Twenty Minutes of Silence Hélène Bessette Review

Twenty Minutes of Silence Helene Bessette BookBlast Review

Kate Briggs, translator of Twenty Minutes of Silence and of Hélène Bessette’s first novel Lili is Crying, wrote in an essay for The Yale Review in September 2025:

How, why, and under what material circumstances a writer, translator, or publisher feels compelled to respond to the call of a past work — all of this is often wholly incidental. While there can be deep interest as well as contingency and opportunity at play, there is rarely a clear logic to it.

Has there been a magic at work in recent years that is particularly kind to French female writers? Marie Ndiaye’s The Witch, first published in France in 1996 and only translated into English thirty years later, was shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. Jacqueline Harpman’s 1995 novel I Who Have Never Known Men, originally published in the UK in 1997 under the title Mistress of Silence, found a fresh readership on TikTok following a series of UK and US reissues from 2019 to 2024.

What sets Bessette apart from these authors is not only her vintage — Lili is Crying was published in France in 1953 and Twenty Minutes of Silence in 1954 — but the fact that, rather than only being unknown to Anglophone readers, she had also been forgotten in France. Her work, though praised by writers including Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir, was never commercially successful and she was dropped by her publisher Gallimard after a string of disappointing sales. Her last novel was published in the 1970s, although she continued writing for the rest of her life. She died in poverty in 2000 after years of isolation and worsening mental health. It was only in 2006 that her work began to be republished in France, and in 2017 that Le Nouvel Attila embarked on the considerable project of republishing the thirteen Gallimard novels as well as six as-yet unpublished works and four volumes of correspondence.

This renewed interest in France may be part of the ‘contingency and opportunity’ that led to Briggs’ English translations, but Bessette’s singular approach to novel-writing, which still feels fresh and unexpected, must also be part of the fascination she can now exert over contemporary translators, editors and readers.

Le roman poétique

Briggs’ Yale Review essay is followed by her translations of extracts from the two issues of Bessette’s short-lived revue Le résumé which function as a manifesto for her preferred form: the roman poétique or poetic novel. Using white space, ‘the disarticulation of the sentence’ and other characteristics of twentieth-century poetry, the poetic novel represented — according to Bessette — ‘the next logical step in literary evolution’. She believed that, unlike art, theatre and music, the novel had not yet progressed beyond its past.

A double-page spread from Twenty Minutes of Silence by Helene Bessette — A double-page spread from Twenty Minutes of Silence by Hélène Bessette

The poetic novel was also, Bessette felt, a form appropriate for modern life. The same key excerpt from her manifesto is highlighted both in Briggs’ extracts and Kathryn Scanlan’s excellent introduction:

“Poetic” language is necessarily the language of difficult times. It is the language of suffering and the everyday normal expression in Times of war. In a noisy anxious world, it is the sentence that makes itself heard. A sentence that has no choice but to be haunting and painful.

Bessette lived through difficult times, both in her personal life and in the wider geopolitical context. In 2026, so do we. Our world, which is perhaps now ready to appreciate Bessette’s work, is as noisy and as anxious as it has ever been. So, too, is the microcosm of a world in Twenty Minutes of Silence, in which a rich family in northern France becomes the focus of a murder investigation. It is a crime novel whose conventions are twisted to their limits, in which

The victim is the culprit.
The culprit is the victim.

Faits divers

The detective novel and its subgenre, the police procedural, tend towards being comfortingly predictable (much as there are many exceptions). The crime may be gruesome, the criminal formidable, but the plot generally moves forwards in a series of predictable steps: crime scene investigation, reconstruction of events, questioning of suspects, a few red herrings, resolution. The crime is solved, and the book ends. Despite or perhaps because of these conventions, the genre lends itself remarkably well to a poetic novel. Bessette’s manifesto, although it does not mention detective novels or Twenty Minutes of Silence by name, suggests as much:

Naturally, such a novel [the poetic novel] is not wedded to artificial chronological order. Instead, it presents as a jeu d’esprit to which the reader must adapt. This game can be that of the associations of ideas, deductions, conversations, the double novel, et cetera.

