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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