The life of a film producer, an alphabet primer, a deceased loved one and a reflection on autonomy: current book releases.
Memoirs
Albina du Boisrouvray, the courage to live. Preface by Daniel Rondeau. Flammarion, 480 pages, €23.
Inventiveness, audacity and insight made Albina du Boisrouvray a great film producer from 1969 to 1985. This friend of Françoise Giroud and Jean Daniel would have liked to be a journalist, but you can’t fight on all fronts. She produced the first films of Marguerite Duras, Patrice Chéreau, Pascal Thomas (Les Zozos, famous success), l’Important c’est d’aimer by Zulawski. In January 1986, his son François-Xavier Bagnoud died at the age of 24 on the Paris-Dakar, pilot of the helicopter where Daniel Balavoine was. “To rebel, to lose the essential, to give everything”: the subtitle sums up the autobiography well. Trained by Bernard Kouchner whom she met on the barricades of May 68, she left for Lebanon with Doctors of the World, then created the NGO and the FXB Foundation, a way of merging her commitments and those of her son. “Militant humanitarian”, she puts her fortune at the service of child victims of poverty, in particular AIDS orphans. We go from the Parisian intelligentsia to the destitute Ugandans, passing through the peaceful Swiss Valais, but it all begins with an intelligent and rebellious little girl, raised in the palaces of New York, Paris and Marrakech, saved by her governesses from maternal coldness. . She takes her first name from her Bolivian grandmother, Albina Patiño, married to the man who, starting from nothing, built the family wealth in the tin mines. His father’s count was the first cousin of the Prince of Monaco Rainier III. Claire Devarrieux
Daniele Rousselier, Bikini. Librinova, 441 pp., €19.90 (ebook: €4.99).
Author of poignant autobiographical stories, Colonel Rivier is dead (1989) et Alone, diary of mourning (2012), Danièle Rousselier wanted to tell her life in alphabet, each letter recounting one of her trips (H like Hiroshima where, from adolescence, she wanted to go to try to understand the incomprehensible but she will have to wait fifty years, N like Naples where she directed the French Cultural Institute, B like Bamako where she was a cultural attaché, A like Algeria where she taught for three years, loved and had a child) or one of her fights (F as feminism). Fragments of existence quoting to F this simple phrase from WG Sebald: “Fragments are better, they let the air through.” A nice trip around the world and inside oneself. Alexandra Schwartzbrod
Roman
Anne Revah, My queen. Mercure de France, 192 pp., € 16.80 (ebook: € 11.99).
Antoine is 14 years old when he falls in love with Patricia and this meeting will dazzle his life. And her, what does she find in him? Why these enigmatic appearances, these sudden departures and this final disappearance? A few decades later, Antoine suddenly can’t stand having let him go, his queen. He finds her in the United States and tries under another identity to seduce her. She recognized him without his suspecting it at first. Why did you wait so long, she asks him. Time has emptied their love story of its substance to pathetically fill it with that sweet stuff that is nostalgia. Nathalie Agogue
Test
Boris Cyrulnik, the Plowman and the Wind Eaters. Odile Jacob, 272 pages, €22.90.
It is an interesting and endearing book, like its author. Boris Cyrulnik mixes his autobiography with snippets of the lives of Freud, Arendt, Sebastian Haffner and other intellectuals. Why do certain beings follow the ambient discourse, including when it demands to kill? What is a radical thought? A thought that praises clear ideas, certainties, and condemns doubt. Dark thoughts are not good either; look for the in-between. The importance of the first 1,000 days of life, emotional security, the ability to emancipate oneself, the eroticization of evil, are some of the themes addressed by the neurologist, referring to recent studies. This text, where this beautiful expression is found, an “apparatus for seeing the world”, praises autonomy. It is messy, dense, current: “All the ‘cancellers’ who want to erase memory are opposed by those who petrify the past.” Virginie Bloch-Laine