Jacques Chessex
L’économie du ciel
Novel
180 pages
The Author
Poet, novelist and essayist, Jacques Chessex was born in Switzerland in 1934. He is one of the finest French-speaking writers. His most recent book, Monsieur (2001), was warmly received by the press.  
The Book
“I come to a halt on the edge of the road, my father has stopped too, now he’s coming toward me, roughly grabs my arm, his hat is pulled down over his eyes, over his glasses, his coat collar is turned up, my father is pale, his blue eyes shining intensely. He is still holding me by the arm, looking around, ahead, behind. ‘There’s no one’, he says in a voice I barely recognise. ‘No one. And remember, you didn’t see me. You didn’t see me now, on this path.’ He let go my arm. He isn’t looking at me, he’s already walking off with big strides, hat pulled down, collar turned up, on that road where there’s no one.”
Why is the narrator’s father erring on that road, where he has no reason to be, in the cottony light of the autumn? How much can be paid for a secret? Do the dead demand peace?
The eight year-old child who was told to say nothing, is at last confessing, years later.  In a pitiless story, where each word penetrates the reader’s consciousness and etches with the acid of truth, Jacques Chessex tells the secret that has devoured him for so long. A novel  that tells his origins, an inquest on a father above suspicion, a reverie about birds, aspiration to purity. Whatever the genre of this book, L’Economie du ciel is a major work. 

Dominique Baudis
Il faut tuer Chateaubriand !
Novel
300 pages
The Author
Dominique Baudis is President du Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel. His works published by Grasset include Raimond d’Orient, Raimond le Cathare, and La conjuration (May, 2001).
The Book
The inspiration for this book is to be found in just a few lines of Chateaubriand’s Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, where he recounts a curious episode. He and his companions “narrowly escaped being shot” while they were gliding down the Nile in a felucca. Was this really an attempt on Chateaubriand’s life? And if so, for what reason? Starting out from an incident mentioned in passing, Dominique Baudis builds an extraordinary adventure novel, peopled with soldiers lost on the Egyptian Expedition.
The story - straightforward enough - is told chronologically, even if the events are revealed and described with more subtle devices. We follow the life of Déodat Dureau, born in 1779, son of a small shoemaker in Toulouse who finds himself abandoned and the prey of a ‘false-brother’, until the day Citizen-Colonel Dupuy, a young hero of the French revolution, takes him under his wing. He becomes Dominique Dupuy’s aide-de-camp and follows him to the port of Toulon, though he has no idea where Bonaparte will lead them. The triumph at Malta lasts only two days (Déodat loses his virginity while taking that of a nun) then on to Alexandria, where they arrive on July 1^st, 1798 with 3,500 men. Bonaparte’s triumph continues at the Pyramids, Cairo… until the hasty withdrawal in 1799. Déodat then falls into slavery, he is put up for sale and taken from one town to the next: Damas, Alep, Trebizond, Bakou... Between the Black Sea and the Caspian, he is dragged through Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia, Ingouchia, until Mehemet Ali, the newly crowned sovereign of Egypt, buys him. He names him ‘Abdallah from Toulouse’, and entrusts to him a mission : to find other lost Frenchmen and gather them under his command. Ibrahim of Tarascon, Selim of Avignon, Youssouf of Picardy…they all become the ‘Khedive’s Frenchmen’.

Five years later, when François René de Chateaubriand seeks a meeting with the Khedive, the distinguished visitor is received by Abdallah. The declarations Chateaubriand made in publicabout the Khedive’s tyranny, as well as the things he was preparing to write when he returned to France about one of Abdallah’s indiscretions, convince the sovereign to ask his sworn enemy, One-eyed Roch, to eliminate Chateaubriand…
A fascinating tale, Dominique Baudin’s books become more and more enjoyable as he allows his imagination to take the upper hand, while constantly weaving fact and fiction with talent. 

Bernard Fauconnier
Esprits de famille
Novel, 300 pages
The Author
Professor of literature, columnist with Magazine Littérraire and Témoignage Chrétien, Bernard Fauconnier has written several novels and essays, including L’être et le géant, L’Incendie de la Sainte-Victoire and Kaïros. He lives in Provence near Aix. 
The Book
Everyone knew that Jacques Sinteuil, renowned author and former ambassador to the Vatican, died at the age of ninety-three, in his home, surrounded by his loved ones. Seven years later in 1998, preparations for the celebrations to mark the centenary of his birth are underway.
Meanwhile in Paris, a notary is brutally murdered. When Alexandre Marciac, Sinteuil’s  biographer and spiritual heir, hears about the crime, he asks to meet the officer in charge of the investigation. Because, by a strange coincidence, just a few weeks before his death the victim had entrusted to him an amazing document: the last confession of the old writer, including the specific wish that the centenary celebrations should take place according to his instructions. But the story Alexandre Mauriac tells the policeman – and relives from the depths of a coma, for he is also the victim of an attempted murder some weeks later - is a very curious one.
Who was the real Jacques Sinteuil? A tranquil catholic writer? Or evil incarnate, member of a secret society and master of deception? What exactly was the mission he entrusted to Alexandre Marciac, apart from writing his biography? Why should the revelation of this ultimate confession cause such alarm at the summits of State and Church? What game are the old writer’s children playing, as they try to recover their father’s heritage?
The maze-like investigation takes us through almost a century of the life of a disturbingly influential man. Esprits de famille is also a satirical portrayal of a world haunted by the obsession of power and stratagem; a theatre where false policemen, writers who lurk in the shadows, corrupt counsellors, ecclesiastics and theologians all play their roles in a human comedy, created and dissected by the jubilant narrator for his and our greater delight.

