Chance programming or outings duly orchestrated? The fact remains that two foals of Gallimard, Eric Fottorino and Tonino Benacquista, take us simultaneously behind the scenes of the edition, an always crisp medium (because very in big mouths, in ego and in flamboyances) and give us, the first seen on the side of the writer, the second of the publisher, two most tasty works.
Sensitive peopleof the author of Korsakov, is the most personal, his characters being drawn from great figures of the literary world: thus we recognize Claude Durand, a time CEO of stock, in the guise of Charles Follet, the boss of Editions du Losange, Chantal Lapicque, muse of this same publishing house under those of Clara, the sparkling and energetic press attaché, and the great Algerian author Rachid Mimouni hunted down by Islamists. As for his narrator, Jean Foscolani, about to publish a first novel about his quest for origins, he looks furiously, less armed, to his creator. But whatever, there is no need to be initiated to appreciate the power of this painting which took place in the late 1990s – moreover tragic for Algerian artists, from Lounès Matoub to Tahar Djaout (of course, we think today of Boualem Sansal). With modian accents, Eric Fottorino relates the funny trio formed by his protagonists with, on the one hand, Clara, the press secretary with a big heart and the easy descent, on the other, Said, the great love of Clara, but who lives essentially in Tangier where he took refuge with his family, and in the middle, the 20 year old narrator to which Clara launched, not ” You have a writer’s mouth “, like a Françoise Verny, but, with the same hoarse voice,” you will be the darling of this school year “.
“To write is to take revenge,” noted Tonino Benacquista in PORCA MISRIA (2022). The narrator of Taken from unreal factsthe publisher Bertrand Dumas, did not set up his house in 1986 to take revenge, but to shed light on man on the beauty and complexity of the world. We find him, the day before an appointment at the Commercial Court. It is that his house is bad, between the authors who hang out or who betray, his “feel-Bad books” who have not all found takers and the refusals of the financiers. The editor of the old school, unable to give in to the times, plunges into memories of forty years of trade, the thousands of refused manuscripts, relegated to what he calls “limbo”, and as many hours of readings, the 641 titles in his catalog, his two hundred authors, living and disappeared. He also recounts, in a jubilant tone, the literary comedy, between TV shows, signature sessions during book salons, jealousies between authors, the literary jurors so courted and disturbing overproduction (more than 10,000 novels are published in France per year). Ruminations that are just as spicy as it is deep. The time for the liquidation request comes to the court. Unless a “blow of fate” to stop the announced end of “Bertrand Dumas editor”….