“Jean-Christophe Valtat’s novella 03 . . . written in one unbroken paragraph, about a teenage boy’s unrequited love for a mentally handicapped girl he sees every day at the bus stop, has an enormous, controlled rage. It roars, from the shallows of the dreariest French suburb, against such received ideas as the religion of childhood ‘innocence,’ the comforting notion that we all ‘grow’ and ‘develop,’ and the solace, offered by our teachers and our parents, that if we observe the proper rites our futures will be meaningful and wholesome . . . His book is at once Proustian and anti- Proustian: childhood and adolescence minutely, lyrically, philosophically examined, only to be given a contemptuous failing grade . . . It is a risky and ambitious book, though it does not seem “experimental” as such, in part because it is so grounded in the real, in the boredom and self-aggrandizement of being a teen-ager. The narrator is morose, aggressive, silly, defiant, as we all were; unlike some of us, he is also funny, intelligent, lyrically precise, and frequently self-aware.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“[Valtat’s] hypersensitive high-school student listens to the Cure’s Pornography but speaks like someone out of Proust ...Valtat manages to re-create the exact unhappiness of lost youth.”—Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles