Days in Sydney is Didier Coste's bilingual novel, a unique text in both French and English

What is it about?

DIdier Coste is a French novellist, poet and academic who spent some time in Australia and wrote an experimental novel about characters who resemble real people who, in the 1980s, straddled university circles, be they French or Australian. This article analyses his bilingual experimental novel in the light of his own theories on aesthetic inevitability, bi-culture, and literary universals. I conclude that the readership of such texts is intended to readers with an interest in multi-layered texts, which no-one, not even ‘bilingual’ people, can ever fully ‘possess.’ By creating this original cultural object Coste performs and upholds cultural Otherness as well as aesthetic Otherness

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Experimental literature pushes boundaries, and this novel is unique in the way it uses languages. Inner monologues and conversations are either in French or in English, according to whether the characters are French or Australian, and depending on whether they address people who are French or Australian. It is also a roman à clés in that most characters were real people mostly associated with Australian academia in the 1980s. But the novel is also the expression of literary theories on universals and world literature, an exercise in decentering the world, and writing a text that is both global and local.