Moderator: Anaïs Lepage
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Taking the floral metaphor as an entry point, this literary dialogue ventures further, toward love, desire and their transgressions. These themes run, each in its own singular way, through Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Mario Bellatin's Flores. Transgression emerges as the key notion for thinking through the very definition of love as a feeling, forbidden desires and gender dissidences in both novels. It also sheds light on each author's relationship to writing.

In Proust, tormented longing finds expression in the narrator's jealousy and possessiveness toward Albertine, and in the clandestine love between Charlus and Jupien. In Bellatin, it is embodied in the Amante Otoñal, a character obsessed with forming emotional and carnal bonds with the elderly, and in the frustrations of the writer-protagonist, faced with his own failed desires, whether erotic, pictorial or mystical.

Yet the movement runs both ways: desire and love, in turn, become powerful means of subverting social and literary norms. Perhaps it is the desire to reinvent literature that unites the two works, through aesthetic transgressions that free them from the codes of the classical novel.
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Mario Bellatin
Mario Bellatin is a Mexican-born writer known for his short, fragmentary novels that blur the line between reality and fiction. His avant-garde work explores illness, bodily difference, and marginalized lives, most emblematically in his novel Beauty Salon (Salón de belleza, 1994). A key figure in contemporary Latin American literature, he has published more than 80 books, translated into 26 languages. His honors include the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the Mazatlán Prize for Literature, the Stonewall Book Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Award, the Antonin Artaud Prize, and the José María Arguedas Prize, as well as the José Donoso International Prize. He was a curator of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel. Alongside his writing, his major projects include the Escuela Dinámica de Escritores (Dynamic School of Writers), The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin, the feature film Bola negra: The Musical of Ciudad Juárez, and the Congress of Writers' Doubles, among others. He is currently working on an infinite book, already published in several editions, titled La Matanza.
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Lila Azam Zanganeh
Born in Paris to Iranian parents, Lila Azam Zanganeh is a novelist, essayist, and critic whose work moves between literature, biography, and cinema. She studied American literature at the École Normale Supérieure and has taught literature and film at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Le Monde, and The Paris Review, and often returns to questions of reading, interpretation, and the lives of writers across languages, cultures, and faiths. Her book The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness was published in thirteen languages and received the Center for Fiction's Roger Shattuck Prize. Her essay on ecstasy appears in Lolita in the Afterlife (Vintage, 2021), alongside a range of prominent contemporary writers. She is fluent in seven languages and serves on the board of directors of the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation. Her forthcoming novel, Exit Paradise, on the nature of desire, will be published internationally in 2027. She lives between New York, Paris, and Rome.