Gérard Guegan
Soudain, l’amour
Novel, 280 pages
The Author
Gérard Guegan has written more than twenty novels, including La Rage au coeur and Les Irrégulières.
The Book
Born in the catacombs under Paris on August 18, 1944, Maxime Périer-Lagrange is the son of a communist intellectual, member of Colonel Rol’s staff. Under the name of Max Logane, he became a renowned professor of philosophy and a playwright in ’68. After a few years of clandestine activism, he withdrew to Ardeche to escape the radars of the Revolution.
At fifty-seven, white-haired and “hips completely done for, aorta in dire straits”, Max walks haltingly with the support of a stick. He comes back to Paris to meet with Meyer, an old ‘brother-in-arms’ now producer, who has given him a commission: the script for a fictional TV film about Stendhal. The two heroes are world-weary. How profound were the compromises they made when the course of history turned away from their dreams?
The aging revolutionary, blasé, macho and cynical, a self-confessed ‘dilettante’ and master of derision, meets Jenny Monfray and her sister Laura. The former, a PT teacher struck down by hemoptysis, makes him realize that he’s still capable of laying down his life for a cause… even if it has more to do with Stendhal than Marx.
Laura, a young, far-left militant, helps him cast off the burden of his memory, especially that of Carla the Chilean, a woman he loved but wrongly denounced and who died of an overdose.
On his way, Max encounters old comrades and young admirers, open-mouthed with awe or just plain stupidity: “that’s the problem with all Stendhalians, we are our best characters”.
Like a “painting within the painting”, Stendhal is thrust into Paris in the midst of the Jospin-Chirac presidential campaign in 2002, while the events of 68 are reflected in the mirror of the 21^st century. Logane is constantly rewriting his script to the tune of present events: one step back into the 19^th century, one step forward into ’68, the jig is brilliantly choreographed and livened with sparkling dialogues and lightening wit. This is an authentic novel of our times.

Homeric
Lady Love
Novel, 280 pages
The Author
A writer and journalist, Homeric is the author of Ourasi, le roi fainéant (1989), Oedipe de cheval (1992), L’aventure de Mazeppa (1993) and Le Loup mongol, which received the Prix Medicis in 1998, all published by Grasset.
The Book
Rico is ten years old when he discovers the world of horse racing through a friend met on holiday. It is a revelation. Against the advice of his worried mother and his mocking father (his parents are separated), he decides to become a jockey.
The story begins the day his mother leaves Rico at the ‘Moulin à Vent’, a newly created centre for apprentice jockey/stable lads. Rico is then fourteen, but he’d pass for ten. Tender and pensive, the new apprentice is confronted on his very first day with a hard and violent world that spares no one. A painful path of initiation awaits him, where competition with other pupils, rough encounters with the stable men and the thoroughbreds (he had never been near a horse before) make up his daily life.
Rico is at breaking point, almost ready to admit defeat – but he hangs on because he wants to show his father that his son is not a weakling, and because there’s a little filly who has eyes only for him. All this time, the youth is also discovering the erotic charge of the horse, and it’s effect on his sexuality. In the company and the close physical contact of horses, he succeeds in growing up.
When he is about to realise his dream, to don a riding habit and silk cap and fly on the back of a thoroughbred, the racing world also brings out his true character. The scheming and conspiring is not always due to the competition. He discovers how to stop a horse from winning, and keep his mouth shut. And that a bet on the horses can be a sure win.
After a four-year apprenticeship, Rico feels he’s overcome all the difficulties when José Venturi arrives, an unexpected and highly talented rival. Lady Love, Rico’s talented and whimsical filly and the love of his life, comes between them. The object of their quarrels, the horse finally brings the two young jockeys together to experience a unique adventure, that leads to a surprisingly sincere friendship in a world strewn with disillusion.
Those who appreciated Loup mongol, and who know Homeric’s reputation for all things equestrian, will not be disappointed by his latest eye-opening novel about initiation into the racing world. A wildly romantic and astonishingly violent book.

François Nourissier
De l’Académie Goncourt
Neuf histoires françaises
Collection Bibliothèque, 2048 pages
The Author
François Nourissier was for many years an editor and member of Grasset’s publishing committee. His oeuvre is rich and varied. It includes an intellectual biography, A défaut de génie (Gallimard, 2000); and a wealth of novels, particularly Un petit bourgeois. This volume brings together nine novels, superbly prefaced by the author.  
The Book
“The novels that have been left outside this collection are guilty, in my eyes of 2002, of too much psychologism. Retrospective jealousy, depression, mal à vivre, mythomania and fabulation – all sorts of problems. I prefer the veridical images of the French society I knew, hated, loved, at any rate explored with passion. A little less soul-searching and a bit more History!
These Nine French Stories  have been plucked from the comfort of the analytical novel, also called ‘à la française’, the temptation of my youth.
(…)
I hope I am not being ridiculous by confessing the sort of friendship I have discovered, that passes between my books and me. This will be my last word: friendship. I, who so often said you should never love your characters - nor love yourself too much - I look a bit of a fool.”
F.N.
Nine magnificent novels.

