With a sixth and final part of “The Poetic Life”, Jean Rouaud takes us back to the time of the publication of his very first novel, The fields of honor. A book which, to everyone’s surprise, earned him the Goncourt Prize in 1990 and a “brutal transition from shadow to light”, while he was a newsagent in Paris – “At the bottom of the ladder social. Last rung. » He carries in Autumn comedy, a dense story with sentences of beautiful complexity, a fine attention to a few beings who crossed his path, as well as to the depths of History. Shedding light with a certain detachment on the context of the end of his “first life”, he provides in passing, without ever naming him, an uncompromising portrait of his first publisher, Jérôme Lindon (1925-2001), the famous boss of Éditions de Midnight. And as if to make the scent of nostalgia more heady, Jean Rouaud evokes a time, now distant, when there was a “fundamental incompatibility between the value of a book and its success”.
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