Teenage seasons

Original title: Des saisons adolescentes

Publication Date:

March 2020

Pages:

76

Original language and publisher

French | Actes Sud

Territories Handled

Netherlands, North America, Scandinavia

Genre

Literary Fiction

Teenage seasons

Original title: Des saisons adolescentes

Synopsis

In their last year at secondary school, a philosophy teacher asks his pupils to write about a single memory. The result is thirty fragments – some melancholic, some full of passion – that are like film sequences of these transitory states and convey the emotional essence of adolescence.

For one, it is the adventures in the calanques of the Mediterranean; for another, time spent in the forests of the Jura when they were sixteen. She is disenchanted, he is laid-back, but all of them remember those spaces where they grew up. In evoking these recent memories, one senses something shifting – no doubt the transition into a new phase of life is imminent.

Through these threads of memory, whether indolent or solemn, shy or nostalgic, visions emerge – sometimes clearly, sometimes fleetingly, but always sensually, capturing the impulses, fissures and dizziness of those teenage seasons.