03: A Novel

03: A Novel"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded." A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for

"From the bus stop across the street, it was hard to tell, but suddenly I understood, seeing the passengers in the van that picked her up every morning, that she was slightly retarded."

A precocious teenager in a French suburb finds himself powerfully, troublingly drawn to the girl he sees every day on the way to school. As he watches and thinks about her, his daydreams--full of lyrics from Joy Division and the Smiths, fairy tales, Flowers for Algernon, sexual desire and fear, loneliness, rage for escape, impatience to grow up--reveal an entire adolescence. And this fleeting erotic obsession, remembered years later, blossoms into a meditation on what it means to be a smart kid, what it means to be dumb, and what it means to be in love with another person.

03 is a book about young love like none you have ever read. It marks the English-language debut of a unique French writer--one of the great stylists of his generation.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 06/22/2010
ISBN: 9780374100216
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.23lbs
Size: 8.08h x 5.62w x 0.28d

Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 04/15/2010
Publishers Weekly 05/31/2010
Entertainment Weekly 07/30/2010 pg. 79
New Yorker (The) 09/06/2010 pg. 81