Jean Azarel, Joachim B. Schmidt and Marouane Bakhti: books not to be missed

“You will say that I have fallen”. Lives and Deaths of Jack-Alain Léger

By Jean Azarel.

Seguier, 310 pages, €23.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

On July 17, 2013, Jack-Alain Léger killed himself by jumping from the eighth floor of his building on Boulevard Arago. Ten years later, he finally emerges from purgatory: Books announces new editions to appear this fall and, in the meantime, Jean Azarel devotes to Léger “You will say that I fell”, a bizarrely conducted biography, both passionate and whimsical – in short, a book that resembles its model. Jack-Alain Léger was not an easy-to-classify artist, nor an easy-going man. He was an underground musician and poet before reincarnating as a popular author (Monsignor), then as an avant-garde gay autobiographer (Self-portrait with wolf), as a great novelist (Wanderweg Or Jacob Jacobi), as a fictional writer à la Emile Ajar (under the pseudonym of Paul Smaïl), as a Voltairian pamphleteer slaying Islamism (Tartuffe celebrates Ramadan And A against Quran) and finally as an obsolete figure, undermined as he was by his bipolar disorders, the drying up of his inspiration and his marginalization in the literary world.

Despite his illness, Leger always refused to take lithium because he felt that it was in his manic fits that he was creatively best. Alas, his mood swings made him impossible to associate with, and even his closest friends sooner or later grew tired of his egocentric and excessive – toxic, one would say today – personality. One man has remained faithful to his memory: Jean Azarel. His intimate and comprehensive book is an opportunity to rediscover the life and work of an authentic Icarus of letters. Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld

Kalmann

By Joachim B. Schmidt, trans. from German (Switzerland) by Barbara Fontaine.

Gallimard, 368 pages, €22.

Express rating: 4/5

In the small Icelandic village of Raufarhöfn, located not far from the Arctic Circle, everyone knows Kalmann. Gossips say he is the village idiot, others consider with a smile that he is the sheriff, because Kalmann rarely leaves his home without his sheriff’s star which he hangs on his anorak, accompanied by a straw hat and a Mauser pistol bequeathed by his father, an American soldier he never knew. At 33, Kalmann lives alone, has never had a romantic relationship, but excels in hunting sharks or arctic foxes. It was during one of his expeditions that he came across a pool of blood, which was soon covered in snow. Strange, especially since Robert McKenzie, a local potentate who made his fortune in fishing, is missing. Kalmann is soon the center of attention, questioned by the police, interviewed by journalists – to his greatest terror.

The brilliant idea of ​​this book is to have entrusted the narration to Kalmann. It is his vision of events that the reader espouses, and this one never ceases to make people smile, full of aphorisms such as “those who think that life is sometimes disorderly or unfair are absolutely right, because it must be like that, otherwise it wouldn’t be life, but a film”. A candor of gaze and a tasty, constantly inventive language, which are not without evoking, all things considered, The life ahead, by Romain Gary. Bertrand Bouard

How to get out of the world

By Marouane Bakhti.

The New Editions of the alarm clock, 135 p., 18 €.

The rating of L’Express: 3/5

There are the fields, the beige cows, the rabbits, the forest, the lake, its marshes, and, very close, the monumental car parks of the Loire-Atlantique hypermarkets. Nothing that can calm the anger of the narrator, who proclaims, from the first pages, his disgust with the “comrades” harassers of his youth. In a breath that is as much slam and poetic prose as narrative, Marouane Bakhti punctuates her adolescent sorrows. For a long time, the child of an Arab and “a girl from here”, tormented by his desires for the bodies of men and “terrified at the idea of ​​someone discovering what everyone already knows”, isolated himself. Alone, he is everywhere, at school, on the football fields, during meetings of the Moroccan paternal branch. He is also and above all close to this father, whose culture he makes fun of. A life that would be untenable without a few healing refuges, the mother’s bosom and the home of Granny, a gentle peasant.

But very quickly, Marouane escapes to Paris, to the chagrin of his father, multiplies the meetings, gets lost… Death of the grandfather, here he is, in Tangier, cradle of the family, above the oak box . New chapter, the father has calmed down, S. enters the life of the narrator, family reconciliation is on the rise. With out of the world, Marouane Bakhti is making a pretty debut on the literary scene, as is her publisher, the designer Ramdane Touhami, a newcomer to the editorial landscape. A strange boss, this wealthy entrepreneur with mountain flair, who sold his Buly cosmetics and perfume house to LVMH in 2021 and reinvested his money in many projects, including these New Editions of the alarm clock and a committed bookstore, in the chicest district of Paris. PM