Never doing anything like everyone else, Frédéric Taddeï publishes… 15 books at the same time. And it’s not over: if successful, the Birthday Books should include 40 titles, one for each age, from 15 to 54 years old. A gamble for the publisher, Grasset, who has already printed 250,000 copies to launch this new collection of small, inexpensive volumes (8 euros), perfect when looking for an extra gift for a birthday. With his usual relaxation, the host explains the concept to us in a café in the Marais where he has just moved: “Age is the blind spot of History, of all stories. We are constantly told how date such and such an event happened, but without specifying the age of the actors, although this is essential. If you type ‘1972’ on Google, you will get plenty of results, but nothing with ’37 years’. By the Birthday Books, I wanted to present age by age where everyone was – who was dead, who had not yet found their way, who was already finished. We are often surprised! We thus imagine that it It is to an old man that we owe Sweetheart let see if the Rose, while Ronsard was only 20 years old when he wrote this poem. Conversely, Chandler was 50 when he wrote his first novel in three months, The Big Sleep. Each Birthday Book is a brilliant cultural guide: you take the volume that corresponds to your age, and you know where the personalities were. For example, if you are 28 years old and interested in literature, now is the time to read or reread The Chouans, by Balzac, Earthly foods, by Gide, or The Stranger, by Camus…”
Frédéric Taddeï is now 63 years old. Echoing his collection, we invite him to revisit the different stages of his life as a reader, which began when he was 10 years old: “My first real literary shock was The Wall Passer, by Marcel Aymé, found in paperback on the back shelf of my father’s friend’s car. When, in sixth grade, my French teacher made us study The Tales of the Perched Cat, I had the feeling of an unbearable regression: I already knew the adult news! I devoured everything Aymé, a wonderful stylist with a lot of humor.” If we follow the chronological order, his adolescence is marked by The invisible Man, by HG Wells, Lovecraft, Pagnol, Butterfly, by Henri Charrière, Waiting for Godot, by Beckett (“wonderfully metaphysical”), Koestler, Nice friend, then all of Maupassant, Kafka, Céline and Dostoyevsky.
At 20, loving Cioran as much as Elsa Triolet and John Kennedy Toole as Marguerite Duras, Frédéric Taddeï was especially passionate about Martin Eden, by Jack London, and The other side of paradise, by Fitzgerald: “In my youth, I saw films and novels as a catalog of lived experiences. The women in my life, I had already met them in novels – and that’s because I had met them in novels that I managed to seduce them, because I knew them or guessed them from cross-references… With novels, we benefit from the experience of the most brilliant people in the world: great writers are excellent coaches! Martin Eden for a fundamental coming-of-age novel, but I liked Fitzgerald’s fate more. Succeed young, self-destruct and die not too old, that seemed like a good program to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t do any of that…” After having imagined himself a writer for a while like the author of Gatsby the magnificent, Taddeï gave it up at 25, the age at which he read Dangerous relationships, of Choderlos de Laclos, and The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell.
“With all that, I still haven’t read Chateaubriand”
What to do with your life? At 29, Taddeï had never worked before when he created his own magazine, NOW. This allowed him to be noticed by Jean-François Bizot, who hired him to launch a new formula ofCurrent, where he takes care of the “books” pages: “In 1992, I was the very first journalist to spot Hygiene of the assassin, by Amélie Nothomb. I remember a lunch at the Bastille with Bizot and the two young novelists who I found interesting at the time: Amélie and Lisa Bresner, who later committed suicide… Bizot wanted them to write in Current. Amélie was not interested and thought she had found a solution by proposing crazy topics about Japanese nerds. No luck, Bizot liked it! But Amélie ultimately never collaborated in Current…” A keen party animal, Taddeï confuses with another Frédéric, Beigbeder, the prize for a lousy novel and the prize for a good novel, the award of which takes place at the Travellers. This schoolboy prize became in 1994 the Flore prize, from which the jury brought out a new generation (Houellebecq, Jaenada and Despentes received it between 1996 and 1998): “The winner to whom I am closest is the very first, Vincent Ravalec – a very good friend who I see regularly. Virginie Despentes is very emblematic of the era. Vincent was in his early days, with Song of the scum ; Virginie has remained so over the decades. Jaenada, for his part, does not revolutionize literature, but he has a real style, immediately recognizable.”
In 1998, at the age of 37, Frédéric Taddeï was at the helm of Last Paris, where writers are often in the spotlight: “The model of the show was The Braggart : a guy in a car who takes the others. I was Vittorio Gassman, the one with the keys. I remember Guillaume Dustan, very funny in a backroom homo, where he explained that straight people don’t know what sex is, and cocktails at Jérôme Béglé’s mother’s house where there were Beigbeder, Patrick Besson, Houellebecq, François Gibault, Nabe…” We know that Marc -Edouard Nabe was a great friend of Taddeï, who met him in 1991, at the publication of Nabe’s Dream. For several years, they have been at odds.
2006. At 45 years old, the Gassman of the PAF found himself behind the wheel of an even larger engine, namely Tonight or never !), a show that lasted ten years and remains unrivaled. If his thirties had been for Taddeï a decade dedicated to contemporary novelists and the classics (Dumas, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Flaubert, etc.), his forties saw him favoring essays. On the set of Tonight or never !), we don’t just come across “sick brains” (to use Patrick Cohen’s expression). Intellectuals, including foreigners, are celebrating there. Umberto Eco, Jeremy Rifkin and Joseph Stiglitz parade. Taddeï confronts the establishment with the protesters, invites relatives (Régis Debray), brings Edgar Morin back into fashion. Emmanuel Todd, who was angry with television, returns to it. From Geoffroy de Lagasnerie to Eugénie Bastié, beginners from all sides are making themselves known there. Another friend of the host, Alain Badiou, made his first TV appearance before having a bestseller (What is Sarkozy named after?). Capital in the 21st century, by Thomas Piketty, also starts there. What tests have really marked Taddei in recent years? He recommends four titles: Mediocracy, by Alain Deneault, Journey into misarchy. Trying to rebuild everything, by Emmanuel Dockès, The Largest Menu in the World, by Bill François, and Feminicene, by Vera Nikolski. Before leaving us, he slips us this confession: “With all that, I still haven’t read Chateaubriand.” Don’t panic: since he likes reading books at the age when their authors wrote or published them, he will have eternal life to immerse himself in them. Memories from beyond the grave.
Birthday Books collection, by Frédéric Taddeï, 15 titles in bookstores. Grasset, approx. 90 p. each, €8.
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