Pauline Dreyfus, the appalled linguists and Claudio Fava: books not to be missed

My life with Colette

by Pauline Dreyfus.

Gallimard, 151 pages, €17.50.

The rating of L’Express: 4/5

She was a music-hall star and ended up president of the Goncourt Academy, without ever losing her strong Burgundian accent: astonishing trajectory than that of Colette, to whom Pauline Dreyfus devotes an essay where admiration does not turn to hagiography. Unlike Sainte-Beuve, Dreyfus prefers works to authors. If she has not stopped reading and rereading Colette’s books with emotion, she is aware of the limits of the latter, ambitious, narcissistic and bad mother – she called her daughter “the big turkey”, which is not the mark of a charitable soul.

Not everything has been said about Colette. “Ma vie avec…”, a collection created and directed by François Sureau at Gallimard, gives writers the opportunity to speak in a personal tone about their tutelary figures, mixing their own journey with that of their subject. Intimate digressions replace academic drivel. In these 150 pages devoted to Colette, the creator of Claudine, there is also a lot of talk about Pauline: Dreyfus remembers his childhood, his dear grandmother, the lost family home. By advancing masked, she says a lot about herself; and this apparently lively and cheerful text turns out to be deeply melancholy for those who know how to read between the lines. On page 76, a sentence will irritate some: “Here is what perhaps pleases me most about her: she was never a feminist.” According to Dreyfus, Colette was in no way an activist, and it is the poetess who should be welcomed at home. Let’s forget the ideology, and reread gigi Or Dear. L.-H. of LR

French is fine, thank you

by appalled linguists.

Gallimard tracts, 64 p., €3.50.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

Must believe that the mustard has gone up in their noses. Tired of hearing what they call “received ideas”, 18 “appalled linguists” joined forces to counter-attack via this “leaflet”. With such a baptismal name, a nod to the collective of appalled economists, opposed to “neoliberal orthodoxy”, we understand that the authors do not line up exactly on the side of “conservatives” and purists of language. Their credo? Remember that the French language (or rather the Francophonie) is constantly changing and that we must stop tracking down the fault, unless we have carried out real investigative work, which alarmists of all stripes do not always do – with , in the first place, the French academicians, or the media.

The titles of the chapters speak for themselves: “French is no longer ‘the language of Molière'” (with a totally outdated vocabulary); “[il] does not belong to France” (300 million people, including many Africans, practice it); “[il] is not invaded by English” (let’s talk rather about lexical borrowings between cousin languages ​​having cohabited for more than three centuries and capable of accommodating an infinity of synonyms); “[il] does not have a perfect spelling” (thus, all the plurals in x have nothing etymological, and there are more effective than dictations to improve the mastery of French)… Didactic, pedagogical and innovative (even going so far as ‘to recommend the use of automatic correctors in exams and to salute digital writing), this short summary should uninhibit many “at fault”, at the risk of bristling some rigorists. PM

Teresa’s Revenge

by Claudio Fava, trans. from Italian by Eugenia Fano.

Métailié, 160 p., €18.

The rating of L’Express: 4/5

How appetizing are the pastries on the cover of this book…until the eye falls on the title above them, Teresa’s Revenge : and if the cannoli were filled with arsenic rather than pistachio? Things are more complicated. Teresa is a 33-year-old Sicilian exiled in Rome, where she goes through life without opening her jaws. Fatherless, hardly any lovers, and a job that is not the lightest: accompanying the dying for 20 euros an hour. One day, Teresa returns to her native island to visit her mother. A phenomenon, this mother constantly in tears, wiping the brass handles of the apartment as soon as you put your hand on it, and who dreams of settling her daughter, even with that simpleton Tino.

It was during this stay that everything came out: Teresa saw the face of Salvatore Rosco on local television. The same one who, president of the merchants, hadn’t understood that Teresa’s father didn’t want to pay the pizza, mafia tax, ten years earlier. And had found nothing to complain about when the refractory had been shot down in the street. This beloved father, who, in his pastry shop, made the best cannoli of the city, with which he regaled his daughter… Can an insurmountable mourning be appeased in revenge? In his simple idea? Claudio Fava chisels a portrait of a woman in suppressed rage, unable to close her eyes to the heap of hypocrisy that her peers put up with. A story of indignation, carried by a raw and desperate humor, which is resolved in a perfectly fine and unexpected outcome. Bertrand Bouard