Cache-Cache
Daniel Boulanger
De l’Académie Goncourt
Novel
198 pages
The Author
Daniel Boulanger is one of the most delightful writers of his time. His production, around sixty titles, is rich and varied and particularly successful in the novel, the poem (with Retouches, he created a new genre), theatre and the short story. He has also produced about a hundred scripts and dialogues for the cinema.
The Book
Mugged right in the middle of Paris, left on the pavement in front of a chemist miles from his home, wallet and wedding ring stolen, the hero of this story plays with his memories to rediscover a woman he fell in love with at first sight. The dazzling Helen is the ultimate fantasy of love-play (“I tell you straight, I felt like undressing her and penetrating her without a word”).
This Philippe Elie is a carpet seller. Helen talks in amphitheatres about masterpieces of painting. They vroom around together on a powerful motorbike, but like everyone else, they are playing at hide and seek in cityscapes that do the same.

Le Bureau des solitudes
Anne Goscinny
Novel
150 pages
The Author
Anne Goscinny, born in 1968, is the daughter of René Goscinny and the young sister of Asterix. This is her first novel.
The Book
There are six main characters in this novel about solitude. Three pour out their feelings in a barrister’s office and the other three recoil in a psychiatrist’s. Only a few yards of landing separate the two doors. Behind the desk of the barrister - and sitting in the psychiatrist’s armchair - we find the same man: the unique narrator of two shipwrecked lives; “I must tell you, I’m an impostor.”
This tragic-comedy has all the appearances of respecting the unity of time ( the story takes place in one day), unity of place (one building, with a Chinese restaurant where the protagonists escape at lunch time), of inaction (because the six, in search of grandeur, are prevented from taking action, either by legal procedure or neurotic protocol). But the final surprise deconstructs the mystery of the narrative, producing a prodigious void.
A superb first novel, brilliant in its construction, control, and the power of the narrative. There is a real sense of tragedy here, and pathos, humour and derision in the treatment of men’s “miserable little heap of secrets”. The characters are quite simply unforgettable.

D’ivoire ou de corne, Les Portes du rêve
Marcel Schneider
Novels
380 pages
The Author
Marcel Schneider was born in Paris in 1913. A specialist in the fantastic genre, he was a prolific author of novels, short stories and memoirs, with his series entitled Eternité fragile.
The Book
“You who live on a star, as François Mauriac used to say. You who frequent the angels, as my friends say. Yet I’ve gone through the same hardships as all the other citizens of France in the 20^th century: war, German occupation, work, discovering the world. But I always had one foot in another world, I lived both here and there, a double life.
A dream I had in my childhood, at eight or nine perhaps, brought me a revelation that marked and transfigured me: I had a vision of myself dancing on a rock that overhung a spring. The child Marcel jumped on the naked stone and at the same time watched his impalpable image on the still surface of the source. My future double life was prefigured in that dream: agitation in the world, contemplation in the solitude of my secret. This dream which I often returned to afterwards in my ideas, allowed me to consider myself as an object of poetic and metaphysical meditation. The images of my dream, the dance on the rocks and the reflection in the fountain of the dance: in fact they symbolise poetry – mirror, hieroglyphic of the absolute.”
M.S.
Under a title borrowed from Gérard de Nerval, this volume brings together three of Marcel Schneider’s Romanesque works that had become impossible to find: La Première Ile (1959), Les Colonnes du temple (1962), Le Guerrier de Pierre (1969). New readers will discover Marcel Schneider, stylist and master in the art of the fantastic.

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Non-fiction

Tristan Tzara
L’homme qui inventa la Révolution Dada
François Buot
Biography
380 pages
The Author
Holder of the aggregation in French, specialist of the surrealist period, François Buot is the author of Crevel (1991), and L’esprit des seventies (1994, with Alexis Bernier), dedicated to Alain Pacadis.
The Book
A lot of people know only one thing about Tristan Tzara; that he was the man who invented the Dada revolution, the radical questioning that preceded Surrealism and spread all over Europe, instructing its adepts to ‘sweep everything away, cleanse’.
But between Samuel Rosenstock, born on April 16, 1896 in the province of Bacau in Roumania, and the monocled revolutionary sitting on the terrace of the Café Flore, the “self-styled barbarian” who was to die in 1963 in a Parisian flat crammed with books and African masks. What a journey was his, what transformation of the self! This first biography of Tzara, rich in previously unpublished interviews with the survivors of surrealism, tells us how the myth was manufactured.
How did he become Tzara? How did he go from the cabaret Voltaire in Zurich before WW1, where he “lived and straddled life like the leader of an invisible army”, to Paris where Max Jacob and Apollinaire sought the company of “a barbarian of the highest possible mental and aesthetic level” who created an international network of assistance to Dada. How did he reconcile the sleepless nights in Montparnasse and writing poetry? How could he promote revolution while living in a town house in Montmartre specially built for him by Alfred Loos? How could he join the ranks of the red army while remaining faithful to his surrealist friends? And write in solitude while abandoning himself to the whirlwind of the period between two world wars, from the Boeuf sur le toit to fancy dress balls in the company of Crevel or Cocteau? He seduced women, but married only one who called him “Papa, poet, peasant and Parisian property owner”.
In a kaleidoscope of names, images, political groups and exploding revolvers, we see all those figures whose names made the epoch, whether in politics (Lenin, Thorez, etc.) or in literature (Breton, Crevel, Dali, Georges Bataille, Roger Callois, among so many others).

