Interviewer on radio and television (Europe1, France Info, RTL), tennis instructor, researcher, teacher, editor, columnist, author, blogger, Guy Birenbaum has done it all. But what he prefers in life is his family, his dog (a 35-kilo Australian Shepherd) and the beaches of Trouville and Deauville. He also enjoys taking pictures and telling stories. “All the stories are trueis his first novel.
“In a series of dazzling texts, a real puzzle that gives this hand-sewn novel the appearance of a fake autobiography (where everything would be true), Guy Birenbaum crosses the ages and paints a poetic, social, nervous, tender and nostalgic picture, of a France that he has known or approached, in terribly dark hours and others perfectly luminous. This bittersweet, but often funny ensemble caresses happy memories, senseless encounters, the sufferings and joys of a child terrible, but above all echoes what unites us all: the love of experience.” (Presentation of Heist Editions)
Meeting with Mia Couto for “The Cartographer of Absences” (Métailié) by Sébastien Jédor.
“In 2019, a cyclone completely destroyed the city of Beira on the coast of Mozambique.
A poet is invited by the city’s university a few days before the disaster. He rediscovers his childhood and his adolescence in these streets where he lived in the 70s. He will take a trip “to the center of his soul” and find there his father, a great poet engaged in the fight against Portuguese colonization. He remembers trips to the site of terrible massacres perpetrated by colonial troops. He also remembers Benedito, the little servant, now leader of FRELIMO in power, the inspector of the political police, the lovers who committed suicide because their difference in skin color was unacceptable, the powerful Maniara , witch and photographer, and above all of Sandro, her hidden brother.
The facts that the child he was tells us are terrible, racism, colonial stupidity, the political police, the PIDE, the treachery.
This powerful novel populated by extraordinary characters with a plot as rigorous as it is surprising is written like poetry, which Mia Couto defines as “a way of looking at the world and understanding what inhabits an invisible dimension of what is called reality. Without this poetic dimension it is impossible to understand life”.
A magnificent novel, in the shadow of a cataclysm, the most personal written by the author, one of his best.” (Presentation of Métailié editions)