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“Dès l’âge de trois ans, vous avez réclamé un animal familier qui vous éloignerait un peu de la compagnie des hommes. Vous avez compris que votre ours en peluche n’était pas un être vivant. L’embrasser, lui tirer les oreilles ou lui arracher les poils n’offrait donc que des plaisirs médiocres.”
Olivia Rosenthal (born 1965) has built a body of work that moves freely between literature, performance, and the visual arts. At the heart of her practice lies a rejection of the myth of the solitary writer speaking only from the depths of individual experience. Instead, she has always collaborated with artists, poets, filmmakers, and choreographers—driven by the conviction that every life is shaped by its entanglement with the lives of others. Published in 2010, Que font les rennes après Noël ? received the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix Ève-Delacroix of the Académie française, and the Prix Alexandre-Vialatte.
In this kaleidoscopic book, Rosenthal blends fiction, autobiography, documentary, and essay—a method of writing that stitches together multiple voices, including her own, held in a delicate balance. Drawing on interviews with people whose lives and work involve animals—from zookeepers to butchers—she became fascinated by the deep attachments they form with the creatures they encounter, even when those relationships are marked by domination or death. This exploration leads her back to a childhood desire: the longing to have a pet. Yet rather than embracing straightforward autobiography, the book opens by addressing its reader directly: “Vous ne savez pas si vous aimez les animaux, mais vous en voulez un.” Naturally, your parents refuse. Their reasoning escapes you. Despite your repeated pleas, you continue searching for a way to corner them. Eventually, you ask the question that has been troubling you for so long: “Que font les rennes après Noël ?” Your parents hesitate. The answer does not come.
From this seemingly innocent question emerges a novel as whimsical as it is profound, as humorous as it is unsettling. Autobiography is not refused, but there is a kind of humility in the way Rosenthal displaces the burdensome first person and transforms it into a more expansive and inclusive “vous”—a pronoun that is both singular and collective in French. Rosenthal builds on this arresting narrative device, layering other voices she gathered into a crowded yet joyful polyphony—don’t we say, the more the merrier? It allows the text to investigate the roots of our need for attachment, whether to animals or to other people, and the less avowable impulses toward possession that can lurk within that need. Must one tell this impatient, trusting little girl that Santa Claus does not exist? There seems to be only one alternative, and it sounds like a quest: “vous partirez avec les rennes après Noël.”
Que font les rennes après Noël ? is a stark and tender narrative in which Olivia Rosenthal revisits, with all the seriousness they deserve, the questions that preoccupied the child she once was and the children we ourselves once were. In her hands, personal memory becomes something larger than life-writing, opening into a reflection on the porous boundaries between human and animal, wild and domestic. Looking more closely at animals in captivity, you begin to recognize your own conditioning in them—the same unasked-for limits, the same accommodations made long ago and since forgotten. Rosenthal asks whether we can negotiate it and inhabit it consciously enough to become, through struggle and hardship, something that looks a little more like ourselves.