Le Moïse des Amériques
Les aventures du munificent Baron de Hirsch
Dominique Frischer
Biography
300 pages + photo section
The Author
Psycho-sociologist and maker of documentaries, Dominique Frischer has written several books including Les analysés parlent (Stock, 1977); La France vue d’en face (Laffont, 1990); La revanche des misogynes (Albin Michel, 1997) and A quoi rêvent les jeunes filles (Grasset, 1999).
The Book
Maurice de Hirsch, born in Bavaria in 1831, came from one of the greatest and most untypical Jewish dynasties of court bankers who, having reached the height of success, abandoned finance in favour of farming. After studies in Belgium, he became passionately interested in the stock exchange and learned the trade in Munich, in the family bank. He left while still very young to join the establishment of his future father-in-law, Jonathan Bischoffsheim, founder of Paribas in Belgium. The latter immediately realised that de Hirsch, who married his daughter Clara in 1855, possessed financial genius. It was in association with a creator of insurance companies that de Hirsch earned his first millions, which he invested in the railways – then thought to be a risky venture. In 1869, he obtained a concession for the construction and exploitation of the Constantinople-Vienna lines. The realisation of this project, which ran into a lot of political opposition, made him famous, rich and was at the origin of the interest he took for the miserable Jewish populations in the Balkans.
In Paris, where he lived in a sumptuous palace opposite the Elysée, his luxurious living put even Rothschild in the shade. A fervent royalist, de Hirsch supported General Boulanger with his millions, in the hope of seeing the restoration of the monarchy. But when his only son died, de Hirsch devoted his wealth to philanthropic enterprise on a scale never seen before. He financed the creation of primary schools, professional training establishments in Central Europe and the East, as well as Canada and the U.S. Angered by the suffering of Russian Jews, victims of endless pogroms after the assassination of Alexander II, he undertook with the Tsarist government to displace 3 million Jews in 25 years. He created two powerful Jewish foundations, the Jewish Colonisation Association (JCA) in order to finance the installation of immigrants in the farming colonies in Argentina and North America, thus the nickname: “Moses of America”.
Just before his death, this partisan of the assimilation and secularisation of Jews opposed Herzl, who was converted to Zionism after the Dreyfus affair in France. Time proved Herzl to be right and de Hirsch to be a mistaken idealist whose realisations never reached the utopic dimensions of his dreams.

Qu’est-ce qu’une vie réussie?
Luc Ferry
Essay
260 pages
The Author
Luc Ferry has written several best-selling books: Le Nouvel ordre écologique, L’homme-Dieu, La Sagesse des Modernes (in collaboration with André Comte-Sponville). His recent nomination to a ministerial role in the French government makes this work, written five years ago, particularly interesting.
The Book
According to ancient wisdom, for a man “to have a successful life”, he had to make his mark in the cosmic or religious order. How can this supposition be considered in today’s disenchanted world, abandoned by the Gods?
This is the question posed and answered here by the newly appointed Minister of Education. From Seneca to Heidegger, Marcus Aurelius to Nietzsche, he travels through the history of philosophy with great virtuosity, constructing what could well be a notion of wisdom for today’s men and women.
A deservedly popular and respected philosopher, as accessible in the questions he poses, that are of interest to a wide range of individuals, as in the answers he proposes.

