2024-01-20 09:42:00
the essentials In his “Love Dictionary of Writers”, the novelist and critic mixes enthusiastic notations and well-felt remarks. If Jean-Paul Dubois is at the party, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Laurent Mauvignier and Tristan Garcia get knocked out.
Frédéric Beigbeder has always had a hard tooth for his fellow novelists, one of his favorite Turkish faces being Edouard Louis, darling of certain media who venerate victimhood postures. In his “Lovers’ Dictionary of Today’s French Writers”, the columnist for “Figaro Magazine” remains biting, for example when he mentions Karine Tuil, of whom he points out “the TV series dialogues, the stereotypical characters and the intrigues twists and turns for station bestseller”. But he also knows how to ferret out rare talents, anachronistic successes, extraordinary zozos.
From “wonder” to “bad faith”
Several Toulouse writers appear in the selection of 281 authors, with the guideline, for Beigbeder, of having created a “discussion with the maximum of wonder, frankness, injustice, altruism, subjectivity and bad faith. “
Alphabetical order requires, “the hussar of Toulouse” Christian Authier, 55, opens the ball. Beigbeder describes him as “a nostalgic stylist who injects himself with Roger Nimier intravenously and deplores the end of literature by refining elegantly desperate little novels.” He appreciates “the provincial fanaticism (which) cures him of the show-off of the nostalgic of the French Colonial Empire.
Less known, Gautier Battistella, 48, stood out two years ago with his third novel, “Chef”, the starting point of which is the suicide of a very great chef. By portraying this “desperate rock star”, the author “is in line with his models, disillusioned hussars (definitely!) and sarcastic careerists (whose) duality has been the spice of our literature for two hundred years.”
“prose grandiose”
After the compliments, here’s something spicy with Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, 43, and his “bloody” style. Beigbeder didn’t like (we didn’t either, for that matter) “Animal Kingdom” (nothing to do with the later film), Inter Book Prize 2017. He sees in it all the faults of an “indigestible” writer including ” the grandiloquent prose seems designed to seduce the jurors of literary prizes, who are easy to impress. The person concerned will appreciate this passage through the mill.
Jean-Paul Dubois, 73, is “the regional American”, “calmly depressed, a tender Houellebecq”. His novels are characteristic of a man who “has a sense of climate, of atmosphere, and does not seek to treat a particular subject, to convince the reader of any committed message.” The author of the “Dictionary of Lovers …” appreciates this “form of courtesy” in a world where “people age without knowing why, before dying in stupid accidents.”
“Lost in the stratosphere”, Tristan Garcia, 42, made a big splash in 2008 with “The Part of Men”, a first book “of breathtaking power” before, indeed, embarking on extravagant romantic adventures, “labyrinthine novels”. Beigbeder regrets the “impenetrable boredom” of what follows in a writer who “challenges the reader to practice literary mountaineering.”
The “Love Dictionary” is an object of passion. Where Beigbeder willingly punishes what he first loved.
Mauvignier’s “logorrhea” and Salvayre’s “necessary art of caricature”
In Beigbeder’s work there are writers who have a strong attachment to Toulouse, most often born during their higher education. This is the case of Charles Dantzig, an “egotist” who loved lists, author in particular of two excellent “Egoist Dictionaries”, French literature and world literature. Beigbeder likes more readily this “rocky and Rabelaisian scum” that is Christian Laborde, “the exciting Occitan” close to Nougaro who caused a scandal with “The Bone of Dionysus” and one of whose most recent works compiles 17 portraits. alert, tapered, fine and golden” of “girls in shorts”. The author of “Dictionary…” admits to preferring girls in miniskirts…
Let us also mention the “troublemaker of letters” Jean Le Gall, also an important publisher in the Editis group; Laurent Mauvignier, “Faulkner at Minuit” who “poses himself as a scribe of broken families but also as a specialist in interminable logorrhea”, Eric Neuhoff the film buff “whose sentences are plans: he has the art of not dwelling too long “. Without forgetting Lydie Salvayre, who cultivates “the anxiety of irony” and “the necessary art of caricature” and whom Beigbeder defines as “a refractory, a real, pure and hard, in an era of falsely bourgeois-bohemia revolutionary “.
“Lovers’ dictionary of today’s French writers”, by Frédéric Beibeder (Plon, 610 pages, €29).
1705745062
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