a literary lunch with Danny Laferrière, record attendance

The 34th edition of the Étonnants Voyageurs Literature and Cinema Festival welcomes this year nearly 150 artists from more than thirty countries. Quebec is the guest of honor.

This Saturday, May 18, the sun fails to break through the clouds in Saint-Malo. Behind Danny Laferrière and the hosts of the literary café, the sky looks gray and merges with the sea. More than two hundred people crowded onto the first floor of the Palais du Grand large to attend this first meeting. “Far too many gray hairs and white horses”, laments Gwenaelle, a retired French teacher. “Young people don’t know Maryse Condé and are very little interested in books,” she thinks she knows.

Dany Laferrière, writer of Haitian origin, paid a vibrant tribute to his lifelong friend Maryse Condé, who died on April 2 at the age of 90. The author ofA certain art of living was able to quickly conquer the audience by multiplying the humorous features. “I was in a hotel in New York, I saw myself in the ceiling, there were mirrors everywhere. I didn’t realize until later that I was in a brothel. Fortunately, Maryse invited me to her house. her then”, he confides to a ready audience. Danny Laferrière, currently very busy with the release of three books, is an astonishing traveler who left his native country for Canada, before sharing his life between Montreal and Paris.

The workshops and meetings are sold out, to the great dismay of some visitors who took care to arrive early. “The attendance is exceptional”, recognizes a volunteer. Will last year’s record, 45,000 visitors, be broken? The large auditorium is stormed by the public for the exceptional meeting with the Polish poet Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize for Literature 2018. Her texts are read on stage by the actress Ariane Ascaride.

For three days, the Festival celebrates encounters and otherness. Quebec literature is in the spotlight thanks to a series of events. The artists will go directly to meet the public across the city. “We thank Quebec for the Literary Intervention Brigades”, enthuses Jean-Michel Le Boulanger, president of the Festival. These brigades will carry the good word, poetry and literature, to different places in Saint-Malo. Jean-Michel Boulanger also underlines the strongly symbolic presence of Ukrainian writers. Objective : “Find the human in us while the bombs rain in Gaza, the war continues in Ukraine.”

The Amazing Travelers is also cinema. Around fifty films, mainly documentaries, are on the program. A component that the Festival intends to enrich from year to year. Another challenge: how to rejuvenate and diversify the audience? The organizers have decided to make entry to the Book Fair free. A first step.