Pierre Philippe
L’air et la chanson
Novel, 420 pages
The Author
Pierre Philippe was born in 1931. He is a producer for TV, a script-writer, sometime song-writer and published his first novel in 1985.
The Book
In the spring of 1938, a little boy in the company of his parents was the enchanted spectator of a matinee performance in a Parisian music hall. The star was the hugely popular Marie Dubas. Also on the bill was the ‘red’ singer, Marianne Oswald, Jacques Tati and the compère Viviane Lys.
In 1998, the little boy is a man with no illusions, but he’s still in love with variety and song. His nostalgia for the music hall and his friendship with Marie Dubas’ son leads him to meet Viviane Lys. Between the two dates, there is a chronicle in seven acts that are in fact seven moments in the life of a small world, set apart from but still governed by History. The Romanesque account of twenty lives that converge in the backstage shadows (but also the turmoil of the outside world) takes us from the destiny of Marie Dubas, a Jewess whose brilliant career was destroyed by the Nazi occupation to that of Viviane Lys, who knew success then shame at the Liberation; from Marianne Oswald, exiled in New York to the singer Guy Davril; from Belinda, who reached the height of her success in the fifties to the narrator, the fascinated witness of so many romantic destinies, as the music hall slipped into its decline and the modern musical show emerged.
The changing decors, at the same time sparkling and shabby; the dressing rooms and the stage of the Européen of 1938, the Olympia of 1955; recording studios and the clammy atmosphere of a transvestite night clubs where, in 1970, traditional song is ridiculed; TV studios in occupied Paris and press agencies where webs of intrigue are woven, fame and glory fabricated; left-bank cabarets in 1946 and the fake festivities of a ‘profession’ in permanent mutation.
Imaginary beings and real characters overlap: as the pages turn, we see the jet-set of French music hall dragged into fictional intrigue imagined by the author, Damia and Sylvie Vartin, “La Grande Eugène”, Lys Gauty, Tino Rossi and Mistinguett, not forgetting the child Johnny Halliday. So many others, the unknown and forgotten names of song, who provide striking extras in this no-limit novel.

Pierre Schoendoerffer
L’Aile du papillon
Novel, 280 pages
The Author
Pierre Schoendoerffer wrote La 317^ème section (La Table Ronde,1963, Prix de l’Académie de Bretagne) ; L’adieu au Roi (Grasset,1969, Prix Interallié) ; Le Crabe-tambour (Grasset, 1976, Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française) ; Là-haut (Grasset, 1981).
The Book
The flutter of a butterfly’s wing in the land of the calm Morning provokes a hurricane on the other side of the world; a spermatozoid in the loins of a woman creates a historical cataclysm; or the breaking of a “five-dollar shackle” causes a chain of catastrophes: at the heart of this novel, the games of chance and necessity, or the tricks of fate.
The fate of three shipwrecked men.   
Roscanvel, a young and brilliant engineer and an excellent sailor, who survived shipwreck during a solitary race by hoisting himself onto an eroded tanker where he saw all the lumpenproletariat of the world rotting in their hovels, stealing the cargo despite a prevailing typhoon and ending up condemned for mutiny and murder…
The narrator, ‘an aquatic negro’, to whom his godson Roscanvel tells his story, so that he will immortalize it in a book. A former legionnaire who fought in the colonial wars, witnessed extraordinary adventures, with courage of steel; who pitches today from bottle to bottle. Now retired to a little Brittany port, his life is rhythmed by the storms that threaten the trawlers, or the death by hanging of the ladies’ hairdresser, or the local news broadcast from the three bars of the fish-auction – ‘La Misaine’, ‘Chez Jenny’, ‘Au Cap Horn’.
Joakim Proffiefke, captain of the Eleveen, a rusty old vessel that bears the name of his father who disappeared in the ice of the Eastern front in 1943. He was conceived by one of the anonymous faces among those who raped his mother, a comfort woman for the soldiers of the Red Army. Fascinating Proffiefke, a monstrous character worthy of Dante’s inferno, an animal lolling in his filth, redeemed by his exit.
Oscillating between black lyricism and disabused irony, this simple story has a metaphysical resonance (misericord, pardon, charity) and tones of the sublime (omnipresence of the poetry of the sea, in the vein of Melville’s Moby Dick). It is also a reflection on writing; does a man’s existence belong to the man who lived it or the man who writes it down? Does it exist as such, even if no one has taken the trouble to write it? But doesn’t it cease to be true, as soon as someone does?

