“Jean-Christophe Valtat's novella 03 . . . written in one unbroken paragraph, about a teenage boy's unrequited love for a mentally handicapped girl he sees every day at the bus stop, has an enormous, controlled rage. It roars, from the shallows of the dreariest French suburb, against such received ideas as the religion of childhood ‘innocence,' the comforting notion that we all ‘grow' and ‘develop,' and the solace, offered by our teachers and our parents, that if we observe the proper rites our futures will be meaningful and wholesome . . . His book is at once Proustian and anti- Proustian: childhood and adolescence minutely, lyrically, philosophically examined, only to be given a contemptuous failing grade . . . It is a risky and ambitious book, though it does not seem "experimental" as such, in part because it is so grounded in the real, in the boredom and self-aggrandizement of being a teen-ager. The narrator is morose, aggressive, silly, defiant, as we all were; unlike some of us, he is also funny, intelligent, lyrically precise, and frequently self-aware.” —James Wood, The New Yorker
“[Valtat's] hypersensitive high-school student listens to the Cure's Pornography but speaks like someone out of Proust ...Valtat manages to re-create the exact unhappiness of lost youth.” —Fabrice Gabriel, Les Inrockuptibles
“A slim Proustian recollection with a vitriolic backbeat, Jean-Christophe Valtat's novella 03 captures the obsessions of its teen narrator . . . Intellectually fierce . . . the story hits its stride when the narrator starts talking about songs by the Cure, at which point the prose turns so lucid, circuitous, and loaded with undetonated angst that it becomes an outright performance.” —Bookforum
“If there's any justice in the world--and of course, 03's narrator would insist that there isn't--this beautifully bitter little book will become as instantly classic as the work of Morrissey and Marr.” —Emma Garman, Words Without Borders
“A book that's a unique and insightful ... rumination on youth. 03 is a mix of beautiful and soiled thoughts presented in an unformed mess of confusion and truth. And, if memory serves, that's exactly what the high school years were like.” —Kyle Olsen, Hipster Book Club