2023-07-30 17:00:04
Grégory Le Floch, on the island of Pantelleria (Italy), in August 2022. CHRISTOPHE IDéAL
“Eloge de la plage”, by Grégory Le Floch, Rivages, 204 p., €18, digital €14.
Glory, Glory, the third novel by Grégory Le Floch (Christian Bourgois, read “The World of Books” of March 17), opened on a beach on the island of Elba. The narrator described, fascinated, the body of an elderly woman offering herself to the sun and the waves. A place that was not insignificant – the author is a lover of the sea shores, privileged places of writing. No wonder, then, that he signs a Praise of the beach. Brittany, Italy, Greece… From these shores, between literary essay and travelogue, it offers a « catalogue » personal, a vision as dazzling as it is melancholy.
On the island of Elba, he says, recalling the opening scene of Glory, Gloryhe once saw an old naked woman whose body “radiated”such « a little white flame. He first describes the beach as a “fairy space”indulging, in a series of heavenly snapshots, in a geological poetry from the black sand volcanic beaches of the island of Stromboli to the purple sands of California, passing through the green coloring of the sand of Hawaii or that, phosphorescent , from the Maldives: “And all these ochres, these browns, these golden, amber reflections, give the shore shades of honey and saffron. »
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Drawing from his experience as well as from the collective imagination, relying on literary, cinematographic or musical references, the author unrolls, in simple and sensual sentences, a history and a sociology of this place from the angle of the border, between margin and edge. In Brighton, England, the mad and sick were relegated there in the 18th century, sea bathing becoming a remedy for the ills of the mind and body. Coming there to treat their lung problems, the aristocracy took a liking to it, even in good health, thus inventing the modern beach.
Proust and Paul Morand
Grégory Le Floch takes the opportunity to deliver a bold interpretation ofIn Search of Lost Time : and if Proust’s madeleine was not the legendary biscuit of On the Swann side (1913), but the beachIn the shade of young girls in flowers (1919), in which the narrator sees Albertine for the first time, and which becomes a “catalyst of love” ?
In the 20th century, it became more democratic, welcoming the working classes. To illustrate this mutation, the author delves into Sea baths, dream baths (1960): Paul Morand celebrates the beach there as a « opium », deploring its invasion from the beginning of mass tourism. A place of hedonism and enjoyment for all, the beach is nonetheless this “edge of the world” where social norms are abolished, where the deep being comes to the surface. The body is freed there, as Brigitte Bardot sang in naked in the sun, in 1963; ephemeral loves are formed there.
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