Broken Identities

Broken Identities (2025) is Denis Emorine's second JEF novella, the English version of Identités brisées, published by 5 Sens Éditions in Geneva in 2023. Its protagonist is again Dominique Valarcher, the semi-autobiographical alter ego who carried Death at Half Mast (2019).

In her essay "A Lot and A Little: The Psychic Fragmentation of Intergenerational Trauma in Denis Emorine's Broken Identities," Cristina Deptula reads the novella as working on two registers at once. On the surface it is an intimate domestic drama: Dominique loves his wife Laetitia, a concert pianist of long standing, and is also drawn to Nora, a gifted young Hungarian graduate student who writes a paper on his work and describes it as "a lot and a little at the same time." Deptula takes that phrase as the key to the whole. Beneath the love triangle, Dominique lives haunted by his mother's earlier life and her loss of a first husband in a concentration camp; a therapist suggests his pull toward younger women in need of mentorship may be a wish to have protected her. Eastern Europe, in his mind, stands less for tragedy as such than for an irreparable inherited loss. The novella is told through poems, diary entries, and letters threaded into the prose, a form that carries the fragmentation directly.

Reviewing the book for the Boston Area Small Press, Michael Todd Steffen read it around a figure of the silent pendulum and a return to full circle — the shape Emorine's preoccupations tend to take across French poetry and fiction since 1982: the divided self, the Doppelganger, the flight of time. The Valarcher novels are where that work carries into English. Broken Identities is the one to read after Death at Half Mast.