Les Gestes oubliés
Paul Giannoli
Narrative
140 pages
The Author
Paul Giannoli has spent many years in the press, working as director of Tele 7 jours among others. He has written his first book at the age of seventy.
The Book
This is a short book, finely sculpted in a block of memory. It is made up of a score of texts, so many epiphanies where the author restores a hazard selection of ‘forgotten gestures’, little slices of the past, now yellowed and melancholic… The smell of sheets when we fold them, the ritual of school photographs, teenage emotion in front of magazine covers, the interference on the old mahogany radio that sputters out a Glen Miller tune...
Paul Giannoli has written a book about memory, intimate and tranquil. Of course there is melancholy in these episodes of the past brought back to life, but also the author’s fidelity to a happy childhood in the streets of Marseilles. The language is sober and restrained, precise in its sepia tones. As the pages turn, we see that Giannoli has become a sort of hedonistic defender of lost and rediscovered time.
A charming book that will seduce lovers of literary impressionism who will find much to admire. 

De si longues vacances
Eric Ollivier
Narratives
618 pages
The Author
Born in 1927, Eric Ollivier is a journalist with the Figaro. He was awarded the Prix Numier and the Prix Interallié. His books include La Loi d’exil and Lettre à mon genou.
The Book
This book presents three titles that had gone out of print: J’ai cru trop longtemps aux vacances (1967), Passe L’Eau (1971), and L’Orphelin de Mer (1982). Together, they form a sort of autobiography of the author, a man of honour and good faith, who said of himself, “I am poisoned by brazenness”.
Here he describes these texts in a poignant preface, where the loss of a loved one leaves him standing alone, between the receding past and a shattered future.
“The three books in this collection describe moments of my privileged life (I have always been conscious of that privilege). They fall into the ‘novel’ category because that’s the custom in publishing. I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to say they are essays, I’m a manual person and not an intellectual, I feel better surrounded by trees than rhetoric, or ‘where the street-corner intellectuals swarm’, as Adèle de Boigne put it. I have no talent for abstraction and theoretical developments, but I am a gifted chronicler. I know how to convey things. To use today’s ‘in’ expression, in Paris (my only homeland), these ‘false novels’ are ‘auto-fictions’. Which I would describe as ‘vertical’. Because I am an upright man.”
This book provides a rare occasion to read the story of an epoch seen through the eyes of a man who does not fit in to any category.

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Non-fiction

Messier story
Pierre Briançon
Non-fiction
350 pages
The Author
Pierre Briançon, a (very) independent journalist, was born in 1954. After being Liberation’s Moscow and Washington correspondent, he became the editor-in-chief of Liberation and deputy manager of Expansion. His books include A droite en sortant de la gauche (Grasset, 1986), and Héritiers du désastre, Précis de décomposition de l’univers soviétique (Calmann-Lévy, 1992).
The Book
Behind him, a trail of ruined investors, a group on the verge of bankruptcy that will soon disappear – rapidly dismantled -, and lost jobs. The last breathtaking gesture will also remain in our mind’s eye-where he tried to negotiate an eighteen-million-euro ‘compensation’ for his departure on the very day that Vivendi Universal shareholders discovered they’d lost 6 billion. After the undoing of Jean-Marie Messier, the man who wanted to conquer America and challenge the big media groups, the question must be posed: how did it come to this?
Without Messier, Vivendi Universal - that bizarre transatlantic entity – would never have existed. He was the one who manoeuvred the dinosaur of the French business world, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, into a patient and deliberate strategy to take over Canal +, the private paying TV channel, then to combine with Seagram-Universal to make an international media giant: cinema, music and TV, not forgetting the press and publishing sector. According to the godfathers who watched the young genius rise, Messier - the former banker - was ‘the best France had produced’ in the way of business magnates. He had come up the classic path, but so brilliantly. Charming, confident, the genius of finance was a stock exchange magician, surprising the markets with his ever more daring ‘coups’. Nothing, apparently, could stop him. Sessions with photographers, interviews, TV appearances abounded, Messier giving lessons to a fascinated France, on the Internet, the modern world, social policy, capitalism and ‘cultural diversity’.
But under the surface of his carefully structured reputation – that of an iconoclast in an old-style capitalist economy – Jean-Marie Messier was in reality the heir of a French system where the same twenty-five guardians of tradition sit on all the boards and scratch each other’s backs. When the distant demons were roused - during his final year - not one of those supposed watchdogs exercised any control or tried to put a stop to his folly. Living in New York in an apartment whose luxury he thought he could keep to himself, cut off from the everyday reality of his group, he dealt with affairs via fax and emails and began to eliminate those he saw as his enemies; the direction of Canal +, still in Paris. He succeeded, but when his own decline was seen to be inevitable, he went on believing he had been the victim of a dark plot, hatched by French culture vultures, the Elysée, the Bronfman family who had sold him Universal. In truth, his fall was due to that same old-style French capitalism that created the conditions for his ascent. Alarmed by the situation of his group, they’d pulled away the rug from under his feet.
Now it is time to ask the question; how was it possible for so many to take Messier for the incarnation of modern capitalism, and for so long? What lay behind the facades, behind the so-called financial ‘transparency’, the complex montages and the dissimulation? Behind the communication, manipulation and manoeuvring? Behind the smart young entrepreneur, the Internet failure, behind the grand principles? Just plain greed and an ego that swelled with the passing years, until it dragged the man to his fall.
The author has been working on this book for two years, this is not a hasty editorial reaction to the fall of Vivendi. He has met all the protagonists of the incredible adventure.
Fascinating reading.

