“Kylian”, play it like Mbappé

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Kylian Mbappé during the UEFA Nations League third-place play-off match between Germany and France in Stuttgart on June 8, 2025. FRANCK FIFE/AFP
Review A writer adrift wants to exploit the star player's vein. A well-felt comedy by Anne Akrich about the literary world that has a lot in common with that of football ★★☆☆☆
Completely out of the game. Anne, a drifting writer who is more Sue Ellen than Eugène Sue, tries to stay afloat financially by playing the ghost writer : "A Holocaust survivor, scientist, impresario, rapper, pianist, horse riding champion, GIGN negotiator (...), I was a jack-of-all-trades in lives-worth-telling." Not enough, however, to satisfy her banker. A situation all the less enviable since Jean, her ex-husband, enjoys the glorious status of "Grantwriter" , thanks to poignant novels like "The Mansuétude of Reptiles." How can she compete? When her publisher offers her the chance to become Kylian Mbappé's ghostwriter, Anne thinks that she might finally have the opportunity to escape the "last stage of woodpeckerhood" and shine in the eyes of her son Gabriel. Her father is taking her on vacation to New York? She's going to show him Bondy, the town where the prodigious football player grew up. And of course, things are going to go badly.
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Series What should you say around the Christmas log if someone says "Kylian Mbappé is a finished player"?
With a lively pen and a sharp sense of the killer phrase, Anne Akrich crafts a well-felt comedy about the feeling of failure and the literary world which has a lot in common with that of football (the transfer window, the agents, etc.). Read with the same enthusiasm as watching a match, "a nice cold beer in hand, lying quietly on a sofa."
“Kylian”, by Anne Akrich, Gallimard, 280 p., 20 euros.