Parij

Under option in Catalonia, China, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Spain and Taiwan. The end of the Second World War. Paris is divided. Its story mirrors that of Berlin. Saint-Sulpice in the West, Montmartre in the East. An alternative history depicting the City of Light in the colours of totalitarianism. Since the Russians took control of the city, Parij - because that's what it must now be called - survives with routine surveillance and purges. The entire territory is strictly monitored by Number One's austere administration, and you have to be extremely ingenious to communicate between one side of the city and the other. Bernard Neuvil, a spy from the East entrusted with command of a political cell, has some experience of this: his hardened eye has been privy to the daily correspondence between Nobel prizewinning novelist Romain Morvan and renowned violinist Clara Banine. The ruling regime suspects the author of working on a "great novel" which will ridicule them and take its rightful place among immortal works of literature.
Neuvil intercepts each letter, reads it, amends it with the help of graphologist scribe, and covers his tracks. In this voyeuristic activity he is disturbed by Clara's beauty, Morvan's intelligence and the dazzling nature of the exchange between the lovers he is protecting. He eventually loses sight of his own position and neglects his duties to the Party, sliding towards dissidence. In the end, although he himself doubted there ever was a Morvan manuscript, he will be the one to smuggle it out, determined to protect its 1,200 encrypted pages...
In the epilogue to this novel - which celebrates alternative histories as a way of reflecting on the political role of literature and creativity in general - the reader learns that the Wall has fallen.
In his preface, Éric Faye deplores the fact that literature today is "a product like any other". However Parij proves that Efin Etkind did not speak the following words in vain: "Putting a novel under lock and key is the highest distinction that state power can confer on a work of literature."
In 2012, éditions Stock's "la Bleue" collection will be publishing Éric Faye's first three novels: Le Général Solitude (1995), Parij (1997) and Le mystère des Trois Frontières (1998). Parij now has a previously unpublished preface by the author.
This novel was published in 1997, and it is not without similarities to the 2006 film The Lives of Others.
Éric Faye has had a number of novels and travelogues published Stock, including Mes trains de nuit (2005), L'homme sans empreintes (2008), Nagasaki (2010, Grand prix for a novel from the Académie française); and a collection of factual accounts published José Corti, Je suis le gardien du phare, which won the 1998 Prix des Deux-Magots.