Valérie Tong-Cuong
Ferdinand et les iconoclastes
Novel, 280 pages
The Author
Valérie Tong-Cuong leads a double life – she’s a writer and a singer with the group Quark. A novelist, her books include Big (1997) and with Grasset, Où je suis (2001).
The Book
When Ferdinand Bataille - boxer’s features, coffee-coloured skin  and well-worn raincoat - is recruited by the cosmetic giant HBMB (Health, Beauty, Mind and Body), who would have guessed he’d soon be one of the top men who make or break the world around them? But Ferdinand has a two-edged nature: there’s the implacable ‘cost-killer’, an aloof businessman who only thinks in bottom-line logic. But there’s also the vulnerable idealist who carries his weaknesses, angst, doubts about sex, love and the meaning of a life, in a weighty backpack. A workaholic, deep into science and technology, he falls asleep when his head falls on the keyboard.
He gets involved with the over-sensitive Melissa, but loses himself in Josephine’s expert and ambitious hands. A loner at the controls of his plane, who flies alone in an unclouded sky to forget that he “grew up without a childhood, married without love and survives without pleasure.”
From the summit of his pyramid, as globalization spreads all around below and profits shoot through the ceiling - increasing the phenomenon of social exclusion and it’s harvest of disturbed individuals - Ferdinand gets the feeling that this can’t go on. How is work to be reconciled with utopia, in a life of pleasant hours stolen from the employees – those flesh dolls that will soon be thrown onto the garbage heap?
A solution appears in the friendship between Ferdinand and the Iconoclasts, a group of scientists who love jazz, chatting and challenges. Will Ferdinand  become the new prophet of the end of work-as-we-know-it? And will he finish - like any self-respecting prophet – crucified?

Raphaële Vidaling
La femme quittée
Novel, 180 pages
The Author
Raphaële Vidaling was born in 1972. She holds the aggregation in French. She lives in Paris. Her first novel, Plusieurs fois par moi (September 2002) was published by Grasset.
The Book
This is the diary of a young woman, mother of a little boy, who has just broken off a love affair: 145 very short texts, titled and numbered, to be read in order, like a novel. There are few tears and less complaisance in her sorrow, rather a gentle irony to coax herself out of the image of the “woman who was left” and a fierce optimism that takes a few knocks. Extremely vulnerable  after her experience, she examines the effects of daily events - the way a security guard looks at her, a nurse’s tone of voice, the smell of a stranger - everything takes on intense meaning.
It is also the story of an active attempt to counter this setback in her life: the small ads, chance meetings, men go by, she picks herself up, generally tries to get a grip on her future. In the background, the little boy figures regularly, and with him the question: she will remain a mother, abandoned or not, but what is left of the woman?
A moving and funny book that never sags despite the structure, for a wide audience.

TOP

Non-fiction

Alexandre Adler
Au fil des jours cruels
Chronicles, 320 pages
The Author
Born in 1950, graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, honours in history and a specialist of the USSR and international geopolitics, Alexandre Adler is a journalist. He has contributed to many press publications including Le Monde and Courrier International. Today he is an editorialist with the Figaro. He wrote J’ai vu finir le monde ancien (Grasset, May 2002)  
The Book
“Like so many people, I didn’t sleep on the dreadful night of September 11^th, 2001. It’s not often, in the time of a human life, that you perceive the hard, white light of the apocalypse. In front of those images - rerun a thousand times - of the two towers collapsing, I observed, reflected. And until the morning, in front of the microphones, I shared my impressions.
Back home at dawn in a Paris that was strangely calm, already chilled by the revelation of a new world, I saw again the pictures of the Cole destroyer, and I thought of the dusty suburbs of Karachi. I meditated on the hatred of the Quaïda for modern times.
I thought it was necessary to consider our recent history. And I undertook to read all my articles written after the beginning of the nineties. I paid particular attention to more than 500 editorials I had written for Courrier International. I confronted the facts with my former hypotheses – always serious, sometimes provocative. I looked again at the Clinton years, Yeltsin, Mitterrand, Rabin. I had travelled; from Bosnia to Hong Kong, from Chile to Bengal. I met men of State, minor princes, Mafioso and dictators. I searched through these years for signs – sometimes elements of proof.
Today, when no one knows what the future holds for our world, I have decided to gather together and share this mass of facts and theories. In the thousands of pages I have written, I have chosen those that seemed most powerful. I would like to provide a compass for readers who are seeking, like me, to prepare a path for the future.”
A.Adler
After the huge success of J’ai vu finir le monde ancien (Grasset, May 2002, almost 100,000 copies sold), many will be keenly awaiting Alexandre Adler’s next book in his usual penetrating, lively style.

