Elie Wiesel turns 80

and publishes: Le cas Sonderberg (written in French)

In this interview, Elie Wiesel describes (Du jour au lendemain, Sept 24) the night he read Kafka's The Trial. He started in the evening and finished at dawn. He recalled greeting the normally annoying early garbage collectors with a sense of glee, so glad to still be living in a world where there were garbage collectors.

Le Cas Sonderberg is about a New York journalist, Yididyah, who is asked to cover the trial of Werner Sonderberg. The accused is a young German living in the US and who went hiking in the Adirondacks with his elderly uncle. And came back alone. The journalist is fascinated by the story, searches his own past, ends up on a mission in Israel... (Amazon.fr)

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Clara Malraux

The guest on last Tuesday's L'humeur vagabonde was Claude-Catherine Kiejman who just published Clara Malraux l'aventureuse.

Clara Malraux described her husband as a merveilleux spectacle, only, she was not a very good spéctatrice. 

He apparently told her that she would be better off marrying him than becoming a second-rate writer.  "That didn't really encourage me," she said. Her daughter gave her a book about Zelda Fitzgerald where she found a similar phrase and where it was made clear that this attitude was what drove Zelda insane. Clara Malraux said she sympathized, but she simply didn't have the time for that: the events in Indochina, poverty, The Spanish Civil War, World War II, being Jewish, fighting in the Resistance, bringing up here child, left her no time to go crazy.

She stayed with André for  15 years and learned this:

« Aimer une femme, pour un homme, c’est peut-être la vouloir semblable à l’image qu’il s’est fait d’elle. Aimer, pour une femme, c’est vouloir que l’homme choisi ressemble à l’image qu’il s’est fait de lui-même, et souvent, plus simplement encore, à être ce qu’il est ».

("Loving a woman, for a man, is perhaps wanting her to resemble the image that he himself has of her. Loving, for a woman, is wanting the chosen man to resemble the image that he has of himself, and often, even more simply, to be what he is.")

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Watch Malraux's tribute to Jean Moulin for a sample of the merveilleux spectacle.

Jacques Attali

On L'humeur vagabonde, Jacques Attali's discusses his play, Du cristal à la fumée, which is based on notes that were discovered after the Russian archives were opened. They include the minutes of a meeting that took place on November 12, 1938, two nights after Kristallnacht. 

In the second act of the play, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich and others discuss the need to deny any insurance claims made by Jews for damage to their property. The conversation expands to other topics and points toward the Final Solution: denying the right to work, to teach or be taught, to frequent shows or go to Aryan markets.

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Oliver Poivre d'Arvor

qui publie Le voyage du fils, chez Grasset.

"J'aime cette absence de mots qui empêche le mensonge, car c'est toujours par les mots que les amants se mentent. j'aime ce  mystère de nos regards qui ne savent rien de l'autre. Là est l'humanité,  la possibilité de la rencontre, par delà les mots, par delà les langues."

(I like this absence of words that prevents a lie, for it's always through words that lovers lie to each other. I like this mystery of glances that know nothing about the other. Therein is humanity, the possibility of a meeting, beyond words, beyond languages.)

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