About the book

In L’enfer des mots, Jean-Chat Tekgyozyan constructs a deeply poetic and unsettling narrative about the fragile ties between language, memory, and identity. The novel unfolds in a strange, dreamlike city where everything feels both hyper-visible and empty, populated by transparent figures and haunted by the absence of meaning. At its center is a narrator who has lost not only his past, but also his words—his ability to name, to belong, to exist within a stable sense of self.

As he moves through this disorienting landscape, the boundaries between past and present begin to blur. The past appears to be something violent and oppressive, something that must be erased to survive, yet it refuses to disappear. In order to go on living, the narrator is forced into a radical act of reinvention: he adopts a new language, reshapes his perception of the world, and ultimately gives himself a new name, Aden. But this rebirth is fragile, shadowed by what has been lost and what cannot be fully left behind.