Brive's book fair, chapter 1: Gaillardes reunion<

By Benjamin Puech published, updated

The great meeting dedicated to literature returns after a year of absence with, as a fulfilled president, the novelist Didier Decoin.Friday, Edouard Philippe or Mohamed Mbougar Sarr signed in turn.

Yes, the "Republic of Letters" is a democracy.On the Paris-Brive private train, which leaves early Friday at the Lyon station, there is neither first nor second class.It is a great green class where we meet political scientists in costume and varnished shoes, long hair publishers, hats novels (why do the authors wear them so often?), Journalists excited by the work toComing and faces curious to discover the great mass of the book, which has been held in Corrèze since 1973. She had not taken place last year, Covid requires.

Reading help with his Goncourt, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr triggers a rush in the bookstores of Dakar

Brive without its chartered train for Parisian feathers and publishers?Amélie Nothomb without Champagne.Jean-Loup Chiflet without ribbed velvet.The ancients had nicknamed it "cholesterol train" to insist on the right treatment on board.This Friday, one or the other of the eighteen young people from the Savignac hotel management school, nice and mutineers, serves foie gras and rocamadour.But this title, let's say it, now seems a little exaggerated.In clubs 4, we read more than you drink.Vegan baskets have multiplied.The old plum has disappeared from the festivities."It has settled down," confirms Didier Decoin, president of this 39th edition.Nostalgia lives certain wagons.A venerable poet regrets "the death of French literary criticism", a writer-Marin Torpille "contemporary well-thought".

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In the Georges-Brassens hall, located in the center of the city, the crowd Trépigne.And jump on Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, who must sign in Tours de Bras.One wonders if the author of the most secret memory of men will have the strength to hold his fork, in the evening, at the black truffle or at Francis, two institutions of the Gaillarde city."We always follow Goncourt on the news," enthuses in the tail Frédérique, a 60 -year -old Limougeaude, who buys each year the novel crowned with Drouant.

Confidences of Édouard Philippe

Go through Jean-François Kahn, transparent glasses on his nose, black sneakers on the feet. He is dashing. Éric Fottorino, former president of the demonstration, explains that he "needed to write to exist". Edouard Philippe would not think him. He presented in the afternoon, in front of a very sparse audience, his fourth book (the third he co-wrote with Gilles Boyer, his former adviser now European deputy): impressions and clear lines at J.-C. Lattès. On the eve of a political Saturday (François Hollande and Anne Hidalgo will be there), the former Prime Minister detailed his memories of the exercise of power. He tells, among other things, the agonizing procrastination which preceded the sending of twenty firefighters to save Notre-Dame, a particularly dangerous mission. "I was not clever," he says. Before continuing with a pleading in favor of moderation and honesty in public debate: "And if we decided, instead of always commenting on the news - which has become a national sport - to speak when we has something to say? "

See also - with "Open 1", Éric Fottorino wants to slow down the pace of info channels (January 27, 2019)

Here, visitors slide between the stands as carried in a slow current.They arise to identify a face that is not foreign to them, leave, stop a little further.Return a tour.The crowd attracts the crowd."People are approaching by waves," explains François-Henri Désrable, the latest Grand Prix of the novel by the French Academy.We sign for a quarter of an hour, then there is a void. ”Some tables, like those of Agnès Martin-Lugand or Olivier Norek, do not know these thinnings.

When you ask a visitor the reason for their presence, you often get answered: "I have come from the start".Tradition, that's all.President Decoin insists, it is an "fair", in the ancient sense of the term: festive (the pressure of the start of the literary school fades for the authors) and popular.Cafouilleux, also sometimes.And who plays the role of the acrobats, these entertainrs who jumped from tables to tables in the Middle Ages?To find out, you have to join a gently old -fashioned dancing: at night, the cheeks of writers get down to Cardinal.