Not everyone perhaps knows Thomas Schlesser, art historian, director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, in Antibes, but everyone will soon know this Courbet specialist, judging by his spectacular arrival in our list of fictions. His first novel, Mona’s Eyes (Albin Michel), indeed emerges in 3rd place. There is no question of Hartung, of Courbet but also of around fifty other artists, present in different Parisian museums, from the Louvre to Beaubourg via Orsay. The idea is clever: a 9-year-old girl will lose her sight in fifty-two weeks and, before it is too late, her grandfather introduces her to 52 paintings, one per week, to pass on to her his wonder and make him understand how much artists illuminate life. In France, Mona’s Eyes packs the press, celebrated, nice split, as well by BFMTV by Arte TV, and abroad it panics publishers – there are already more than 25 who have acquired the rights.
She too, Camille de Peretti, talks to us about art in her 9th novel, The Unknown Portraitand more precisely from a painting by Klimt, Portrait of a lady, painted in 1910 and reworked (repainted) in 1917. A painting which holds many mysteries. Who is this young woman with the demure bun? Why did the Austrian artist rework it? By whom was this painting stolen in 1997 before reappearing twenty years later? So many questions to which the imagination of Camille de Peretti provides very romantic answers, appreciated by a public which places it at 16th place among the bestsellers of the week.
The late poet and writer Christian Bobin (1951-2022) experienced his first literary success in 1991 with A little party dress (Gallimard) followed by Very low, in 1992, Prix des Deux Magots. His very last work, posthumous, has just been published under the title The whisper. Started at his home, in Le Creusot, in July 2022, continued on his hospital bed during the two months preceding his death, on November 23, 2022, The whisper is “the trace of a race between love and death” and travels between “the marvelous and the obscure”, as its publisher, Gallimard, nicely writes. Christian Bobin celebrates the beauty of things, the sound of a piano, the verses of Rimbaud, the stained glass windows of the abbey church of Conques, his love for Lydie, his wife… The many readers of his work have flocked, propelling this ultimate ode to simple beauties in 7th place.
As for the essays, we will point out the posthumous work of another much missed author, the economist Daniel Cohen (died in August 2023), whose publisher Albin Michel publishes A brief history of economics, which paints with great clarity and a certain educational concern the history of the economy from the dawn of humanity to the present day. Thomas Misrachi (The last nightGrasset), Anthony Bourbon, (Force your destiny. Resilience, ambition, passion: all the keys to success, Michel Lafon), Alain Bauer (You will not kill. The pitiful globalization (t. II), Fayard), Annette Wieviorka (Red Poster AnatomySeuil), and Christophe Dechavanne (Without transition, Flammarion). We will tell you more about it soon.
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