French Literature Reviews - 2026
É. Chevillard, Défense de Prosper Brouillon
Other Literary Studies
Défense de Prosper Brouillon
Éric Chevillard
Jean-François Martin (Illustrator)
Publication date: 14/09/2017
Publisher: Noir Sur Blanc (Les Editions)
Series: Notabilia
ISBN: 978-2-88250-484-5
EAN: 9782882504845
Number of pages: 104 p.
At first glance, this book presents itself as an exploration—and praise—of the wondrous oeuvre of a writer named Prosper Brouillon, but this is merely a disguise. In reality, it is a fierce indictment of a certain institutionalized, complacent, and self-satisfied literature. What happens when we take a closer look? This is the question Éric Chevillard answers in a book that is as delightfully fresh as it is caustic and scathing.
Prosper Brouillon is the collective name given to the authors whose exemplary sentences were gathered by Chevillard, who playfully used them to reconstruct a delirious faux novel. Born from the collaboration in the newspaper Le Monde between Éric Chevillard and Jean-François Martin, who illustrated his bi-weekly column, the book also features some twenty images that add an extra layer of meaning and humor, resulting in a thoroughly delightful work.
*
Excerpt from the article by F. Georgesco, Le Monde des livres, September 14:
The writer penned the column for "Le Monde des livres" for six years. He signs off with "Défense de Prosper Brouillon", the hilarious finale of this venture.
"One day, you reach the end of a chapter and write: « I caught myself whimpering lugubriously while chewing on a ball. » Admittedly, a page earlier you had to contend with « a brutal bereavement barks within her », and one thing leads to another: logically speaking, a barking bereavement makes you whimper lugubriously, and while you're at it, you might as well chew on a ball. For six years, you, Éric Chevillard, transformed yourself every week into a columnist for Le Monde des livres, surviving a steady, high-dose diet of editorial output, including turkeys, impostures, and inadvertent pastiches of what literature is and ought to be in your eyes.
This is the Zorro-grade of writing, the moment of revenge. No column is complete without a finale: Défense de Prosper Brouillon is your plot twist. The mask comes off the enemy. His name, therefore, is Prosper Brouillon. […]
*
You can read an article about this work on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
This work emerges from a six-year collaboration between writer Éric Chevillard and illustrator Jean-François Martin, originally featured in their bi-weekly column for Le Monde des livres. By compiling sentences from various editorial sources, Chevillard constructs a fictional entity named Prosper Brouillon. The text functions as a commentary on the state of contemporary writing, targeting what the author perceives as complacent or institutionalized literary practices. Through this reconstruction, the book examines stylistic conventions while integrating twenty images that add meaning and humor to the work.
The volume belongs to a tradition of meta-literary satire that uses pastiche to examine the limitations of literary output. By framing his critique through the persona of Prosper Brouillon, Chevillard engages with the repetitive content he encountered as a columnist. The inclusion of illustrations by Jean-François Martin develops the tone of the work, shifting between observation and invention. Readers interested in the intersection of journalistic critique and experimental fiction may find this collection of columns and illustrations a relevant exploration of the boundaries of modern authorship.