A crime story is a story with a puzzle at its heart. The reader is drawn in by the desire to solve the murder alongside the detective, to make their own associations and deductions. The poetic novel takes this a step further, bringing the concept of the crime novel — and of crime itself — into question.

Kathyrn Scanlan notes in her introduction that Twenty Minutes of Silence, the story of a boy who kills his father (or does he?) was inspired by a real-life parricide in a hotel where Bessette and her sons were staying: ‘Bessette read in the newspapers that a boy had shot and killed his father. She continued to follow the case, and at some point began to reconstruct her findings on the page’. Just like Briggs’ translation, the writing of Twenty Minutes of Silence was a result of deep interest, contingency and opportunity.

The marks of this reconstruction are palpable. The reader is put into Bessette’s position as an outsider to the crime with no clear path to the truth yet bombarded by contradictory sources: newspaper articles, gossip, press conferences and, in the novel, the voices and perspectives of the son, the mother, the maid, the dead father, the people who knew them and the ordinary citizens who read articles and form their own opinions.

One of the jeux d’esprit Bessette plays with the reader is to be self-consciously fictional, in a deliberate echo of the narratives that spring up around a crime. ‘Let’s turn back a page or two’, instructs a narrator, and later on, the novel refers us back to its own page 39. As well as cementing its fictionality, this is also an example of the poetic novel’s aim of drawing attention to its status as a physical book-object.

In one disorienting scene, a retelling of the fifteen-year-old son’s memories of a miserable family Christmas culminating in his mother’s abandonment of him to go out and meet a lover are suddenly revealed to be part of a newspaper article: ‘And who could blame her? writes a journalist’. The personal and nuanced is splashed across a headline, the story of a life reduced to black-and-white print. On the flipside, the family’s reading of detective novels, their game of Cluedo on the night of the murder, become suspect: was this a crime inspired by fiction and games? Conversely, these self-conscious references remind the reader that Twenty Minutes of Silence is a fictional work inspired by a true crime story.

The son, whom we learn was encouraged by his mother to kill his abusive father and perhaps even deliberately framed by her, is the most sympathetic character in the novel. Having been cast by his mother, the detectives and the general public as a criminal, he is also described with language that suggests he is uniquely aware of his own fictional status both inside and outside the world of the novel; he ‘sees the scenery, the setting that others can’t see’, and following his coerced confession, when his role as a murderer and a prisoner is set, he is ‘outside the story-situation now [. . .] He’s played his role, had his turn [. . .] And it disgusts him, this crime story’.

It disgusts Bessette as well. There is a deep vein of criticism running through the novel, targeting parents who hate and neglect their children, the bourgeoisie, the bloodthirstiness of crowds and the injustices of the justice system. Wordplay is deeply serious in Twenty Minutes of Silence. The tragedy at its centre — a child forced into a crime, his former self dead and replaced by a criminal — is expressed through games of grammar, as though the author and her narrators are desperately trying to rewrite the narrative, rewrite history.

someone was killing
the house was burning
he was dying [. . .]

But suppose that ‘someone’ were the father, and that ‘he’ the child. Grammatically, the sentence still works.

An imagined scene in which the Chief Inspector arrives at a press conference to shout that he must ‘CONFESS’ to not knowing the name of the culprit, to tell the crowd that the ‘fascinating game’ is not won and that ‘there will be no end to your suppositions, your desires, your inventions, your suggestions, your intuitions, your deductions’ reads like a message directed at the reader, and yet it is cut down by a short line: ‘Naturally, that’s not what he said’.

The story of guilt within the novel cannot be changed, its momentum too great to turn back. The weapon of language is double-edged, and can be used against the son just as much as for him:

Because: when a criminal kills, it’s a crime.
When Justice kills: it’s just.
It’s a simple matter of vocabulary and word families.

The tension between certainty and uncertainty, between polyphony and the construction of one implacable narrative, between truth and fiction, between criminal and victim, is maintained until the very end of the novel. After a last, doubting question from ‘a man at the door’ in the prison, the final page contains only three words: NOT THE END. Thankfully for new fans of Bessette’s work this is indeed not the end of the republication of her novels in France, and we can hope that Fitzcarraldo (along with New Directions in the US) will continue to publish her tricky, disturbing, innovative novels in Kate Briggs’ flawless English translation.