"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."Thursday, July 30, 2009
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."
Sunday, July 19, 2009
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."
Sunday, July 12, 2009
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.
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.
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