Dominique Bona
Il n’y a qu’un amour
Non-fiction, 440 pages
The Author
Born in Perpignan, literary critic with the Figaro, novelist and biographer, Dominique Bona’s works include Les Yeux noirs ou les vies extraordinaires des soeurs Heredia (1989) and Malika (Prix Interallié, 1992). Grasset published her novel Le Manuscrit de Port Ebène (Prix Renaudot, 1998) and Berthe Morisot, Le Secret de la femme en noir (Bourse Goncourt de la biographie, 2000).
The Book
Three women, as superb as they are capricious, face to face with a famous writer… three lives that left behind a collection of letters and notes that cover half a century with their lot of hopes and promises, lies and charm... The man was Emile Herzog, better known as André Maurois (1885-1967), a renowned writer in France and abroad. Their previously unpublished correspondence is now unveiled, drawing back the academician’s cloak to reveal the face of a seducer, a lover who feels and gives pain; a man who loves with passion and draws on his amorous acrobatics to provide matter for his books, not without adding a sprinkling of perversity. And the three women?  Here are their stories:
Geneva, 1909. Emile, the strictly brought-up heir to a textile factory meets Janine de Szymkiewicz, who’s everything he isn’t. Seventeen, the fair-haired daughter of a Polish count who died of consumption and a catholic mother, yet flighty and bohemian. It takes great patience to convince the two families – his  being secular Jews – to give their consent. He is madly in love with his Slavic wife, with her angel face, with her body that demands care and only the most expensive furs. The proof is there is those letters: tender, roguish, protective. Everywhere he goes he writes, from the factories in Elbeuf to the front line during WW1, surrounded by the wounded, concealing the massacre that she strives to imagine, gently teasing in response to her demands for more money, more flowers, new hats… “When will I ever be good?” she says, as she dances in Deauville, maybe more, in the arms of handsome Americans. They were to have three children, including two sons that he may or may not have fathered. Neurasthenic, she died at thirty-one after an abortion. Emile became André Maurois after publishing Les Silences du colonel Bramble. Broken-hearted ? But for how long ?
Paris, 1924. Born into a Proustian family, a tall dark girl, anorexic and a snob.  Simone de  Caillavet’s grandmother was Anatole France’s muse and her father the playwright Gaston de Caillavet. She was to be André Maurois’  ‘physician of the heart’. Soon the couple could be seen at all the finest social occasions. In private she was his typist, his confidante, advisor, occasionally his victim. Her close relations with the Academie française facilitated the election of the ambitious Maurois in 1936, thanks to the help of a certain Marechal Petain! The Gaullists were never to forget the fact. Simone writes a lot, letters and poems. She knows she will never be loved -  adulated - as Janine was. Until their exile in the United States, when the Maurois family was struggling for survival, she was constantly battling against her husband’s ‘sirens’.
Lima, 1947. André Maurois abandons himself to the ‘very voice of Love’, the sensual and irresistible body of a determined Peruvian admirer, Maria de Las Dolorès Garcia. They appeared openly together during a tour of conferences in South America. 20 days and 54 letters sufficed to enslave Maurois, captivated by her beauty which he sang in almost naïve letters and poems. Simone looks on, suffers, and in the end tames her Don Juan husband. She turns his final flame to her advantage, while Maurois transforms it into another book. Was Maurois faithful to just one woman? Or to an ideal image? Is there only one love?
A wonderfully Romanesque narrative about the lives of three women, travelling from Geneva to Paris, Deauville to New York, through two world wars, Dominique Bona’s faithful readership will not be disappointed.

jacques Chessex
Les Têtes
Portraits, 280 pages
The Author
Poet, novelist and essayist, Jacques Chessex was born in Switzerland in 1934. He is one of the finest French-speaking writers. His most recent book, Monsieur (2001), was warmly received by the press.  
The Book
What do we look at first in a man, if not his face? From the caves of ancient times to the physiognomist’s workshop, from drawing to sculpture, we see the representation of the face.
“No matter how much I search, it is other faces I scrutinize when I am searching to know what mine was like, forty thousand years ago - leaning, determined, obstinate - over a stone, or a bone, a face of bone for sharpening or polishing.”
What we have here is a series of depictions, not so much portraits as representations in relief. Hewed, Gothic faces that Jacques Chessex invites us to feel for ourselves. They can be grouped into categories:
The famous: French, Swiss, and from other countries. Here is François Nourissier as a ‘young, cruel dog’, Robbe-Grillet as a ‘strawberry head instead of the red wool scarf’, Jean Paulhan as an owl, Yves Berger - ‘Caesar’s legate in Narbonne, Gaulle’, Henry Miller has a wolf’s head, Maurice Chappaz is a Saracen, James Baldwin’s ugliness impresses. 
There are also anonymous heads. Perhaps they are the most meticulously investigated faces, reconstructed in the author’s memory. They may emerge from the night of the past or bright daylight. The ruminant, wrinkled face of Marie Blanc, who always says no. The rodent of ‘La Gerboise’, the eastern seducer who ferrets around the Quai d’Ouchy looking for girls.
Finally, the face of the mystic, calling for a crown of thorns, whose eyes are ‘hollowed out by the dreadful regret of being a man’: those false Christ faces that act out ecstasy with total sincerity.

Julien Dray
Comment peut-on encore être socialiste?
Non-fiction, 280 pages
The Author
Socialist M.P. for Essonne, founder and former militant of S.O.S. racism, a ‘young Turk’ in the French Socialist party, Julien Dray is one of the rapidly emerging figures of the socialist left in France. He made himself conspicuous recently by approving the security measures refused by the big party wheels. He enjoys the support of many within his party and in the world of French medias, where his powerful invective is often heard.
The Book
On April 21, 2001, Jean-Marie le Pen’s extreme right party managed against all expectations to beat the socialist party in the first poll of the French presidential elections – thus excluding the left from the second and final poll. Julien Dray believes that after that historic defeat, everything has to be reconstructed: thinking, strategy, ‘vision of the world’, ideals, alliances… The left, he says, will not regain power automatically, simply because the right has worn itself out. That power may have been lost forever last April, unless the left is prepared to accept a radical, violent and lucid self-examination. 
In the first part of this book, he suggests a critical look at the twenty years of Mitterrand’s and Jospin’s government. And he concludes, “Yes, this Parti Socialiste is dead.” A  party with no vision, representing no values, cannot go on existing. A party obsessed only by power, while employees who earn less than 1500€ a month no longer feel that they belong there, where young members are becoming scarce – that socialist party is in ruins.
In the second part of the essay, the author analyses what the “Red-pink and green” alliance (communist, socialist and ecologist) should be in his view: the necessary centre of socialist reconstruction, where there will no longer be a ‘minister’s left’ as opposed to the ‘left of the streets’. It’s not a question of repeating the Congress of Tours backwards, but of placing at the heart of a new, more social party, ecological and security issues – remarkable by their absence for the last twenty years. More social action, more conviviality, a more orderly party – that is his solution. And he illustrates and defends his viewpoint with impressive energy. This pamphlet will obviously be bitterly debated at the next party congress in May. But even now, it promises to be a charter for ‘socialist reconstruction’ that will hold all attention.

