A few years ago, the dandy journalist Matthias Debureaux published a hilarious essay entitled The art of boring by recounting your travels. Nothing is worse, it is true, than these narcissistic stories that look like slide shows. After having pinned down his contemporaries, it was time to take up the gauntlet. Mission accomplished for Debureaux which had signed an essential Worldly guide to the villages of France, where he crisscrossed our provinces with erudition and playfulness. Mind is necessary to make a successful travel book. This is what makes the trademark of the master of the genre, Sylvain Tesson, whose popularity among readers has not declined (nearly 170,000 copies sold for his latest book, With the fairies). At the beginning of the previous one, White, we underlined these sentences rich in general knowledge: “I also knew sentences for departures. From Rimbaud: ‘I’m going to buy myself a horse and go away.’ From Montaigne: ‘You must always be booted and ready to go.’ From Ms. Despentes: ‘We get up, we break down.'” The three authors who follow follow suit.
Julien Blanc-Gras must have read Despentes quite a bit. Aged 48, he is from a generation that was nursed on Bret Easton Ellis and Houellebecq rather than Pierre Loti. This is felt in his style, which leaves more room for good formulas than for contemplation – which is not a criticism, except when he writes this unforgivable sentence: “Happiness is as simple as a sunset. sun on the Mekong while listening to Aya Nakamura.” His wife (of Korean origin) having burned out, Blanc-Gras decided to take the bull by the horns: he took their son out of school and, for four months, the trio traveled through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Japan and finally South Korea, following in the footsteps of Madame’s past.
Jumping from a scooter to a canoe and from a ferry to a tuk-tuk, the tireless Blanc-Gras is a bobo Nicolas Bouvier. His book Bungalow in the hands, you have the impression of reading a long report from the magazine Society. The picturesque visions are embellished with sociological considerations and historical digressions. We’re having a great time. The globetrotter should work on a manifesto: The art of entertaining by recounting your adventures.
Nugget signed Philibert Humm
Adrien Blouët must also know the books of Matthias Debureaux, if we are to believe the introduction to his story How not to become a travel writer : “People (people like me) should never write about their travels. What could be more boring, and even more abject, than this kind of report? The same eternally interchangeable narrators who tell you stories, stuck in lyricism with colonial overtones, what everyone could learn without their help…” At the end of 2019, the young man arrived in Okinowa, “the region in the world with the greatest number of centenarians and where the highest life expectancy is observed. longer”. Winner of a writing grant, he hopes to complete a novel in peace. A certain epidemic changes the situation. Blouët has completed his current manuscript (The Iron Buildingsreleased in 2021) and took notes that we find in this logbook of Japan in the time of coronavirus, as funny as Blanc-Gras, but also very poetic.
The best post-Tesson writer remains his friend Philibert Humm. We remember its delicious Tribulations of a Frenchman in France where, leaping like a young Belmondo, he sought the Caribbean in Corsica, found Tuscany in Clisson and saw in Autun a double of Rome. Why travel the vast world when you have France? Although devoid of any ideological or ecological discourse, Humm displays an impeccable carbon footprint. In Roman river (2022 Interallié prize), three friends boarded a canoe (which would have belonged to Véronique Sanson) to reach Le Havre from Paris. None having sea legs, the funny scenes followed one another, with absurd humor and an old-fashioned elegance, somewhere between Jerome K. Jerome, Alexandre Vialatte and Pierre Daninos.
This gem, which was released in paperback at the beginning of March, is one of the current successes, with almost 30,000 copies already sold. To put in your backpack this summer, while waiting for Humm’s new book, Station novel, to be released at the end of August. “Travel trains youth and distorts pants,” said Max Jacob. In the best cases, like here, they can also entertain the reader funny.
Bungalow, by Julien Blanc-Gras. Stock, 193 p., €19.
How not to become a travel writer, by Adrien Blouët. Notabilia, 207 p., €20.50.
Roman river, by Philibert Humm. Folio, 283 p., €8.90.
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