Les Clowns
Tristan Remy
Essay
Illustrated throughout + photo section
440 pages
The Author
Tristan Remy, Prix Populiste 1933, was a proletarian writer and a specialist of the circus, the author of the first serious work on clowns, published by Grasset in 1946. This new edition features the original illustrations and an enhanced photo section.
The Book
In this ‘treatise devoted to the clown’, the author makes an inventory of those great public entertainers, spanning from the birth of the modern circus to our times. A historical study, it provides both precise references and picturesque anecdotes. ‘A light but erudite book’, as Claude Roy described it.
England is the clown’s country of origin, and he came to France in 1785. After the creation of ‘Auguste’, whose beginnings remain obscure, the first solo acrobat-clowns gave way to the classic dialogue-pantomime. Then came Foottit and Chocolate, the traditional act where a white-faced clown is the ploy and master of an Auguste, who tries to steal the act…  and sometimes does.
Solos or working in groups, or in families, French circus clowns are presented with lots of biographical and technical detail. Tristan Rémy highlights the specificities of each clown, from the great artist to the least supernumerary. He describes the work of these artists: long years of research and great patience if they are to meet with success. He follows their vagabond existence, their partnerships and loves, sometimes their fondness for alcohol, the accessories they use and of course their famous sketches. Foottit, Chocolate, Antonet, Bebey, Grock, the Fratellini, Rhum, Alex, Zavatta are all there, spilling out of these sparkling pages.

La Venise de Vivaldi
Musiques et fêtes baroques
Patrick Barbier
Essay
280 pages
The Author
Patrick Barbier holds a degree in Italian and teaches music at the Université Catholique de l’Ouest (Angers). After Une vie quotidienne à l’opéra au temps de Rossini et de Balzac (Hachette, 1987) he wrote three books on the theme of castrati, Histoire des Castrats (Grasset,1989) ; Farinelli le castrat des Lumières (Grasset, 1994) and La maison des Italiens  (Grasset, 1998). Some of his books have been widely translated. Patrick Barbier is a member of the Académie de Bretagne et des Pays de la Loire.
The Book
In the 18th century, the Republic of Venice was enjoying its last hours of glory. Never had Venetians prized sheer enjoyment so greatly, never had music and dancing been so much a part of everyday life. The famous carnival (which could last between five or six months), official ceremonies, games - but also concerts, religious ceremonies and operas - excited the admiration and envy of foreign visitors. Vivaldi, whose name was inseparable from Venice, wrote concertos for the young ladies of the Hospices and behaved more like a business man, as cunning as he was talented.
From the carnival to receptions in Embassies, from St. Mark’s to the splendid opera houses, from the song of the gondoliers to the music of the cloisters, Patrick Barbier delves into the glories of Venetian life, working from memoirs and letters of that period and peppering the text with his delightful anecdotes. He succeeds in breathing life into the musical environment of that incomparable city.
The author and his book will be present in Nantes for the ‘Folle Journée’, whose theme this year is ‘Italian music in Vivaldi’s time’. 

Paul 1^er, le Tsar mal-aimé
Henri Troyat
de l’Académie Française
Biography
300 pages
The Author
Henri Troyat, born in 1911 in Moscow, is a novelist and a biographer. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1938 for L’Araigne. His most recent books published by Grasset are: Le Fils de Satrape (1998), La Fille de l’écrivain (2000).
The Book
The son of Catherine the Great, born in 1754, was a fragile child. Taken from his mother as a baby, he was brought up by an army of nannies in the imperial residence, under the authoritative watch of his grandmother, Tsarina Elisabeth. Deprived of a mother’s love, Paul became a moody and sensitive child. He was witness to the political struggle between his father, Peter III, and his mother, in which he soon became the main stake. When Catherine was crowned Tsarina of all Russia, her control over her son was complete. She selected his first wife then the second, sent him to Europe to keep him away from the Court and gave him  a miniature territory to rule over - an empire in which Paul could freely indulge his passion for the military arts - without interfering in State matters.
Paul was a naïve young man, devoted to order and tradition and suffocated by his mother’s tyrannical personality. When she died, he was at last able to assume the power to which he was heir at the age of forty-four. A changeable ruler who trusted only his instincts, Paul I swayed between enlightened reform and indefensible exactions. He feared Jacobinism and courted Napoleon, then the English. But his capricious behaviour only dragged Russia into confusion and terror.
After reigning only five years, the ill-loved Emperor was betrayed by his own people. When he refused to abdicate in favour of his son Alexander, he was brutally assassinated.
Troyat’s limpid style creates a perfect blend of historical account and Romanesque intrigue. The reader immediately grasps the character of Paul I - not the emblematic figure or the political strategist - but the anxious son, the hypersensitive despot.

