The Emotions: A Novel

An analyst at the heart of the European Union revisits his past and anticipates the future after his father’s death, in this brilliant, nuanced novel of love, politics, masculinity, and memory.

A European civil servant specializing in strategic foresight, Jean Detrez works on the future with scientific rigor. However, the unexpected seems to invade his life, both professional and personal. The Brexit referendum, the election of Trump, the separation from his partner, the death of his father, but also a night inexplicably spent with a stranger. Questioning what to do with time, the one passing and the one to come, leads him from professional life where anticipation is a scientific discipline, to private life where the past troubles the future.

Do we want to know what the next few days or weeks have in store for us? Do we want to know if we are going to experience a new romantic or sexual adventure in the hours to come? Or how close death really is? This novel is an experiment in the ways in which fiction disrupts our representation of reality. Jean Deprez foresees events that do not occur, does not imagine those that will crush him, does not always perceive what he is experiencing, and is never certain that his reconstruction of the past is faithful to what happened.