Namrata reviews Nocturne Pondicherry (Hachette India, 2024) originally written in French and translated into English by Roopam Singh calling it a masterclass in atmosphere, character, and quiet rebellion.
In Nocturne Pondicherry, Ari Gautier delivers a collection of seven masterful stories that are both hauntingly lyrical and brutally honest tales that unearth the human psyche amid the shifting sands of postcolonial identity, memory, and survival. Originally written in French and exquisitely translated into English by Roopam Singh, this slim yet potent volume dismantles the postcard prettiness of Pondicherry and lays bare its shadows with its fractured souls, forgotten corners, and quietly burning griefs.
The title is telling: Nocturne refers not only to the time of day these stories seem to inhabit between twilight and dream but also to the musical form, often melancholic and reflective. And just like a nocturne, each story is composed with deliberate restraint and subtle crescendos, echoing inner turbulence while maintaining a deceptive calm. Gautier’s Pondicherry is not the sanitized, tourist-kissed Franco-Indian dream. It is an aching palimpsest of colonial scars, social decay, and human yearning.
The book’s cover, with its subdued, dusky palette, shades of cobalt, sienna, and muted violet, mirrors the emotional tone of the stories. It evokes a nightfall mood, teetering between dream and decay. The aesthetic is introspective, not ornamental, drawing the reader inward rather than distracting with visual spectacle. Much like Gautier’s writing, the cover whispers rather than shouts.
Themes: Memory, Transgression, and the Underside of the City
Gautier’s characters are transgressors, not in the flamboyant sense, but through their quiet resistance to imposed roles. A prostitute elopes with her auto-driver, not out of romantic impulse alone but perhaps as an existential shrug toward freedom. A postman haunted by the weight of time attempts to deliver a final letter, an act loaded with metaphor. A police inspector stumbles upon the body of a boy he previously assaulted, turning duty into an eerie confrontation with guilt.
These characters are not saints. They are flawed, conflicted, and sometimes morally adrift but always human. Gautier handles them with clear-eyed compassion, peeling back their façades to reveal the layers beneath: loneliness, lust, anger, even beauty. As Ambai aptly notes, the stories carry the fragrance and the stench of a land forever entangled in colonial debris and spiritual longing.
Style and Writing: Lyrical Precision, Brutal Honesty
Gautier’s prose, translated with remarkable fidelity by Roopam Singh is stunning in its musicality. He writes with a kind of poetic audacity, switching between the grotesque and the graceful with ease. As Diriye Osman observes, the stories dare the reader not to look away. The lyricism never masks the grit, rather, it heightens the unease. Every sentence feels like it has been sanded down to its essence, rhythmic, charged, and uncompromising.
Gautier’s use of language reveals the city’s duality: sun-drenched boulevards and alleyways of abandonment coexist in his Pondicherry. The realism borders on the hyper-real, where ordinary events seem imbued with philosophical heft. It’s the tone, humane but unsparing, that allows Gautier to strike a balance between empathy and indictment.
Translation: A Quiet Triumph
Roopam Singh’s translation is nothing short of elegant. Translating Gautier’s nuanced cadences from French to English while retaining their emotional density is no easy feat. Singh captures not only the surface narrative but also the emotional tonality, the sighs, silences, and slips in consciousness. The result is prose that reads fluidly while maintaining the integrity of its original rhythm and cultural specificity.
Ari Gautier’s Contribution to French Literature
Ari Gautier stands as one of the rare voices reclaiming Indian identity within the Francophone literary world. As a Tamil-Malagasy-French writer born in Madagascar and raised in Pondicherry, he brings to French literature a vital perspective, one that confronts the historical amnesia of colonialism and diaspora. His work contributes significantly to postcolonial French letters by disrupting the Eurocentric narrative and inserting lived, multilingual, multicultural experiences of the Global South.
With this book, Gautier rewrites geography. He takes the French-inflected, neatly compartmentalized Pondicherry and blows its edges outward, northward into urban sprawl, southward into grief, and inward into moral ambiguity. The city becomes a character itself, aching, gasping, alive.
Nocturne Pondicherry is a masterclass in atmosphere, character, and quiet rebellion. It calls to those who understand that beauty and horror often occupy the same space. This is short fiction at its most potent, unafraid, elegant, and enduring. With this work, Ari Gautier not only reinvents the literary landscape of Pondicherry but also cements his place among the most exciting contemporary voices writing in French and about the Francophone world beyond Europe.
About the Reviewer
Namrata is the founder of Keemiya Creatives, a literary consultancy based in Mumbai, and Bookbots India, an initiative bringing transparency to publishing and book marketing. She also hosts The Bookbot Theory, a podcast that makes book marketing accessible for authors and creators worldwide.
She is the editor of Kitaab, a Singapore-based South Asian literary magazine, and a published author with a focus on travel, relationships, and gender. Her travelogue-cum-memoir, A Lost Wanderer: A Book of Memories, reflects her deep connection with storytelling. A UEA alumna, she has also studied travel writing at the University of Sydney.
As an independent editor and book reviewer, her work has appeared in Asian Review of Books, Scroll, Contemporary South Asia Journal (King’s College London), The Friday Times, Feminism in India, and more. Her short stories have been featured in various anthologies, and she has published two short story collections of her own. She is currently working on her debut novel.
About the Book
A postman struggles to deliver the last letter on his last day of work. A prostitute elopes with the auto rickshaw driver who arranged clients for her. An inspector discovers the dead body of the boy he had an altercation with the previous evening.
In seven riveting stories, Ari Gautier peels back the layers of human emotions until glimpses of greed, anger and lust can finally reveal themselves. Unsettling and irresistible, Nocturne Pondicherry is an all too realistic collection where mundane situations ‐ featuring common people, ill-fated street dwellers and hapless immigrants ‐ pull readers in and fling them into the abyss.
About the Author
About the Translator