Bernard-Henri Levy
Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?
Non-fiction, 280 pages
The Book
Who has forgotten the horror of those images, broadcast by CNN in February 2002, showing the execution of the journalist Daniel Pearl? Who has failed to keep intact the feeling of nausea in front of a man’s suffering, as he protested his faith in Judaism while his executioners crouched in the shadows, preparing to cut his throat? Those images, as one would expect, remained in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s mind’s eye. He asked himself how, and why, this admirable man, a friend of the Arab-Islamic world, an exemplary reporter of the Wall Street Journal, could have been executed in the name of such fanaticism.
Shattered and haunted by the horror of that image, the author of Damnés de la guerre decided to lift the veil on this crime and carry out his own investigation. It took him quite naturally from Karachi to London, from Dubai to Kandahar, from Washington to Bombay and again to Karachi. He followed in the footsteps of victim and his killers. He found witnesses, and the location of the crime. He explored the terrorist nebula in its most unexpected ramifications. At each stage, he asked three questions: who killed Daniel Pearl? why did they kill him? what investigation did they want to prevent him from concluding?
In this narrative, each place, each stage of the investigation, each secret is analysed with implacable rigor. The intellectual, the novelist and the journalist in Bernard-Henri Lévy relayed each other in a descent into a hell where the shadows of Dostoevsky’s demons prowl. An account, an investigation, a counter investigation, a meditation on evil – he has dipped into all the genres. Bernard-Henri Lévy remains more than ever faithful to his obsessions, and his intuitions.

Georges-Louis Roux
La nuit d’Alexandre
René Char, mon ami pendant la Résistance
with previously unpublished photos
Narrative non-fiction, 160 pages
The Author
Georges-Louis Roux, born in 1922 in Céreste (Alpes de Haute-Provence), was an English  teacher and a poet. His published works include Quand le soir menace prefaced by René Char.
The Book
August, 1936. A tall, distinguished man is getting off the Avignon-Digne bus in the little village square in Céreste. He is René Char, the poet. Georges-Louis Roux, a young local man, is watching in admiration. A long and warm friendship was to begin.
“Set your anger against the world”, is the advice of the young would-be poet. During all the pre-war years, he listens, advises, breathes the ‘passion for freedom’ into his friend. That passion soon has to prove itself in hard conflict all during the war years. We see René Char become Captain Alexandre, the great Resistant who, with others, overviewed all the arms delivery operations to the region. Through the prism of life in a little village, we see an image of daily existence in France during that period of extreme violence: clandestine activity, the maquis, the traitors, but also the just women and men. (It was in Céreste that the family of Alain Krivine found refuge and protection). Behind the poet’s calm and heroic face, men said no to tyranny. The book, written by a first-hand witness, follows René Char until the Liberation. Then, unlike so many others, he refused to accept an official function, preferring to remain quite simply a great poet. There exist few close testimonies on René Char’s activities in Céreste, which makes this book especially precious.

Yves Simon
La manufacture des rêves
Auto-biographical narrative
280 pages
The Author
Novelist, composer and poet, Yves Simon has published many books with Grasset, including Le Voyageur magnifique (Prix des Libraires, 1988); La Dérive des sentiments (Prix Medicis, 1991); Le Prochain amour (1996); La voix perdue des hommes (September, 2001).   
The Book
For the first time, Yves Simon talks about himself in a book. This is the itinerary of an unusual artist, who has received recognition as a novelist and as the author/composer of songs.
“What accumulation of words, places, objects and meetings do we represent?  Who and what made us what we are, ourselves, unlike any other?”
In this self-portrait, Yves Simon sings the praises of the musicians, writers, poets, towns and countries, films and things he has loved and people he has met – all having left their mark on his life and his work. He draws up a list of his passing angels, be they outstanding or ordinary, and pays homage.
As the pages turn, we meet François Mitterrand, on a day of shared secrets; Simone Signoret, in the evening of her life; Chris Marker in a Tokyo bar; Bowie hugging Higelin and Yves Simon one pale morning, Serge Gainsbourg in a provincial town. Who could evoke these shadowy figures, angels of light, with more magic?
There are also some superb anonymous portraits, like young Lesley, Simon’s first love at the age of fifteen, revealed in a Proustian chiaroscuro; there’s a father who worked on the railway, difficult to talk to except at the very end. Throughout this generous book, he shares with us his feeling of awe – in front of the silence of the vast American deserts, or the buzz of a lap-top, companion of the author’s nights – and the solitude of a singer on the stage.
La manufacture des rêves is a self-portrait that zooms in on the soul, focuses on the give and take in each and every encounter between a man – an artist – and the world.

