Zeina Abirached

Interview with Zeina Abirached, a comic book artist who talks about her memories of growing up in war-torn Beirut, unaware that there was a western half of the city beyond the wall at the end of her street.

She reads letters sent between her mother and grandfather, between France and Lebanon during the war.

En toutes lettres

Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray's rapid-fire lecture style is hypnotic and captivating for the way he repeats each concept in three phrases using three alternate adjectives. This year's series of lectures is part of the series entitled "The Genius of Hedonism" and is devoted to the development of the idea of the "superman". I always think of Nietzsche when I hear the term, and never really understand quite what is meant. Nietzsche is present in these lectures, and Onfray promises more to come, but for the first sessions he focuses on the precursors to Nietzsche's superman. Six are devoted to Jean Louis Guyau.

Conférences de Michel Onfray: la construction du surhomme

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Olivier Bessard-Banquy

"French publishing has changed a lot since the first years of (Bernard Pivot's TV show) Apostrophes. With the advent of the industrialization of distribution and as mass-media was taking off, "the Gutenberg galaxy", still mostly a family craft in the 1970s, dedicated to quality, turns to the wider public just as powerful industrial and financial groups are investing in books. Avant-garde series and prestigious publications are abandoned to make room for 'fast books' that get rave reviews. French literature itself is becoming imperceptibly more informal; authors are starting to produce texts taken from "writing degree zero" that are presented as works worthy of a Nobel prize. Facing the pressure of the standardization of literature, young and not-so-young publishers in small and large companies, resist and try to defend another literature that is not formatted to please the greatest number. All of these years of publication are also years of intense creation, great innovation and audacious, surprising and inventive works. What were the details of this transformation? Who were the actors? How did the NRF fight for its position as leader? What were the tactics and strategies of the old labels of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in order to prevail in the bookstores? In this detailed account of the "the daily life of the book under Bernard Pivot," from the death of Gaston Gallimard to "the marketing of the Houellebecq product," Olivier Bessard-Banquy recounts... thirty years of publishing that are also thirty years of immediate literary history. Packed with anecdotes that shed inside light on the workings of the old publishing companies, The Life of the Contemporary Book offers an agile and sometimes funny chronicle marked by authors' whims, the painful sessions poring over manuscripts and brainstorming the best way of launching the new. Between economy and culture, publishing is unveiled, still just as fascinating, at the intersection of the paper and the electronic."

La vie du livre contemporain: Etude sur l'édition litéraire 1975 - 2005

Du jour au lendemain (7/24)

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Michel Ciment

"It always seemed to me that these interviews, recorded in the1970s with two of the greatest American directors of their generation, could be read "in a mirror" - to the extent that their parallel destinies reveal points of convergence and divergence.

"Kazan and Losey were born in the same year, 1909, from milieus that could not have been more different. Their respective origins, the Greek minority in Turkey and the world of carpets for one, an old patrician and protestant family for the other, explain in part the choices they made during the era of the Black List, a desire for social integration for Kazan, affirmation of the values of the Constitution for Losey. They both studied at the most elite universities of the East Coast, Yale and Harvard, they joined the communist party, and met with their first artistic success with theater productions in the 1930s. Their first films are marked by their social and political engagements dating from the New Deal before they gravitated toward films more focused on the ambiguities and the complexity of the human soul. They would thus both collaborate with Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter. Kazan's first great critical success was America, America, the same year, or almost, that Losey would know his first international acclaim with The Servant. And of course the dividing line was established by the witch hunts, with the denunciations of one and the exile of the other to Europe.

"Their lives never again crossed, but they had, as they aged, the same mistrust with regard to overly established certitudes."

Du jour au lendemain (7/15)

Kazan, Losey: Edition définitive

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Jürgen Ritte

Theodor Adorno thought Germans should see in Proust a kindred soul because of his long sentences. Jürgen Ritte describes the trajectory of Proust in 20th century Germany, from the moment Rilke read him in 1914 (on Gide's recommendation), to the translation in German by a 24 year-old translator of Chateaubriand (it was bad - "as if you were trying to arrange Debussy for the harmonica"), then, after that publisher folded, to Walter Benjamin's translation that was forbidden by the Nazi regime, and finally to Herman Hesse who pushed for its publication after the war.

"Cher Ami": Marcel Proust im Spiegel seiner Korrespondenz

The book is a catalog of an exposition currently in Cologne that displays the correspondence of Proust. Ritte wanted to show the manuscripts and "make them talk at the same time." He wanted to include context, and for this he would try to have a letter juxtaposed with one from the correspondent. Unfortunately, Proust had the habit of destroying the letters he received, making the juxtaposition a challenge. We have the letters that Gide wrote to him, because Gide kept copies (it was part of his job at the publisher), but most of the others are gone.

