Death at Half Mast

Death at Half MastDeath at Half Mast (2019) is the English version of Denis Emorine's French novel La mort en berne, published by 5 Sens Editions in Geneva in 2017. It is the first of his novels in English. Its protagonist is Dominique Valarcher, a writer who functions as Emorine's semi autobiographical alter ego rather than the author himself. The same figure returns in Broken Identities (2025), so the two JEF novels read as a pair. Emorine has been publishing in

The method underneath it is journalistic: Leventhal frames her fiction around the four questions a reporter asks

a recontextualization that lets the original telling expose its own ideology and pathology

its co-author

to see how well the writer understands the craft

a satire built by borrowing real texts and bending them out of true

after decades as one of America's most prolific photography critics and a long teaching run in the History of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

On the surface it is an intimate domestic drama: Dominique loves his wife Laetitia

this one holds to one argument across its length

The pieces open onto specific puzzles

like a sinking ship

dialogues with an imaginary rat

anthropomorphic fables