La nuit au cœur by Nathacha Appanah

Gallimard. 2025. 288 pages.

In La nuit au cœur, Nathacha Appanah confronts the epidemic of femicides in France through the prism of three emblematic cases, among them that of Chahinez, burned alive by her partner in 2021. The novel brings together these fractured destinies while deliberately withholding the names of the murderers, reduced to their initials, as if to underline the anonymity of violence and the structural dimension of patriarchy. By doing so, Appanah shifts attention away from sensationalizing perpetrators and back to the erased voices of the women themselves.

The narrative traces the spiral of violence—what Appanah herself refers to through the Fraserian metaphor of the “spirale”—as a dynamic that surpasses individual understanding and exceeds the confines of literary representation. This spiral is not simply the descent of a single relationship into abuse but a systemic pattern in which social indifference, institutional failings, and cultural silences converge, trapping women in deadly cycles.

The book bears an autobiographical undertone: Appanah acknowledges having drawn on her own intimate vulnerabilities. The act of writing thus acquires a therapeutic dimension, transforming pain and fear into testimony. The novel becomes both an indictment and a form of self-healing, situating personal memory within a collective catastrophe.

Stylistically, La nuit au cœur oscillates between sharp, spare prose and lyrical passages that hover on the edge of poetry. This contrast mirrors the brutality of violence against women and the fragile moments of tenderness and hope that punctuate their lives. Appanah resists narrative closure; the open wounds of these stories resist containment, reminding readers that literature alone cannot resolve the crisis it exposes.

With La nuit au cœur, Appanah affirms the role of fiction as both witness and therapeutic gesture. By inscribing the unspeakable into narrative, she offers readers not consolation but clarity: an urgent reminder that the spiral of violence is not a private tragedy but a collective failure.

Christophe Premat
Stockholm University