The Social Circus
French writer Esther Teillard's new novel Fuck Circus follows a newly dumped woman through a chaotic, hallucinogenic night that descends into sex and violence while exploring modern neuroses and existential despair.
According to Causeur, Esther Teillard‘s latest work, Fuck Circus, published by Grasset, follows a woman freshly dumped by her boyfriend Gabriel on a sweltering summer evening reeking of decay. The relationship, which began three years earlier on a winter day in Paris’s Rue de Lisbonne, survived the cold but not the heat. The narrator wanders through an unnamed city that resembles Marseille and ends up in a strange multi-level bar called Le Mythe, where the night spirals into depravity.
Teillard’s protagonist is painfully self-aware, tracing her emotional dysfunction to an absent father, a mother who never acted like one, and a lifelong deficit of love. Her confession is bleak: boys flee after using her for a few days or at most a few seasons, frightened off by what she describes as her unquenchable thirst for affection. Her romantic life, the magazine notes, resembles a Vietnam.
Literature as Shield Against Nihilism
What keeps the narrator afloat amid the cold nihilism? Literature. She carries Baudelaire with her and harbors a deep admiration for Emmanuel Bove, discovered at age thirteen. Since reading Mes Amis, she has compulsively hoarded books, piling them on the floor of her small apartment. When she carries a book in public, she regards strangers with benevolence, even forgiveness, sometimes love.
Inside the bar, the night descends into psychedelic horror. A film producer who claims descent from Chateaubriand loses control and takes the assembled misfits hostage. Violence erupts. Yet Causeur emphasizes that the tragedy is laced with biting irony, particularly in scenes skewering the lawyers and bankers of Parc Monceau. The characters in Fuck Circus do not love themselves, but they are lucid.
A Bold Voice in a Dreary Literary Season
Teillard previously published Carnes in 2025 through Éditions Pauvert, which won the Prix Sade for best debut novel. Causeur predicts that Fuck Circus will stand out in an otherwise lackluster literary season thanks to its originality, stripped-down style, and absence of ornamental language. The prose cuts quickly to the bone.
The novel has been compared to the work of American artist Grace Hartigan, particularly in its erasure of faces and vivid, multicolored chaos. Above all, it provokes laughter—diabolical laughter—which the magazine identifies as a crucial tool for mocking the powerful ringmasters of the social circus.
Fuck Circus by Esther Teillard is published by Grasset and runs 224 pages.
With information from Causeur
