write when to love becomes survive

There are texts that smell ink and paper, and others that smell sweat, blood, tears and cyprine. Consequently, All lives (Stock, August 20, 2025), Rebeka Warrior’s first novel, belongs to this second category. Nevertheless, It is a book that we read with the dilated nostrils, the swinging temples, the tight throat. In addition, A book that forces us to remember that literature is not made to decorate our shelves but to tremble. Nevertheless, live, survive.

Rebeka Warrior recounts the incandescent love and the brutal death of Pauline, write when love becomes survive his companion mowed by breast cancer at thirty-six. Furthermore, “I didn’t know what it was to lose someone so close. Therefore, I didn’t know. However, It’s like losing a piece of self, ”she writes. Nevertheless, The book puts in words this brutal tilting: “from lover to caregiver”. Consequently, then “widow at thirty-nine”, alone facing the tunnel of care, papers, hospitals. Furthermore, Each page restores reality at raw: the antiseptic smell of the bedrooms. Moreover, the metallic taste after chemo, the pallor of a skin that thinks under the caress. But also the scent of sweat in a still warm bed. the heat of a loved neck, the burn of chosen tears. It is the flesh of love and the flesh of the disease, tight in the same fist.

The tongue is raw, broken, breathless. We read as we listen to a breath that is interrupted, resumes, leaves. Rebeka Warrior writes write when love becomes survive in an emergency: brief sentences, lists, souts, pieces of intimate newspapers. She summons Sartre. Hesse, Guibert, Rousseau, “these old CIS, white and dead philosophers” in which, she says with irony, she nevertheless recognizes herself. We are not in shaped literature: we are in the body-to-body with the inexpressible.

All lives is a lesbian novel. Not by displayed activism. but because it finally inscribes in the language the experience of a love between women with an intensity that can no longer be silent. Rebeka Warrior does not disguise the first names. She does not divert intimate. She says Pauline, she says their bed, she says their desire. For a generation of readers. this word has the strength of a manifesto; The loves of women are not on the sidelines, they are in the center, brilliant, indomitable. “Like my songs, the book is queer because I am queer. Everything is political so write when love becomes survive I am political, but I claim to be a poet more broadly, ”she said recently.

The novel does not stop at the last breath. He plunges into the aftermath: the shameful relief which follows the end of too long an agony. impossible mourning, the descent into the abyss of depression. Rebeka Warrior describes the call of drugs, the flight forward, the temptation of erasure. But the text, despite its darkness, is crossed by flashes: shards of humor, moments of grace, glimmer of spirituality. Zen meditation, silent pensions, writing and discipline become gestures to tame pain. “Life is a dog and you have to set it up,” she wrote with brutality that sounds like a mantra.

Certainly, All lives is not free from stylistic clumsiness, and too simply chopped turns. But this roughness is also its truth. Far from a police novel, All lives is an instinct, emergency, survival text.

Write when love becomes survive

All lives

Rebeka Warrior
Stock editions, 288 p.
Publication: August 20, 2025
Prix : 20,90 €