ALL EARS

Alexandre Postel

Éditions de l’observatoire, 256 pages, 2025

Why you should take a look at it?
√ A bold and original novel
√ A psychological and sensory journey
√ A meditation on the power of fiction

This singular novel unfolds in the form of a dialogue—triangular and unsettling—between three distinct presences: a cryptic author cloaked in ambiguity, a sharply logical editor bound by reason, and a manuscript that moves between them like a living thing, chapter by chapter, pulse by pulse.

At its center lies a story whose protagonist is haunted by an inexplicable craving for sound—an auditory hunger that drives the narrative forward. As the editor delves into the manuscript, attempting to evaluate its literary worth, she finds herself increasingly unmoored. The act of reading stirs something intimate and disquieting within her—not only in her professional identity as an editor, nor merely in her complicated friendship with the author, but in her deeper self: as a woman, as a reader, as a body attuned to things unspoken.

Why has this tale found its way to her, of all people? Why does it disquiet her so profoundly? And beneath it all, the quieter question that echoes louder each time she turns the page: why did she choose this profession?

Does every act of reading, in truth, invite us to listen more closely—not only to the story on the page, but to the hidden story within ourselves?

With All Ears, Alexandre Postel crafts a beguiling and mischievous meditation on the potency of language and the elusive nature of desire. At once a coming-of-age tale and a lyrical inquiry into the myths and fantasies that shadow our inner lives, the novel blurs the boundary between narrative and essay, dream and reflection.

It is a work that contemplates the act of reading not as passive consumption, but as a form of intimate listening—a tuning-in to the murmurs of others, and more deeply, to the reverberations within us. In Postel’s hands, fiction becomes not merely a story told, but a space in which we might overhear our own hidden longings.

Born in 1982, Alexandre Postel gained recognition with Un homme effacé (2013) which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt of the first novel.