Jean-Michel Hirt
Les infidèles
S’aimer soi-même comme un étranger
Essay, 220 pages
Collection « Figures »
The Author
Jean-Michel Hirt was born in Paris in 1948. He still lives and works there as a psychoanalyst and professor of psychopathology in the University Paris XIII. He is qualified both in literature and psychology, the subject of the thesis for his doctorate was psychoanalysis. He has often contributed articles to the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse on literature, the psychoanalytical clinic and anthropology. Grasset has published two of his essays: Le Miroir du Prophète.  Psychanalyse et Islam (1993) and Vestiges du Dieu. Athéisme et religiosité. 
The Book
In this essay, the author examines the conditions of self love at a time when the taste for nothingness and destruction is so prevalent: how can one love oneself, in order to love others and be loved by others? How can one love, rather than hate, the stranger within the self; rather than hate oneself?
To answer these questions, he draws on the history and the works of certain 20^th century writers, who lived in conflict with their peers and resisted all classification. Their originality lies in a writing style that belongs to no specific literary genre. Distancing themselves voluntarily from their native lands or the environment of their birth, they tricked fate and escaped the destiny life had mapped out for them. They are Thomas Edward Laurence, alias Laurence of Arabia; Louis Massignon, the Islamo-Christian orientalist; Victor Segalen, orientalised ‘exote’ (a term he invented, meaning the eternal and ideal traveller, permanently foreign and constantly xenophile); and Simone Weil, the atheist mystic. All had a special relationship with exile, excess and the religious phenomena. How did they enrich their mother tongue by drawing on other languages, and dedicate their lives to meeting the foreigner, in an assortment of situations marked by wars and the genocides of the 20^th century?
All of them developed, ‘in a time of sorrow’, strategies of self-love and love for others by being unfaithful to the future that social affiliation or convention reserved, and refusing to sacrifice others to their personal or national interests. They all sought to build their own destiny thanks to the meeting with a culture other than their own; each thus converging toward their own secret. If an infidel’s soul is indeed their common trait, each assumed the rupture and the joy it conveys in their flesh and in their psyche.
“The infidel,” writes Jean-Michel Hirt, “is a desiring man who is seeking a dimension within himself that can only be revealed by the foreign host.”

Jean-Luc Marion
Le phénomène érotique
Six méditations sur l’amour
Essay, 280 pages
Collection « Figures »
The Author
Jean-Luc Marion published L’idole et la distance in 1977 with Grasset, where the ‘New Philosophers’ were present. Today, one of the most striking philosophers of his generation, he has come back to Grasset with a project that has been maturing since those early years. A specialist of Descartes and the history of modern philosophy, a phenomenologist, Jean-Luc Marion teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne and the University of Chicago. He received the Grand Prix de philosophie de L’Académie française in 1992.
The Book
“Love is something we talk about endlessly, often experiment; but we understand nothing about it, or almost. The proof is that we can no longer give the word one meaning and we stretch it to cover opposites: eros and agape, animal pleasure and abstract charity, pornography and sentimentalism. Love in the end becomes absurd or insignificant. The reason is that philosophy has persuaded us to interpret love starting out from our own consciousness, (cogito), as a simple variant, an irrational derivative, of clear thought. Thus it falls to the rank of ‘passion’: unhealthy, irrational, always suspect.
Here, this verdict is refuted. Love touches us much more originally, more deeply. It does not derive from the ego, but precedes it and presents the ego to itself. Well before the philosopher’s question,  ‘to be or not to be’, or the academic’s ‘to know with certainty or not to know’, another question haunts me: ‘Am I loved? Is there someone to love me?’. Without the answer to that question, all beings and all certainties become vain issues, that ask ‘What’s the point?’. I then find myself in a state of erotic reduction.
One must try to describe the facets of the consciousness in this original situation: the absolute necessity to be loved, and my radical impossibility to hate myself; my unilateral advance in the role of lover; the vows between lovers from which emerges the erotic phenomenon, unique yet common; the exchange wherein each offers to the other eroticised flesh, which one does not possess but receives in return; the endless act, yet always concluded, where one enters into the other without resistance; the objective contradiction between the short term orgasm and the long term promises, which makes jealousy reputable and perversion reasonable; finally, the eternal wait for a third party and witness, who leaves and anticipates.
Love, in all these cases, can only be spoken and lived according to one unique meaning. The same for everyone, God included. For love unfolds as logically as the most rigorous concept. It precedes everything and everything depends on it – the philosopher’s reasons, the knowledge of the erudite and the things of the world. Without it, everything is, but everything is vain. With it, everything becomes possible, even – especially – the impossible.
J-L.M.

