The Grand Tour, self-portrait of Europe by its writers
Collective, under the direction of Olivier Guez, with Daniel Kehlmann, Sofi Oksanen, Colm Toibin, Jens Christian Grondahl, Lidia Jorge…
Grasset, 464 p., 22 €
What can culture do in times of war? This question, at a time when Europe has seen the armed conflict return to its soil, will perhaps be debated by the Ministers of Culture meeting in Angers on 7 and 8 March next, invited by the French Minister Roselyne Bachelot to reflect on the strengthening of the European cultural model within the framework of the French presidency of the Union.
The coincidence of the publication of the literary project proposed by Olivier Guez with this dual topicality, Ukrainian and European, highlights the price of freedoms all the more vividly. The French journalist and novelist asked twenty-seven authors – one per Member State of the European Union – to write regarding their vision of culture. The result is a great diversity of looks and shapes.
The ” geographical feeling »
If literature is not intended to appease, and if their pens report without disguise evils and inequalities, reading the collection is a window of hope in the current context. How, for example, not to read singularly the beautiful text of the Romanian Norman Manea on the exile and the poetry of Paul Celan, on his native Bukovina and the pangs of History in Eastern Europe?
Most “authors not only scrutinize our criminal inclinationswrites the coordinator. In The Grand Tourwe live, we love and we wander ». It is indeed also life as it is, strong from the past and swollen with the future, which pushes the writings of these twenty-seven. The Greek Ersi Sotiropoulos starts from a childhood memory to talk regarding the “marriage of old and new” that characterizes his country.
The Frenchwoman Maylis de Kérangal evokes the historic beach of Omaha Beach, the view of the English Channel and the “geographic feeling” experienced on this “european shore”. The Hungarian Laszlo Krasznahorkai tells regarding the people of his hometown of Gyula, craftsmen, passers-by and all that, with them, “knights of the mist”disappeared from the land of Central Europe.
→ REREAD. “Aaron’s Leap”, by Magdalena Platzova: a portrait of Europe between two wars
And, among other inspiring literary meditations, the Lithuanian Tomas Venclova explains having “Grew up in a half-destroyed country and went wild once more” through invasions and wars, and speaks of Lithuania as a “Europe in miniature” : “Since my childhood, like all of us, I understood that we were not the Soviet Union, but something elseremembers the 84-year-old writer.
Reflecting on the essence of this difference, I gradually understood that it consisted of a particular diversity that remains and never ceases to be reborn. (…). The totalitarian world is the realm of unison that hides a cacophony. The countries of Europe are never in unison but, on the whole, they are in harmony with each other. »
