These two authors that everything apparently opposes have in common at least one place of predilection: the Etretat needle. It is in this place dear to Maurice Leblanc that the new story of Sylvain Tesson opens, Sea pillars (Albin Michel). A day of boredom, in the fall of 2020, Tesson led with him his friend Daniel du Lac (former world climbing champion) to climb to the top of the famous needle, about fifty meters high. Up there, the Bourlingator-Potte half Cendrars half Rimbaud knows an epiphany, not to say an enlightenment: “The stack is the ultimate refuge, the pitfall of the last chance for paranos and wandering souls, that is to say to be normally constituted.”
During the 200 pages that follow, he will try to relive the intoxication of this first time by attacking a hundred of these rocky peaks dispersed around the world, from Easter Island to the Faraglioni of Capri and the Marquesas aux Highlands. Better not to be dizzy. Anyway, the many admirers of The Snow Panther,, White Or With fairies Will not be disoriented: in addition to the adventures and the Tesson decorum (cigars, etc.), we find his usual playful and his art of quotes that hit the bull’s eye, often drew from improbable authors. Despite his singularity, he is no stranger to his generation. When he evokes Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Mont Athos or Greece, it looks like it is addressed directly to Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot-these are three passions of the writer-journalist, the latest novel of which was entitled Find refugea title that Tesson could have used.
Because of its sophisticated look, some imagine that the deputy director of the editorial staff of the Point is a pure sugar Parisian. Nothing is more false. Normand of origin (like said barbey), he grew up in Octeville-sur-Mer, about fifteen kilometers from Etretat. With Inner sea (The observatory), he exploded as he had never done before. Just as the Beatles once recorded a “white album”, wanted to write a “blue book”, a sort of fragmentary self -portrait mixing memories and essays, where he tells himself through the sea corner. In moving pages, he talks about his grandfather, who worked on the shipyards of Le Havre, and his father, who took him to fish for meats and look for fossils. Ono-said biot having become keen on contemporary art, we follow him in the museums of Pinault in Venice, in the footsteps of Damien Hirst, but he mainly takes us elsewhere-at Victor Hugo in Guernsey, in Zanzibar, in Lanzarote, in Malaysia…
“Small aquatic museum”
If he confesses that he can no longer consume octopus, he ate lion during the writing of this book? We did not remember that one-time biot could be so leaping, as inspired and, let’s say it, so funny. In the most passionate moments of Inner seawhen he digress on such a curiosity of Greek antiquity, it looks like Philippe Maneuvering himself for some rare disc. He brings the character of Ulysses and Brocarde Poseidon to the clouds. Fanatic of scuba diving (superb pages on the subject), he also rehabilitates the shark, his favorite animal, while pointing the dark side of the dolphin, which, far from the idealized image of freaking out, can also “be violent, harassment, and even a follower of rapes in a meeting, cornering with several males the female in deep waters, and forcing them to copulate with them”. This is not what Commander Cousteau had taught us! Abandoning any form of snobbery, ono-dit-biot remembers its first sea bath and the Pirate Playmobil boat in his childhood. He confesses his passion for adolescence to The big blue by Luc Besson, as well as the excitement felt in front of Daryl Hannah in a mermaid in Splash.
We read this book as we lead a treasure hunt ranging from reading Atlantis from Pierre Benoit to the vision of Pure pigments from Yves Klein to Nice. In the last part, the former aggregate of letters devotes brilliant chapters to Moby Dick and at Twenty thousand leagues under the seas. Counting tribute to his French teacher at first in Le Havre, Jacques Derouard (“The greatest world specialist in the Gentleman-Cambrioleur Arsène Lupine”), ono-dit-biot also excels in pedagogy. Its “small aquatic museum” is to offer to all freshwater sailors who would finally like to take off.
Sea pillars. By Sylvain Tesson. Albin Michel, 211 p., € 21.90.
Inner sea. By Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot. The observatory, 233 p., € 21.