Histoire secrète de L’OAS
Georges Fleury
Essay
1500 pages
The Author
Georges Fleury’s works are many and varied, alternating accounts of wars and stories about animals. A novelist and historian, he wrote the highly successful Tuez De Gaulle! (Grasset, 1999). Enrolled when still very young in the marine commandos, he fought in Algeria and for the ‘French Algeria’ cause. This much awaited history of the O.A.S. (Organisation de l’Armée secrète, an illegal military organization supporting French rule of Algeria) is also his own story.
The Book
L’ Organisation de l’Armée secrète was born in Madrid on February 11, 1961. It’s founders, Pierre Lagaillarde and Jean-Jacques Susini, soon asked General Salan to accept the leadership of the military group that was born in the fear and anger provoked by the looming independence of Algeria. After the failed putsch of Algiers in 1961, the O.A.S. welcomed deserters from the army, former secret agents, monarchists, French colons who refused to leave Algeria. Until its disappearance, the O.A.S. remained a violent and impenetrable nebula.
When the Generals Salan and Jouhaud were in command of the O.A.S. in Algeria, the organisation launched a terrorist campaign on the French mainland. The aim was to make De Gaulle change his mind on his project of auto-determination for the Algerian population. But the effect was the contrary; they succeeded in representing the O.A.S. as a repulsive group. Yet, politicians – whose names are revealed here, followed these actions from the shadows, right up to the failed attack on the life of Malraux, on February 7, 1962, that disfigured a little girl and earned national disgust for the perpetrators .
From then on the O.A.S. continued their hopeless and brutal combat. They “held” Oran for two months in spite of the efforts of General Katz, whose henchmen, the deltas, carried out executions in the streets of Algeria, even destroying the barbouzes recruited by the Elysée… Until Jean-Jacques Susini decided to make a deal with the F.L.N., the Algerian independence fighters. But it was too late, the majority of French people, sick of the hatred and bombs, had been reconciled to the fact that French Algeria was a thing of the past.
A superb account, providing a fascinating and convincing portrait gallery of politicians in a desperate situation, men and women in clandestinity, war dogs and maniacs… The official history is artfully blended with its shady secrets, lies and symbols, revealing much previously unknown information about the organization, its ideology and networks. No really thorough book has been written on the subject until now.

La Voix méconnue du réel
René Girard
Essay
(With a previously unpublished preface)
304 pages
The Author
Born in 1923, René Girard became a historian before going to live and work in America in 1947. He taught for many years at the University of Stanford, where he lives to this day. Among his most renowned works are La Violence et le Sacré (1972), Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (1978), Le Bouc Emissaire (1982), Shakespeare, les feux de l’envie (1990), Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair (1999).
Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque is now published in the Cahiers Rouges collection.
The Book
In this collection of exceptional quality, René Girard has brought together nine texts that take us back over his oeuvre. They were first published in English in prestigious American university reviews.
La Voix méconnue du réel is an excellent introduction to Girard’s thought. It offers an in-depth treatment of his favoured themes of reflection: mimetic desire, mythical thought, the great sacred texts etc.
A second volume will be published, featuring non-Christian founding myths.
Contents:
Violence and representation in the mythical text; Differentiation and reciprocity in the work of Levi Strauss and in contemporary theory; Strategies of madness; Nietzsche, Wagner and Dostoyevsky,  Nietzsche versus the crucified Christ; The Question of anti-Semitism in the New Testament; Mimetic desire in the underground; The plague in literature and myth; A dangerous balance: Essay of interpretation of Humour: Innovation and repetition.

Le Croquant indiscret
Henri Calet
In ‘Les Cahiers Rouges’ collection
New edition
140 pages
The Book
Calet, the native of Montparnasse, visiting the secret places and the town houses of the capital, questioning Grand Duchesses and Baronesses who weren’t exactly to the manner born, who’d believe it? Yet, you must read the investigation of Croquant indiscret if you want to understand the ins and outs of the Parisian jet set in the fifties. This book is at the same time documentary and entertaining. Calet visiting the rich, a smirk on his lips but resisting the temptation of caricature, ears and eyes gleaning all there is to know about the high society with aplomb, the healthy writing  of a man who buys his suits with spirit but still hasn’t paid the dentist...

Les Enfants terribles
Jean Cocteau
In ‘Les Cahiers Rouges’ collection
New edition
140 pages
The Book
« There’s a book I can finish with an increased admiration for the author. It is his masterpiece. He shows the kind of originality that never irritates, and those who know him well will find him just as he is. The style is perfect: the sentence spare and nervous, few images, mystery in full daylight! They are truly terrible, those children! What a surprise! It’s the first time French literature has sent its children to Hell…There’s one scene, remarkable in its intensity, the most powerful pages Cocteau has ever written, that’s for sure.”

Maurice Martin du Gard
Sur le fleuve Amour
Joseph Delteil
In ‘Les Cahiers Rouges’ collection
New edition
140 pages
The Book
Ludmilla, born on the banks of the River Love, is at the head of a regiment of women in the tsarist army. As soon as they see her in a white uniform, Boris and Nicolas, ‘red’ officers, fall in love with her. They become deserters and set out on inextricable adventures, like all Ludmilla’s pretenders…
A fantastic and admirable wok, first published in 1922 by Grasset.

Quel beau dimanche!
Jorge Semprun
In ‘Les Cahiers Rouges’ collection
New edition
448 pages
The Book
“Did I dream my life at Buchenwald? Or on the contrary, has my life been a dream since I got back from Buchenwald? Quel beau dimanche!, which Semprun believed to be his “essential” work, tells the vertiginous search for identity of a double survivor from Nazism and Stalinism.
Here, the former clandestine Spanish Communist Party leader, who was almost suspicious of himself, tries to recount and to understand his story within that of his century. Inspired and even commanded by the reading of Soljenitsyne’s One day in the life of Ivan Denissovitch, this book is also an uncompromising reflection on the death of the Revolution.
 

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