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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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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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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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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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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Claire Gallois

Du jour au lendemain (12/18)

"The imprint of broken things may be what we hide from ourselves and what keeps us going.

"Writer and woman, the narrator is accepted into the Académie française. Her acceptance speech is unusual. Insolent. Abrubt. Moving. Ferocious. With an unexpected conclusion. She reviews the episodes of a life, without false modesty, mocks the culture of appearances, confronts her own doubts and doesn't fail to hit her targets. 

"Claire Gallois' talent lies in the biting freedom with which she brings together the real and imaginary, the serious with the frivolous. A novel about time and vanity that begins with a joke and ends with a tear in the eye."

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Nicolas Grimaldi

Du jour au lendemain (12/4).

Proust et les horreurs de l'amour

"It seems to me that the most original experience of consciousness, or at least that of those who become philosophical, is disappointment. For, if things delighted us, fulfilled us, we would not question why they were this way and not another. We would find that things were fine as they were. (long silence) If we are disappointed, it is because we were expecting something. The problem then becomes how to know where that expectation comes from. A large part of my analysis ...  consists of understanding that expectation is consciousness itself.  ...this is in a way the key that I have tried to turn in the proustian lock. Because it seems to elucidate the entire enterprise and most of the experience that Proust relates."

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Michael Lucey

"The child conceived during the marriage has, as a father, the husband" - Napoleonic Code. 

Alain Veinstein spoke to Michael Lucey (Du jour au lendemain 10/22) about his book, The Misfit of the Family, which has just been translated into French (Les ratés de famille).

Lucey pored over the Code civil ("an extraordinary literary work") as a prerequisite to his close look at some of the relationships in Balzac's novels, especially those that depicted diversity. "Homosexuality" was not part of the lexicon, and anyway for Balzac the term would define a narrow category for the varieties of interactions that his characters experience. Lucey cites as examples two late novels: Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons, both characters leading single, and therefore suspicious, lives. 

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Valentine Goby

In her novel, Qui touch à mon corps je le tue, Valentine Goby retells the true story of Marie-Louise Girard who was a faiseuse d'anges, or avorteuse who was guillotined in 1943 by the Vichy government which had just one year before made abortion a capital offense. 

On Du jour au lendemain (10/6), Goby discusses the three characters of the book: Marie G, the faiseuse d'anges who is one of the last women guillotined, Lucie L., the woman having the abortion, and Henri D., the executioner. 

I remember walking out of Claude Chabrol's Une affaire de femmes, also based on Marie-Louise Girard, and I wouldn't want to read a book that left me with that feeling. But the novel, and Goby, sound intriguing. 

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Martin Page

Page discusses his fifth novel, Peut-être une histoire de l'amour, with Alain Veinstein on Du jour au lendemain (10/2).

The main character of the novel is Virgil, a name inspired both by the Roman writer and the Woody Allen character in Take the Money and Run. Virgil is excentric, slightly obsessed with yoga, and won't watch films in color (he adjusts his tv to black and white). 

Though he is used to women leaving him, he is confounded when "Clara" leaves him a message telling him that she would "prefer" that they break up, because he doesn't recall having a relationship with anyone named Clara. Inspite of this detail, he decides that he must strive to win her back. 

Page has written children books as well as an essay on rain which opens with this sentence:

Rain is the password for those who have a taste for a kind of suspension of the world. To say that you like rain is to affirm difference.

And Gwenaël Jeannin writes on Buzz-littéraire that his characters are "raindrops traumatized by their fall and infused with light."

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Atiq Rahimi

Both Affinités électives (10/2) and Du jour au lendemain (9/25) interviewed Atiq Rahimi last week to talk about Syngué Sabour. 

Though the book is written in French, the title is Persian. It means "patience stone" and is the name of a magic black stone that absorbs the stress of those who believe. Some, in the book, say it is the stone at Mecca, around which millions of pilgrims walk. One day it will explode, overloaded with human misfortune, and that will be the apocalypse.

But in the book, Syngué Sabour is an Afghan man who has been paralyzed by a bullet in his neck. His wife resents his bellicose nature that has left him a vegetable, but she cares for him, and talks to him, never knowing if he can hear. Her confessions become increasingly unfettered by the social, religious and conjugal oppression of Afghanistan. Until one day the stone explodes.

Rahimi depicts the oppressive reality of everyday life in Afghanistan, and especially that of women living with a particular notion of Islam.

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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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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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