Pierre Moscovici
Après le désastre
Essay, 280 pages
The Author
Former minister and co-director of Lionel Jospin’s presidential election campaign, Pierre Moscovici was defeated in the last general election.
The Book
This is an exercise in introspection as much as a political essay; a letter to the absent loser and an analysis of his defeat; a testimony for himself and for others. And a face to face with the inexplicable: the defeat of Lionel Jospin, the undoing of the ‘pluralist left’, after five years of praiseworthy government.
Of all the government ministers, none was closer to Jospin than Pierre Moscovici, the ‘little brother’ of France’s socialist leader, and his pupil in political rationale. But Moscovici was also a friend, an observer, trembling with concentration and contained affection… Jospin’s defeat was also his, the end of the first chapter of a political life that began in 1984 with Lionel, who was then only the general secretary of the socialist party.
After reflection about his future, after deciding to continue in politics, ‘Mosco’ stopped long enough to write this book. Throughout, he has tried to be fair and truthful. Refusing easy answers and nostalgia, avoiding complaisance and self-apology, he looks over the Jospin years, describes the slow passing from the left’s recovery of dignity to the confinement in governmental satisfaction; the transformation of a political dynamic into a downhill slide that lead to disaster; the strategic error of modifying the elections calendar; the hesitations of ‘the man who didn’t want to be President’; Jospin’s traumatism – as soon as the reserved and proud militant was revealed by his biographers, Jospin feared the French would never see him again in the same way. 
He also looks at the slow tragedy of the left, how they lost their audacity without even realising… Jospin, no longer a ‘Jospinist’, ended up by losing and all the forces of the left with him. And Moscovici, persevering with the history of the left, fighting one by one what he calls simplistic tendencies (pendulum swings to the extreme left, ostentatious modernism, destruction of the idol) affirms his dignity by remaining faithful. And by adhering to the same principles, to be, in his turn, an heir to the future.

Daniel Tanguay
Leo Strauss
Une biographie intellectuelle
Collège de philosophie
Essay, 320pages
The Author
Daniel Tanguay teaches philosophy at the University of Ottawa.
The Book
Daniel Tanguay has provided us with a long awaited, ambitious reconstruction of the thinking of that immense philosopher and political historian, Léo Strauss (1899-1973). Revealing the complexity of his fundamental themes (natural law, critique of political modernity, positivism and historicism) and the dynamics of the shift it operates, Tanguay retraces the itinerary of a rigorous mind, whose thinking grew progressively stronger in the patient and determined confrontation with major trends of political philosophy.
Working closely on the writings of Léo Strauss, Tanguay succeeds in laying bare, within the classic reading that Strauss gave of Spinoza, Farabi or Hobbes, the elements that constitute the individual voice of the historian-philosopher. Conferring its full signification  to Strauss’ position on political Zionism, he shows how, between philosophy and a religion of revelation – between Athens and Jerusalem - an original endeavour is made, whose aim is to try to articulate the ‘two obsessions’ of Strauss: God and politics.

Jacques Chessex
L’ogre
Les cahiers rouges,
Novel, 240 pages
Prix Goncourt 1973
Jean Calmet is pushing forty. He teaches Latin in Lausanne. We see him for the first time on the day of his father’s funeral, the late Doctor Calmet, at the town crematorium. It is morning. The sun is shining on the lake. Will this death free Jean Calmet? Or, on the contrary, will the dead man’s shadow follow him forever?
Doctor Calmet was a larger-than-life character: a tyrant in his family, a tower of strength, too fond of white wine and the servant girls at the inn, occasionally taking advantage of the twenty year-old girl that his son, still a teenager, clumsily and tenderly desired, never daring to treat her as she wanted: like a girl. At all times, in all places, Jean Calmet felt his father’s watchful eyes. The father’s enormous appetite for life made his son’s scruples and insipidity seem even more contemptible. And now that his father is dead, his power has mysteriously multiplied, deepened, become obsessive…

Jean Giono
Mort d’un personnage
Novel, Les Cahiers Rouges
196 pages
When the grand old lady of Provence, Pauline de Théus, arrives on the scene, she intrigues all those who meet her. But her grandson Angelo more than anyone else falls under the spell of this woman with a generous past, who now lives in a home for the blind in Marseilles. The years go by, and Pauline is close to death when Angelo sees her again, but she has lost nothing of her prestige and grandeur.
An uncomplicated and moving story of love between a child and an old lady, Mort d’un personage is perhaps the most classic, unfussy and unusual of Jean Giono’s novels.
Panaït Istrati
Les chardons du Baragan
Novel, Les Cahiers Rouges
210 pages
An initiatory novel that is also an extraordinarily powerful picaresque tale, Les Chardons du Baragan lets the reader glimpse, through the eyes of a child forced by poverty into a life of vagabondage, the living conditions of ordinary country people in Romania just before the bloody uprising of 1907. Combining lyricism and realism, Panaït Istrati describes with talent a world haunted by tradition and legend, pushed beyond the limits into bitterness and resignation by  insufferable oppression.

André Maurois
Les silences du Colonel Bramble
Novel, Les Cahiers Rouges
182 pages
Les Silences du Colonel Bramble is directly inspired from the author’s experience when he served as a liaison agent for the British army during WW1. So we meet the pontificating Major Parker, the paradoxical and spiritual Doctor O’Grady, the courageous and naïve Reverend MacIvor…. They all do a great deal of talking, about philosophy, history, the weather and the war. In this little clique of officers and gentleman who brush shoulders with death - yet so gifted for life - only Colonel Bramble is silent, listening to waltzes on his gramophone, his stomach occasionally contributing to his companions’ conversation with a loud  rumble.
Maurois has really got under the skin of these Englishmen, steeped in honour and humanity. We can feel he admires them, even more, he loves them. The spiritual fantasy of his characters marries perfectly with the charmingly ironic tone he has adopted. Extremely elegant, and very funny.

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