2023-08-16 10:50:00
DISPATCH — It’s already time for the literary season, which mobilizes booksellers the day after the August 15 weekend. And it promises to be sober, with a limited number of publications and serious novels.
Never in the 21st century have there been so few arrivals: only 466 novels planned between mid-August and the end of October, according to the specialist magazine Livres Hebdo.
This is 5% less than the previous year, and above all a third less than the record of some 700 novels set in 2010.
There is a logic to this. The cost of paper, while down from the peaks at the end of last year, remains high. And the purchasing power of readers worries book professionals.
Publishing is not doing so badly, but in literature, the paperback is driving the market. Last year, 81 million were sold in France, against 78 million “large format” copies, that of new releases, according to the GfK institute, a reference on book sales.
Quantity or success
Taking stock of the September 2022 back-to-school, GfK explained that in the “quantity/success equation” (publishing a lot to ensure volume, or focusing on a few carefully chosen titles), “readers have decided”. Namely that they are selective, demanding, when they spend more than 20 euros on a novel.
“For our customers, even wealthy ones, it’s an investment,” confirms Céline Maillard, bookseller at Richer, Rougier and Plé, in Angers. “We are in times of crisis, a large format is expensive, and potentially it is a book that will stay in a library. So it is not an impulse purchase like a paperback”.
On the shelves of this general bookstore in the city center, space is only guaranteed for a few well-known writers. The others are forced to prove themselves quickly, or they will fall into the dustbin of literature.
Success is assured for Amélie Nothomb, who is in her 29th consecutive literary season. In “Psychopompe” (Albin Michel), one of her best autobiographical stories, she opens up on a painful adolescence and the birth of her vocation as a novelist.
Prize contenders
As of Wednesday, contenders for the great autumn literary prizes, including the Goncourt, arrive in bookstores.
Grasset editions bet among others on Sorj Chalandon, who wrote “L’Enragé”, about an escapee from a penal colony for minors in the 1930s, and Laurent Binet, with “Perspective(s)”, an epistolary novel about a murder in Renaissance Florence. A special comeback for this prestigious house: it will change owners by October, as will all of its parent company, Hachette Livre, taken over by the Vivendi group and the billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
Thursday, its rival Gallimard puts on sale “Panorama” by Lilia Hassaine, social novel of anticipation, and “Sarah, Susanne and the writer”, frightening account of the decline of a wife and mother, with which Éric Reinhardt hopes one of the rewards that have eluded him thus far.
The times are serious, as evidenced by the subjects of other leading authors of this season: genius and madness with Sarah Chiche (“Les Alchimies”, at Seuil), and the heritage of Jewish refugees in France with Agnès Desarthe. (“Le Château des rentiers”, at L’Olivier).
Among all this seriousness, where to find scandal, the ingredient of a successful literary comeback? Perhaps in the painting of social violence in Bondy, a suburb of Paris well known to Thomas B. Reverdy (“Le Grand Secours”, Flammarion).
In the foreign novel, even your serious. We find it in the account of a mutiny by the American David Grann in “Les Naufragés du Wager” (editions du Sous-Sol), or the line of assassins imagined by the Spaniard Victor Del Arbol in “Le Fils du father” (Actes Sud).
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