of the memory of the Second World War Jewish genocide transmitted to younger generations, the desk powerfully materializes transmission in its potentially traumatic, obsessional, and violent dimensions. This essay deals with the way first- and second-generation women, in the novel, develop ingenious, creative but also uncompromising responses to the inescapable duty of remembrance. While the dominating male characters freeze memory in timeless, petrified representations, these female writers expose its terrible necessity while hiding nothing of the damages memory causes to witnesses and descendants. They claim a right of inventory and use the desk as an echo-chamber reflecting both the suffering voices of children and the dark presence of defaulting fathers and failing mothers, thus allowing for a new generation to be born with a more bearable heritage.

Little Tulip (2014) is the third collaboration between US writer Jerome Charyn and French comic strip artist François Boucq. This graphic novel moves back and forth between the USSR of the 1940s and 1950s and New York City in the 1970s to tell the story of Paul, a US-born tattoo artist who spent his childhood in a Gulag colony in Siberia where, as Pavel, he learnt his craft. Drawing and tatooing are at the heart of the narrative, both Charyn and Boucq attempting to probe their powers: when Pavel/Paul becomes an artist in the Gulag, he learns to adorn captive bodies with insignia that reflect the strict hierarchy of the camp or with codified symbols that tell the stories of the criminals’ lives, but he also learns to penetrate those savage men’s personalities and thus to save his own skin by beautifully inking the skins of others. Beyond exposing the very concrete powers that enable the young tatoo artist to survive in Siberia by both respecting and transgressing the rules of the camp, and then to roam the violent streets of New York city, Little Tulip explores the laws of art that each drawing contains: rules that allow the artist to walk the thin line between art and magic, where the indelible ink of tatoo can paradoxically give birth to invisibility.

This essay analyzes the way Report from the Interior, Auster’s fifth autobiographical text, fits in his production which can be seen as largely autobiographical not only because Auster uses many biographems in his fiction, but also because his whole work (poetic, fictional and non-fictional) seems to originate in a global autobiographical project which he has been developing from his very first texts onward. It also presents the work done by several researchers of the LERMA Research Unit, at Aix Marseille Université, on Report from the Interior which they have analyzed in its autobiographical, literary, linguistic, visual or epistolary dimensions. Their exploration of this strange memoir, described by Auster as “four things in one,” gave birth to the essays published in this issue of E-rea.

In Let the Great World Spin coincidence is structural: the choral novel rests on a complex network of plots, echoes and reflections hinging on the performance of a tightrope walker who, on 7 August 1974, crosses from the top of one of the brand new Twin Towers to the other. Reading Let the Great World Spin, one is bound to superimpose the birth of the towers in 1974, which the tightrope walker celebrates, and their destruction in 2001, especially since McCann creates the haunting figure of a falling man at the very heart of his text, as a mirrored and reversed image of the skywalking acrobat. Little by little a map of New York appears, on which the shadow of the upper and cloudy plot adds to the various wanderings of the down-to-earth characters burdened with their painful existence. The characters move along two vertical and parallel lines which recall the towers themselves, and their destinies intersect in different points, thus reflecting this magical hour during which a man’s cloudwalk managed to draw a hyphen in the city’s skyline.

In 1996 Daniel Pennac published a brief novel entitled Des chrétiens et des Maures, a reference to one of the latino specialties Jerome Charyn’s famous commish, Isaac Sidel, is especially fond of ("Cristianos y Moros"). Sidel meets the famous Malaussène family in Paris and finds a most necessary shelter in a violent Belleville. In 1998, Charyn went on with this crossover between Pennac’s noir universe and his in Appelez-moi Malaussène (never published in English) : Sidel goes back to Paris and discovers he is the father of one of the Malaussène children. "Bartleby the Scrivener" is the intertext that both authors draw on in order to twin their respective sagas : Melville’s tale allows them to weave their long-standing meditations on the issues of originality, identity, name, noire paternity and fictional fraternity.

In 1982 Paul Auster published a roman noir entitled Squeeze Play under the pseudonym of Paul Benjamin. The novel is also a “baseball novel”: its plot essentially deals with a baseball New York team and its former, fallen star, and the final resolution of the mystery intervenes thanks to a revelation brought by a baseball game in which a rather rare and spectacular maneuver (the double suicide squeeze) is used by one of the teams to turn the tables and win the game. This paper analyzes the place of baseball in Squeeze Play: it first appears as an essential element in the very structure of the plot, but it is also, for Auster, a way of questioning the myth of the hero in an American society whose main aspects (sports, politics, private life) are eaten up by corruption and perversion. The links Auster establishes between roman noir and baseball novel are also dealt with.