“A library, according to the poet and essayist Thomas Mainguy, can recall a cellar. One finds there, among the works of current consumption, books of guard which, one would say, guess our future thirsts. The author unpacks part of his library in Admirable twilightsa collection of twelve lively, decanted and lovingly crafted obituaries — half of which appeared in the journal Backlight. From Marie Uguay to Jules Supervielle, from Louis-René Des Forêts to Marguerite Yourcenar, via Catherine Pozzi, Robert Walser or WG Sebald (who wrote in the shed of his garden and whose work “is assimilated to the memory of an unforgettable hike”), it is under the sign of complicity that we visit these dead. And if sometimes a single reader is enough to bring a work back to life, Thomas Mainguy tells us, it also seems that certain twilights can take on the color of dawn. Exercises of admiration through which is embodied, for our greatest happiness, a lofty idea of literature. Contagious.
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