The show is worth listening to if only to hear the first lines of A la recherche read in German by Ritte.

Les affinités électives (7/9)

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Michèle Lesbre

Du jour au lendemain (6/24)

Les affinités électives (7/2)

Sur le sable

Noticing flames behind a dune where she had wandered, the narrator stops. At the edge of the fire, curled up under a blanket, a man lay prostrate contemplating the blaze. Intrigued, the woman agrees to stay with him.

She has just left her night shift at a Parisian hotel. She has also just had a break up with the man that she loved. The characters of Modiano's novels, which she re-read in their entirety during her nights at the hotel, undoubtedly offered better company... Floating between real and fictional characters, she follows what she refers to as her "slow decline."

The man on the beach never stops talking. He has come to bury his mother and to witness the disappearance of this unhappy house where so many dramas occurred: the young woman who drowned, his mother who would come meet her lover there, a former secret service agent, and Sandra, with whom he would have liked to live there but who had been brutally extradited to Italy and imprisoned.

Throughout the monologue of this chance companion, his listener is invaded by her own demons. Her losses, her love lost in Bologne, her quest and battles reemerge, painting with light touches the portrait of a woman for whom freedom and solitude are close companions.

With this eleventh book, Michèle Lesbre continues her path, determined and luminous, where the enchanting power of words awakens the world's murmurings.

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Michel Cassé

Du jour au lendemain (6/9)

Les trous noirs en pleine lumière

What is a black hole? An object that is so dense that light cannot escape. And yet, modern physics leaves us to believe that the smallest of them have a glow.

In his new book, Michel Cassé, who is an avid black hole hunter, takes us to the limits of the visible where we discover strange entities at the heart of our world. Soon, in Geneva, the CERN collider should be able to create minuscule ones that will allow scientists to verify their wildest hypothoses. Physics is entering a new era.

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Claude Hagège

Les affinités électives (6/11)

Dictionnaire amoureux des Langues

No one is indifferent to human languages, whose appearance at the dawn of our species is what permitted its members to make social ties that no other animal could. Those who do not like languages, because of the difficulty of learning certain ones, will find in this Dictionary, if not reasons for loving them, at least enough to be surprised by all that languages permit us to do, say and understand about our nature. It is filled with the brilliant, infinite ingenuity of human populations when defied to speak the world with very limited means.

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Dominique Missika

L'humeur vagabonde (6/9)

Je vous promets de revenir

In May of 1945, Leon Blum had just returned from captivity. He had been held just outside Buchenwald since 1943, after three years of confinement in France and his trial in Riom. There he had married Jeanne Reichenbach who had joined him, determined to share the destiny of the man she had loved for years. The ex-president of the Council of the Popular Front was then 78 years old. Jeanne was 45. It was the the third marriage for both of them.

These five years of prison could not defeat this old socialist. His trial, where he defended himself, became an indictment of his accusers. Worn out physically, he never gave up the struggle, the resistance, writing, nor love. Dominique Missika re-counts this latter battle in her fascinating book, filled with documents and unpublished testimonials.

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Henri Justin

Du jour au lendemain (6/5)

Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose

Renovator of the short story, inventor of crime fiction, herald of psychoanalysis, Edgar Allan Poe was the spritual brother of Baudelaire, the proclaimed master of Valéry and Mallarmé. In 1894, the latter concluded that he was "an absolute literary event." Years of familiarity with the work of this American writer convinced Henri Justin of the accuracy of this strange phrase.

Noting that Poe is hardly perceived as anything but a master of fantasy and a writer for young adults, the author takes it upon himself to restore the original shine to these stories and to reestablish the logic of the whole. He brings to Poe's oeuvre all that Poe himself brought to western literary consciousness: an esthetic that serves the text itself, and which helps think literature.

Without jargon, passionate, captivating, the book opens with the life and work of Poe before delving into an exploration of his imaginary space, moving in stages, with stops and detours. Henri Justin has labored with Poe, and when he takes the reader into his work, he is a guide who knows the good spots and who knows how to provide a taste, using the best examples, of writing at work.

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Simonetta Greggio

Du jour au lendemain (5/29)

Les mains nues

"Books make you think, make you a little more intelligent. Television prevents intelligence and thought."

