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Cécile Wajsbrot's Conversations avec le maître, the first volume of a series called ‘Haute mer’, is a novel about the experience of listening to music. Through conversations between a composer and an anonymous young woman, it conveys crucial aspects of musical listening and of its verbal expression. This article examines the functioning of dialogue between the two characters ; moreover, it studies the relationship between creation and reception, as expressed in the novel. It also examines what is at stake in this dialogue: the power of art in its relation to reality, to History. How may music become the echo of contemporary catastrophes ? The article offers a close reading of the novel’s descriptions of listening to music : what literary techniques enable the author to put it into words ?

The framework of this article is Freud's theory of trauma and its relevance to contemporary second‐generation Holocaust literature. In this literature, two complementary tendencies are distinguished: on the one hand, empathy as the urge to re‐enact the past and, on the other hand, the need for distancing and working through. This hypothesis is examined through an analysis of Henri Raczymow's novel Writing the Book of Esther, in which both tendencies are present. On a thematic level it is a novel about re‐enactment, but on a formal, technical level it is an example of what distance and working through may mean in literature.