Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, Claire Castillon, Robert Maggiori… – Release

2023-07-07 21:35:00

Libédossier’s notebook Books Haystacks, a large suitcase, a film by Chris Marker, the war in Syria, a lake and the obituaries of philosophers.

Roman

Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe

The reading light

Serge Safran, 140 pp., €15.90.

Ferdinand collects paintings representing haystacks. He had bought the first one with Jeanne, from an antique dealer in rue de Vaugirard ten years earlier. Jeanne, met at Voltaire high school, died in a train accident in India at the age of 20, Jeanne, with red hair that all the boys in the class coveted and who nicknamed her “the Reader”, in reference to the painting by Jean-Jacques Henner, on which a young red-haired girl lying on her stomach is absorbed in a book. Ferdinand had managed to coax this savage pupil, who slipped away from their meetings at the cinema or at the café without saying a word. The restoration of Meules in the mist, at “la Petite Encadreuse” in Tours, brings back this love of youth, still as acute. In Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe’s novel, the magic of a “tale by Théophile Gautier” hovers, with characters in revolt who come out of the canvases and a tender nostalgia which drapes certain destinies. F.Rl

News

Claire Castillon

The eye

Gallimard, 192 pp., 19 € (ebook : 13, 99 €).

Sitting in the Luxembourg garden, she gets up with difficulty – clinging to the railings, the guard’s arm or the fireman’s boots. Prisoner of her dizziness, it is her room that Madame Gueune will never leave. So she writes. The crumpled, crossed out sheets are kept in a large suitcase. “She doesn’t go on a trip with me, but she takes me.” Claire Castillon too, through her twenty-one short stories. It makes our singularities, a banality: we are surprised to find ordinary this man taking himself for a dog or even this teenager sucking his pacifier all the time. “Our boy has a problem. Something is wrong with him, but what? There is a questioning shared by his characters, whether it comes from the violence of a husband or the loneliness of a widowed grandfather, all are worth more than a glance. CG-D.

Narrative

Anna Dubosc

Koumiko

Quidam “les Nomades”, 192 pp., €8.50

In Japan in 1965, Chris Marker, fascinated by the young Koumiko Muraoka, dedicated a film to her, the Koumiko Mystery. In Paris, almost sixty years later, the writer Anna Dubosc, daughter of Koumiko, dedicates this book to him when Koumiko drifts towards dementia. As soon as the decline (or the rise?) of Koumiko has started and to defy oblivion, Anna decides, as a meticulous scribe and with love, annoyance, anger and admiration mixed together, to write everything down. Deprived little by little of reason but not for all that of spirit, Koumiko, still there but already elsewhere, then appears to her daughter as the center from which a poetic world radiates, as if “the Koumiko mystery” remained whole forever. The often funny story is entirely in the present, like a challenge to the passing of time and an invitation to the reader to participate in this struggle between forgetting and memory that concerns us all. N / A

Poetry

Frank Smith

Syria, the invention of war

Lanskine, 230 pp., €20.

Frank Smith is a writer, filmmaker, visual artist. With his “office of poetic investigations”, he explores territories little appreciated until now by poetic art: conflict zones, countries at war, places of seclusion. Guantánamo, a masterful choral book published in 2010, was composed from accounts of interrogations that took place in the infamous military base. Syria, The Invention of War is similarly based on UN reports documenting the events that unfolded at the start of the war. We read there, transcribed as such from the UN resolutions, the only verbs (“condemns / “urges”, “deplores”) and it is the muffled violence of what is not named that arises. We plunge into the horror of “massacres”, “bombings”, “sexual abuse”, etc. But by leaving a silence after a word here, by going to the line there, Smith gives back to the victims their voice, their singularity, their dignity. YP

Interviews

Chantal Thomas

The Embrace of Water. Interviews with Fabrice Lardreau

Arthaud, 172 pp., €13 (ebook: €9.49).

Her mother bathed pregnant with her at Lake Paladru in the summer of 1945, “a kind of inaugural image”. She had been born in Lyon for a few months, when her parents decided to settle in Arcachon, “I think that I was born in Arcachon”, “it is the territory which shaped me”. In these interviews with Fabrice Lardreau, who has done it with many authors close to the mountains, the writer talks about her love of water, contrary to the feeling of danger she can feel on the peaks. “Not only have I never been afraid of this element, but I have even always had the impression that it wished me well!” For the author of Journal de nage (2022) and Souvenirs de la tide basse (2017), it is a form of philosophy of life, adept at counting, close to her way of writing. And “swimming, running or even hiking embody those moments when the evaluation posed by an outside gaze is no longer necessary. It is also, more intimately, the idea of ​​a happy and self-confident relationship with one’s body”. Also just published From a fan to the dome, a collection of speeches held on the occasion of its reception at the French Academy by Dany Laferrière (the Seuil “Fiction & Cie”). F.Rl

Philosophy

Robert Major

Memory. From Sartre to Bruno Latour, lives and deaths of contemporary philosophers

Preface by Marc Crépon, Vrin-Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, 350 pp., €22.

Robert Maggiori started writing for Liberation almost half a century ago, just after publishing Lire Gramsci with Dominique Grisoni, when they were students in Vincennes at the Sorbonne. In the preface to this collection of obituaries that he mainly wrote for the newspaper, from that of Sartre on April 17, 1980 to that of Bruno Latour on October 9, 2022, he recounts their interview with Sartre, from which Grisoni and he “left overjoyed”, except that the typewritten copy brought to the editorial staff will disappear there body and property. Likewise, Michel Foucault’s recording cassettes – which he “buried” on June 26, 1984 – vanished with the theft of a moped. Professor of philosophy, Maggiori accompanied the entire history of the newspaper, exceptional longevity, with “a work” of more than two thousand articles. Before each of the seventy-six obituaries, he says whether or not he met the intellectual with personal anecdotes. Jankélévitch, “my only master”, ill, pushes him to leave while not letting go of his arm – “I haven’t seen him again”. He recounts his walks in Tokyo with Jean-Toussaint Desanti, the kindness of Ruwen Ogien… “I wrote his obituary in tears.” Memoir speaks of philosophy and the end of the philosophers, of the paper tomb to offer them when it is not already prepared and they have just died, it is then the commotion, because the closer the loop is, the more quickly you have to capture a whole life. F.Rl