Emma is a veterinarian in the country. At forty three, in the middle of a difficult life, autarchic and solitary, the young, teenage Giovanni arrives. She'd known his parents, Micol and Raphael. She had wanted to forget what had happened between them, bury it as deep as possible. She'd prefer Giovanni left, but he stays. And little by little a tenderness, feverish and awkward, grows between them.

When Micol comes back for her son, she believes the irreparable has occured, that Emma and Gio are having an affair. There will be a trial. And revenge. But about what and on whom? Over a love that remains taboo? Or over a past whose wounds haven't healed?

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Pascale Kramer

Du jour au lendemain (5/27)

L'emplacable brutalité du réveil

"Una nursed while softly banging her head. Alissa could barely feel her. The computer was on and displayed in succession the same images of her and him, a hypnotic world before waking. Una stared at her with her blue eyes that seemed frosted over. A dead leaf caught in the air conditioner fan grated the silence. It seemed like time could stand still for hours, and Alissa could think of no one to seek out. How could things have become so merciless, without the hope of future recourse or alternative? Alissa could not get over what she had allowed to happen. This couldn't be the life that had been promised her.

"Alissa and Richard were known as the sexiest couple on campus. From their love, Una had just been born. It's summertime: the California sky is spectacular, the air conditioners hum in the apartment building where they've just moved. Left alone with the baby whose total dependence moves her and overwhelms her, Alissa sinks inexorably into doubt. But the moment of choice has passed. There is no going back."

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La Table de Montaigne, Christian Coulon

Du jour au lendemain (4/20)

"Meeting Montaigne as a reader, you feel like it would be nice to sit down to dinner with him. Yet the author of The Essays hardly comes across as a gourmet. It has even been said that he lacked delicateness when eating: the "science of eating" leaves some doubt; his knowledge of all things culinary are rudimentary, to the point where he admits that he doesn't distinguish cabbage from lettuce and is not too familiar with the "diversity and nature of fruits, wines, meats"; he is unable to "carve at the table", doesn't understand "police of sauces"... "You can give me all the preparations in a kitchen, I will go hungry." Hopeless!

"When you take a closer look though, you realize that this avowed ignorance doesn't mean that the man is indifferent to all things cuisine. On the contrary. First, he has a great appetite, and even recognizes "eating gluttonously": "I often bite my tongue, sometimes my fingers, in haste." A precipitation that reflects a ferocious taste for life and natural sensual pleasures.

"In the Essays, Montaigne doesn't hesitate to provide us, in minute detail, with his table habits, his favorite dishes and the evolution of his tastes. He tells us how he adapts his diet to his digestive troubles, his age, his illness, without renouncing "natural pleasures", how he "loyally takes pleasure in his being" and "lives well", thanks to careful attention to the "culture of the body."

"During his voyage across Europe, Montaigne likes to discover and taste the specialities of the regions that he passes through, he thrusts himself on "tables thick with foreigners", castigating men who shy away "from forms opposed to their own" and call "barbarian" whatever is not of their land. A fine lesson in cultural openness.

"After having placed Montaigne's comments about cuisine and table manners in the context of alimentary habits of the 16th Century, La Table de Montaigne studies his culinary knowledge and sensibility, his tastes and appetite, the thoughts that cuisine suggests to him in understanding "the human condition", and the importance that he puts on the alimentary habits of "others" in understanding their cultures."

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Patrice Leconte

L'humeur vagabonde (4/7)

"I like women with short hair, I always have. There is no reason for it, that's just the way it is. Women with short hair make me shiver, they enchant me, fluster me, fascinate me, move me, touch me, attract me and overwhelm me. After years of close observation, I decided once and for all that women with short hair were more beautiful than the others. I say women, but I could also say young girls, teenagers, young women, mothers or older women. In the theater, in the street, in a crowd, a reception, a beach, a department store, on a train station platform, an airport, a restaurant, a public swimming pool, from a distance in the fog, even in the dark, anywhere, I always spot women with short hair. It's like a magnetism, a fascination, a happiness." - Patrice Leconte

"Women with Short Hair is the first novel by the director Patrice Leconte. A sort of fairy tale for old kids, it reads with a smile, with lots of images of a Paris filled with park benches for those who love post cards, where all the women are beautiful and and family meals are not at all boring. It's a novel..." -Kathleen Evin

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Guadalupe Nettel

Pétales : Et autres histoires embarrassantes

"Over the years I heard all sorts of opinions about veritable solitude. It was a recurring theme at family dinners. The kind of conversation in which it isn't proper to express a sincere opinion about the news or moral questions, because you would most likely end up in the prodigious tumors of misunderstanding. Certain people, especially those already on the slope of old age, speak of veritable solitude like an austere spider web that we construct over time. But there are also some who speak of it as a privileged and capricious place where the rules for admission are more or less arbitrary.

