The TLS blog

Dreamland in Lyon

By LUCY DALLAS

 

Earlier this month, the Villa Gillet in Lyon hosted its first non-fiction festival, Mode d'emploi – A user's guide (a typically ambitious, and literary, name, with its nod to Georges Perec's La vie: Mode d'emploi). They conquered New York recently with a series of programmes called Walls and Bridges; their summer festival (Les Assises Internationales du Roman), which deals with fiction, has been successfully running now for six years, so naturally they turned their attention to – well, everything else. There were performances, talks, readings, round tables and conferences on newsworthy topics such as sexual identity and public policy, surveillance and security, climate change and our relationship with the animal world, but there was also room and time for more abstract debates: does democracy work, does evil really exist, does religion make us free? (the latter was co-chaired by the TLS's very own Rupert Shortt).

Taking part in the debate on climate change was Andri Magnason, who crystallized the growing environmental movement in Iceland with his book Dreamland, which made a detailed, passionate, witty case against the installation of more aluminium smelting plants in his country. The smelting takes an enormous amount of energy – cheap and plentiful in Iceland, thanks to the geothermal currents there – and the process, Magnason contends, lays waste to the countryside. It also makes Iceland's economy dependent on huge multinationals, rather than its own people; Dreamland was written before the banking crash and when we talked in Lyon he was happy to report that since then, one of the putative smelting plants has been stopped and more small businesses and start-ups are developing, trusting in their own energy and initiative.

Scandalous books

by Adrian Tahourdin

 

Proust once contributed articles to it, but Le Figaro is not a newspaper I've ever been in the habit of looking at. Yet I couldn't help noticing recently that it was running something entitled "Ces Livres qui ont fait scandale", a 24-part series on books that created a stir when they first appeared.

This must be the Figaro's equivalent of its great rival Le Monde's imaginative ploys to fill its summer pages.

Madame Woolf

 

By Adrian Tahourdin

 

Virginia Woolf’s work has just appeared in the prestigious Pléiade series in France. She is only the ninth woman writer to be granted this accolade, out of 200 Pléiaded writers. 

The other eight on the list are: Mme de Sévigné, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Sand (whose house at Nohant Woolf visited on a trip to France in May 1937, “avoiding King George’s Coronation, as [she] had avoided the Jubilee”, in the words of Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee), Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. Surprising not to see Mme de Staël in the pantheon. Marguerite Duras’s own Pléiade Oeuvres, which appeared towards the end of last year, will be reviewed in a future issue of the TLS.

The novelist Virginie Despentes reviewed Woolf's Pléiade Oeuvres in Le Monde des livres last Friday. Despentes is the author of Baise-moi and, most recently, Apocalypse bébé. After sketching the life she discusses Woolf’s death, on which she writes: “Le suicide est à l’écrivain ce que l’overdose est au rocker” (suicide is to the writer what overdose is to the rock star). Later she has a slightly strange riff on how the verb “to sink” is close in sound to “to think” - “Couler, to sink, terme si proche de to think, penser” . And “Ouse” as in the River Ouse is apparently a bit like “house”.

Making it up?

BY ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Pierre Bayard, the man who gave us the enjoyable Comment Parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? (How To Talk about Books You Haven’t Read), has done it again. This time he has turned his attention to travel with the equally provocative-sounding Comment Parler des Lieux où l’on n’a pas été? (How to talk about places we haven’t been). 

The title of the series in which the books appear - Editions de Minuit’s “Paradoxe” - might have been invented for Bayard. Note too the teasing question mark in the French, which the English translator thought prudent to omit, removing the ambiguity in the process. The earlier book became a surprise bestseller in France, with more than 80,000 copies sold; how many of those buyers bought it in the mistaken belief that they had picked up some sort of self-help manual? Far from being a mere farceur, Bayard teaches literature at Paris VIII and is a practising psychoanalyst. 

Going, going, Goncourt

This year's Prix Goncourt has been awarded to the forty-eight-year-old Alexis Jenni for his resonantly titled first novel, L'Art français de la guerre (Gallimard). The most prestigious prize in French publishing is worth the princely sum of 10 euros but guarantees healthy sales; the novel, which was widely praised on publication this autumn, has already sold 50,000 copies but the Goncourt can deliver sales in excess of 400,000.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a first novel has won the prize: Jean Rouaud's Les Champs d'honneur (largely about the First World War) did so in 1990 as did, more recently, Jonathan Littell's door-stopper Les Bienveillantes (2006), the fictional autobiography of an SS officer.

Jenni's triumph further confounds the vaguely held belief that French readers, critics and judges of literary prizes aren’t interested in historical novels. His book, over 600 dense pages long and epic in scale, spans the years 1943 to 1991, taking in the war in Algeria as well as France’s misadventures in Indochina. The 1991 cut-off date marks the first Gulf war.

Jenni, who teaches biology at a lycée in Lyon, describes himself as coming from a left-wing and anti-military family. He also charmingly suggests that he has up until now been a mere “écrivain du dimanche”. L’Art français de la guerre will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of the TLS. 

Paris cannot abandon Balzac!

Balzac was always changing addresses in Paris, but he did spend seven years (1840–47) at an address in the rue Raynouard in the sixteenth arrondissement. In that time he produced such masterpieces as Une Ténébreuse Affaire, La Rabouilleuse and La Cousine Bette. The house is described by Graham Robb in his wonderful biography of the author (1994) as a “little eighteenth-century house in the suburban village of Passy”, where “the landlord filled the empty apartments . . . with a colony of launderers who brought with them the greatest enemy known to writers: noisy children”. It has for several decades accommodated the Maison de Balzac, one of apparently only three literary museums in the capital – the other two being the Maison de Victor Hugo and the Musée de la Vie Romantique. The Maison de Balzac receives more than 50,000 visitors a year.

In 2001 the Parisian city authorities bought three houses adjoining the property, with a view to extending the cramped museum space. According to Gonzague Saint Bris, writing recently in Le Figaro, the Mairie is looking to sell the three houses, to take advantage of the buoyant property market in the city. He points out that “these three houses . . . full of charm if dilapidated, could easily be replaced by a building that would crush the maison de Balzac, that ancient ‘folly’ which, alone, bears witness to what was once the village of Passy, with its terraces going down to the Seine where, at the bottom of his garden, the writer would flee his creditors by taking a riverboat to the centre of Paris”. Saint Bris reminds us that the house in Passy is one of only two surviving Paris addresses associated with the writer, the other being in rue Visconti where he set up his printing press (since converted into apartments).

Gonzague Saint Bris is president of the Société Honoré de Balzac de Touraine and the author of more than forty works including the recently published Balzac, une vie de roman, as well as biographies of other nineteenth-century French literary figures. He has also written a book about Michael Jackson, whom he accompanied on a tour of Africa in 1992 (Au Paradis avec Michael Jackson, 2010). He has twice stood as a candidate for the Académie française. In his Figaro piece he makes an eloquent plea to the Mayor of Paris (Bertrand Delanoë – whom he doesn’t name) to rethink his decision and to see through a project initiated by his predecessor, suggesting that he would as a result gain “a place in literary history”. As he says, “Paris cannot abandon Balzac!”