No gift ideas before Christmas? Here are six original books you can’t miss

Amin Dada

By Jean-Louis de Montesquiou.

Perrin, 394 pages, €23.

Colossus of almost two meters, Amin Dada sprinted as fast as Usain Bolt and boxed as hard as Mohamed Ali. Better not to upset him. Certainly a good father (about sixty children on the clock), the Ugandan tyrant was less friendly with his opponents. Any opponent was tortured, mutilated and thrown to the crocodiles, when he was not simply devoured by the head of state – a cannibal in his spare time, Amin Dada appreciated human flesh,

Those with a strong stomach will be fascinated by this very informed biography written by Jean-Louis de Montesquiou, at the height of the famous documentary that Barbet Schroeder devoted to the dictator in 1974. How this street urchin “Dickens-style of the Tropics” could he have forged such a destiny for himself? A soldier of the King’s African Rifles, he knew how to take advantage of decolonization and tribal quarrels. Supported by England and Israel, he overthrew Milton Obote in 1971. We know how he thanked his supporters, giving Elizabeth II nightmares and declaring that “the Jews are worse than Hitler”. He finds in Gaddafi a support of weight, but insufficient: from 1979 the bloodthirsty jester will be driven out of power. While traveling in Africa in his youth, Churchill had seen in Uganda “the pearl of Africa”, “an earthly paradise”. For eight years, Amin Dada had made hell out of it. Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld

Anthology of blunders and other curiosities of French song

By Alister.

The Tengo, 199 pages, €22.

His bibliography gives an idea of ​​his mischievous and inquisitive turn of mind: The Woman is a dandy like the others, Anthology of villains and other bastards of French cinema, The Impossible Library…Also singer and co-editor of the excellent magazine Schnock, Alister loves exceptions and oddities, on which he takes notes and from which he sometimes draws erudite and hilarious books. He reissues in an expanded version his cult book first published in 2014: Anthology of blunders and other curiosities of French song. An entire program ! There are pell-mell lyrics that mean nothing, grammatical errors, a selection of the worst French adaptations of the Beatles, a choice of the most improbable covers of our variety… Jokes but passionate: it makes you really want to listen to our old 45 rpm. L.-H. FROM LR

Spheres n° 10. The thousand faces of writers

By collective.

Spheres editions, 144 p., €20.

Not sure that you know this quarterly review if you are not passionate about tattoos, navigators, dancers, riders or even climbers (themes of the last albums published), but you can catch up with this n° 10 devoted to writers. Subtitle Small Communities, Big Storiesit offers a great variety of literary universes approached by all means – interviews, portfolio, investigation, testimony, story… Thus the cross interview Zep and Riad Sattouf, two greats of French-speaking comics who confront here their career and their troubled with moralists of all kinds (the Brazilian Bolsonaro for the first and the Catholic traditionalists for the second).

For their part, Florence Aubenas (The Quai de Ouistreham, The Stranger of the Post) and Sylvain Prudhomme (The Great, By the roads) discuss the contribution of investigation to literature, while Oxmo Puccino and MC Solaar, “the rhyming uncles”, agree on the importance of words in their melodies. On the menu again for this beautifully designed issue, Emma Becker, Gaël Faye, Michel Hazanavicius, Diaty Diallo, Sigolène Vinson, the hatred of writers, etc. Marianne Payot

T. My life in T-shirts

By Haruki Murakami, translated from Japanese by Hélène Morita.

Belfond, 200 pages, €24.

It is not certain that this book “will contribute to solving the innumerable problems of the current world”, notes with humor Haruki Murakami in his introduction, while hoping that he will be able to entertain. Mission accomplished. We have fun and we smile reading this commented and illustrated selection of some of his impressive collection of T-shirts – we learn in passing that the Japanese writer also has an addiction for LPs, books , magazines, and small pencils… Acquired all over the world, his T-shirts bear witness to his past and present passions, such as surfing (practiced in the 1980s), marathon (New York, Boston, Hawaii…), music (concerts by the Beach Boys, Springsteen, on Broadway).

If he is not wearing those that promote his work, such as the “Keep calm and Read Murakami” offered by his Spanish publisher, so as not to attract attention, nor a T-shirt on the whiskey, so as not to not “to be taken for an old alcoholic”, the author of 1Q84 willingly wears all those promotional T-shirts bought in thrift stores, which relate just as well to hamburgers as to birds, to bears as to lizards. Also to be savored for the many anecdotes provided by the 73-year-old author. PM

An icebreaker in the tropics

By Nicolas Vial.

Oak, 96 p., €39.

No, it was not in Antarctica that the commander of the polar patrol vessel L’Astrolabe invited Nicolas Vial at the end of April 2022, but indeed in the warm seas of the Indian Ocean and the Mozambique Channel, i.e. a rotation of one months around Madagascar to supply the four islands of the Eparses archipelago. “Four white hosts – French possessions”, as Sylvain Tesson nicely calls them in his preface to the book by the designer and painter of the Navy Nicolas Vial born from his trip on the French icebreaker.

As Tesson writes again, “Vial, it is the Douanier Rousseau who would have swallowed a carnivorous plant”; then, go for the luxuriant vegetation, the thorns and the lianas, the mango baobabs and the eucalyptus; also goes for floating wrecks, ruined houses, dilapidated huts… Gouaches, watercolors, inks and drawings, made on the spot despite the pitching – his bottle of Indian ink flew about more than once -, testify to this unique experience on the amazing red-hulled boat. Impressive. PM

Atlas of lost peoples

By Dominique Lanni, illustrations by Camille Renversade.

Arthaud, 120 pages, €25.

The academic and specialist in travel literature Dominique Lanni, author of the delicious Atlas of dream lands and the epic Happy who, like Hannibal, has no equal for us instruct, to travel in time and space. This time, it is in the once flamboyant civilizations that have now disappeared that he takes us. Etruscans, Mochicas, Aksumites, Mayas, Vikings, Mandingos, Phoenicians, Olmecs… flourished, shone (through their technical or artistic culture, their way of life, their imagination or even their sophistication), before dying out.

Accompanied by the illustrator and sculptor Camille Renversade, Dominique Lanni brings them back to life here in style. Climatic upheaval, wars, migrations, conquistadores, genocides, diseases, massive displacements, deforestation, individualism, or even simple hypotheses explain the extinction of these peoples. From the Sumerians, who invented writing, agriculture and town planning in the 4th millennium BC, to the Iks, semi-nomads from Uganda moved to reserves in 1962, the impressive panorama drawn up by Dominique Lanni says it all on human (un)wisdom. PM

Proust’s Magdalene. Pastiches

Collective.

Baker Street Editions, 160 pages, €20.

Among the dozens of books published on the occasion of the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust, we offer you this one, a nod to the author, a great amateur and himself the author of pastiches. We will find there a “Proust in the manner of Guillaume Musso”, signed Jean-Marc Proust, another “in the manner of Marguerite Duras”, concocted by René de Ceccatty and mischievously titled “The crumbs of Venice in the dead eels of the Mekong “, a text by Irène Frain imagining Proust applying for the Club des Croqueurs de chocolat or even a “Proust in the manner of Guillaume Apollinaire”, composed by Paul Stroemer.

There are a good dozen of them who have had fun parodying the master in this slightly crazy book, nicely illustrated by Mark Crick. As a cherry, each text is punctuated by a recipe after Proust proposed by the Relais Bernard Loiseau. On the menu, Madeleines with honey and pollen, Asparagus with truffle vinaigrette, Pan-fried lobster and its coral sauce, Beef bourguignon. What to satiate you amply. PM