"When I forget to be prudent in the midst of all this chatter, among so many eye glasses, so many mouth noises of aunts with make-up covered faces, and a child who stretches a filthy hand to reach a cookie in a small container, I defend this last definition because I remember, not without some nostalgia, that I myself was looking for this paradise when I was fifteen years old. In my opinion, the only inhabitant of the veritable solitude should be a young girl, full of shame, her little pointy breasts, like the nipples on a family dog, her body too big for her clothing and too flat for her swimming suit."

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Philippe Sollers

Du jour au lendemain (2/11)

Philippe Sollers describes the novel as something that is heard (ça s'écoute) and has no patience for the American definition of a book as something that should tell a story which can be easily transformed into a Hollywood film. The true novel must be heard. Beckett wrote "for a voice." If there is a voice, it's good. The test is poetry - it has to speak to the ear.

Sollers always seems very much in the brain though, and he says in the interview: "I expect a book to bring me knowledge." Maybe that is why this books begins by thanking the body for being there, constantly reminding the narrator that it is all about le corps.

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Kamilya Jubran

L'humeur vagabonde (1/21)

"In January 2002, while Israeli tanks were incircling the Moukhata, headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, and were bombarding the city of Ramallah, the poet Mahmoud Darwish, shut up in his house like all the inhabitants of the city, was writing poems. They were published under the title "State of Siege" and almost everyone of them spoke of love, of the landscapes of Palestine, of the sky and of the song of the nightingale. Some reproached him at the time, as always, for not writing more political texts... Mahmoud Darwish died last summer. He must be read, today, as yesterday, so as not to despair of life.

"Kamilya Jubran is also a Palestinian. She composes music from poems that inspire her and she sings them, accompanied by her oud, the extraordinary traditional instrument of Mashrek music. And today, as a dead silence follows the din of arms in Gaza, she prepares to sing at the Institut du monde arabe, Saturday night. To sing, in her turn, of love, of the landscapes of Palestine, of the sky and of the song of the nightingale. Because these are the arms of poetry."

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Jean Roudaut

Du jour au lendemain (1/8)

Les Trois Anges: Essai sur quelques citations de A la Recherche du temps perdu

"As he delivers himself from them, the narrator evokes the errors that he committed; he is convinced that at the end of his clarification, he will firmly experience a state of happiness that he has intermittently seen hints of. But when, to draw an end to his journey, the narrator adjoins to the réconstitution of Lost Time, the hymn to the joy that is Time Regained, he is no longer the one who conceived the triumph. He is marked by the horrors of the war. From that point, isn't it delusional to hold the expression of a juvenile hope in literature as a victory?"

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Pascale Casanova

Du jour au lendemain (1/6)

La république mondiale des lettres

"This world republic of letters has its Greenwich meridian, to which the newness and modernity of works are measured.

This is the story literary revolutionaries who managed to invent their freedom as writers by creating new forms. The texts of Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner or Beckett, but also Arno Schmidt, Mario de Andrade, ibsen, Kateb yacine, Ramuz, Michaux, Cioran, Naipaul, Juan Benet, Danilo Kiš, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and many other "ex-centric" writers."

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Denis Podalydès

L'humeur vagabonde (12/31 - repeat)

Voix off includes a CD that complements this audio autobiography and includes texts read by Roland Barthes and the voices of his own family. 

"Could there be a more treasured place, safer shelter, a more peaceful retreat than a recording studio? Enclosed on all sides, covered, sitting in front of a single microphone, outloud - without making an effort to project, in the medium - for two or three hours, I read the pages of a book. The world becomes the one in this book. The world is in the book. The world is the book. The lives that I'm with, the dead that I mourn, the time that passes, the era of which I'm a contemporary, the story that unfolds, the air that I breathe, belong to the book. I enter into the reading. Nacelle or bathyscaphe, the small windowless room where I enclose myself permits a total immersion or ascension. We descend into the depths of the book, climb to a language sky. I leave it to the voice to represent me entirely.  Written and read words serve as perfect existence. But with my voice, reading the words of another, those of someone long gone, whose flesh has evaporated, but whose style, the beauty of this style,  triggers a world of echos, of connections and living voices through which I pass, speaking in turn, entering into these voices, surrendering myself to daydreaming, to the specific action of continuous daydreaming, parallel and free, I know that I'm speaking, I know that it is me, not in the text, of course, but in the enunciation of these pages. And so other voices make themselves heard, in mine."

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