L’Escadron blanc
Joseph Peyre
Novel
Les Cahiers Rouges
238 pages
The Author
Joseph Peyre is a native of the Basque country, where he was born in 1895. His three Saharan novels made him famous: L’Escadron blanc (1930); Le Chef à l’Etoile d’Argent (1933); Sous l’Etendard vert (1934). In 1935 came Sang et Lumière, which received the Prix Goncourt and definitively established his reputation. He went on writing until he died in 1968.
The Book
L’Escadron blanc is the reliving of the admirable adventure of a battalion of legionnaires on a rezzou - a surprise raid - in the heart of the Sahara. In this epic novel, where the cruelty of the desert evinces the charms of exoticism, we find a perfect illustration of the sort of colonial drama that was very much in vogue during the thirties.
Joseph Peyre, an unchallenged master of the genre, has succeeded in combining tragic realism and heroic idealism.   

Pélagie-la-charrette
Antonine Maillet
Novel
Les Cahiers Rouges
322 pages
The Author
A French-speaking Canadian author, Antonine Maillet was born in 1929 in Boutouche, New Brunswick, in the heart of Acadia. She was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1979 for Pélagie-la-Charrette. Her works also include La Sagouine (1976), Les Cordes de bois (1978), and Le Chemin de Saint-Jacques (1997), all published by Grasset.  
The Book
Chased by the English in 1755, a widow who had become a slave in Georgia decides to make her way back to Acadia with her children. With a trail of other exiles, her odyssey - strewn with adventures, romantic and perilous – lasted ten years. From Charleston to Baltimore, via the moors of Salem, Pélagie and her people meet the Iroquois, weave their way through the war of independence, suffer the hatred of Boston protestants and the bitter cold of winter… before they reach their promised land.
One wonders what is most admirable in this saga: the language of Antonine Maillet, with its violent tones and colours of Acadie, or the personality of the heroine, who incarnates the courage of our far-off ancestors. One thing is sure: the author’s humour and fervour make Pélagie-la-Charrette a masterpiece that will evoke tears and laughter.

Claire
Jacques Chardonne
Novel
Les cahiers rouges
238 pages
The Author
Jacques Chardonne (real name Boutelleau), was born in Barbezieux in 1884 of a French father and an American mother and died in 1968. His first novel L’épithalame (1921) brought him fame, obtaining from the Goncourt jury the same number of votes as the book that carried off the prize. Grasset published his Les destinées sentimentales (1934-36), Vivre à madère (1953), and Claire (1931). The latter received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française.
The Book
When Jean meets Claire, he sees in this mysterious young woman the one he’s been waiting for. But absolute happiness is not to be had without a feeling of eternity, and all love carries its own end within. Chardonne gives a masterly description the demise of a passion that is haunted by the obsession of death.

Les Vraies Richesses
Jean Giono
Les Cahiers Rouges
224 pages
The Author
Jean Giono was born in Manosque (1895 – 1970). Most of his life and work is rooted in Provence. An exalted story-teller, he sings the praises of nature and a peasantry that is almost mythological. A resolute pacifist (Le Serpent d’étoiles, Triomphe de la vie), he also wrote more ‘classic’ literature (Mort d’un personnage, Le hussard sur le toit, Angelo) where the influence of Balzac and Stendhal is visible.
The Book
Les Vraies Richesses… An explicit title for a narrative that denounces the vanity of urban life and money… celebrating the joys of the sun, the earth, the hills, streams and rivers ‘that irrigate me more violently than my arteries and veins.’ The work begins with a promenade in Paris, in Belleville, a pretext for the author to reflect on his ‘roots’. Giono, a visionary and virtuoso of the sacred, immediately thinks back with ardour to the paths in Provence, the mythological peasantry, the law of bread, the wind of his dreams.
This book does not belong to a genre, it has something of all genres. An ecologist manifesto? Perhaps, but for a countryside free of politics and full of poetry.     

Naissance de l’Odyssée
Jean Giono
Les Cahiers Rouges
238 pages
The Author
Jean Giono was born in Manosque (1895 – 1970). Most of his life and work is rooted in Haute-Provence. An exalted story-teller, he sings the praises of almost mythological nature and peasantry. A determined pacifist (Le Serpent d’étoiles, Triomphe de la vie), he also wrote more ‘classic’ literature (Mort d’un personnage, Le hussard sur le toit, Angelo) where he is influenced by Balzac and Stendhal.
The Book
Not much of an Odyssey, the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, according to Giono. More likely he hurried home because he heard reports of Penelope’s infidelity. But how do you justify ten years’ absence? No bother, again according to Giono, a simple lie will do… Thus was born Ulysses. In these wonderfully poetic pages, Giono celebrates a world where, through the Gods, man and nature enter into deep communion. 

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