Jean-Christophe Valtat’s “03”

In Jean-Christophe Valtat’s dazzling English-language debut, 03, a lyric from The Smiths’ Nowhere Fast sums up the narrator’s attitude toward feelings: “And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I’d get such a shock I’d probably lie / in the middle of the street and die.” This belief that emotions, ones worth having anyway, are the result of conscious decisions, “long and involved tactical maneuvers,” underpins his tortured yet exquisitely expressed subjectivity—where the reader is deliciously mired for the brief, spellbinding duration of this single-paragraph novella, in which a man remembers his seventeen-year-old self’s obsession with a developmentally-disabled girl. Read the rest @ Words Without Borders.