La Presse in Paris | The French are there

(Paris) The sun shone through the immense glass walls of the ephemeral Grand Palais on Friday, where we could see on the Champ-de-Mars the thousands of participants in the Great Dictation of the Games, bringing together spelling athletes, before Paris is taken by storm by the athletes of the Olympic Games. Near the Eiffel Tower, there is a lot of work, we feel that it is coming. And all the French people I know tell me they’re going to leave during the Olympics.

But the time has now come for letters, and that doesn’t scare anyone away, it seems.

I narrowly missed Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the Paris Book Festival, which was not announced to avoid chaos, even if it caused inevitable disruptions, due to presidential security. But when I arrived, it looked like all book fairs, and I don’t say that in a jaded way, because it’s the kind of event that brings together a people with whom I identify: those who read.

It’s mild and humid in Paris these days, and there is no air conditioning in the short-lived Grand Palais. I was sweating two minutes before leading a discussion in a packed room. I don’t really know if it was nervousness in front of this crowd, the lack of ventilation or symptoms of perimenopause, but I was confirmed that it was a public success in advance for this discussion with Kim Thúy and Éric Chacour, whom I already knew, and Hemley Boum, a novelist of Cameroonian origin whom I have just discovered.

I have hosted meetings at the Montreal Book Fair several times, except that it was my first time in front of a French audience, and I was stressed.

How can I explain to him with my accent that Kim Thúy is a real star in Quebec, who told with so much delicacy in Ru his arrival with his family in the small town of Granby after fleeing Vietnam? That the monster craze around Éric Chacour is reminiscent of that for Kim Thúy?

In any case, it went like a charm, because Thúy, Chacour and Boum formed a great trio, even if they had never met. The theme of exile had been imposed on me in advance, but we drifted on to love, because in my opinion it is an even more important subject of novels Ru, What I know about you And The fisherman’s dream.

I was surprised to see many people buy the three books to have them signed by the authors. You should see the lines at Chacour’s table, it doesn’t stop, even though it’s been more than a year since his novel was published, picking up awards along the way. A reader explained to him that she had missed her metro station, too immersed in her reading. Others are almost in tears in front of him.

At the Pavilion of Honor dedicated to Quebec, it was Sabrine Zergit, a young reader of Patrick Senécal, who wanted to buy his latest book, Civilized, to have it signed. She discovered the writer through her brother, and when I ask her if she reads other Quebec books, she names a few titles from the Forbidden Tales series from AdA editions.

My day started by leafing through The Writers’ Liberation, under the direction of Hervé Le Tellier and Dany Laferrière. In the special notebook “Vive le Québec livre”, we have texts by Michel Jean, Andrée A. Michaud, Audrée Wilhelmy, Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba, Annie Lafleur, Alain Farah, Larry Tremblay, Éric Chacour and Martine Delvaux, on subjects such as indigenous homelessness, the environment, ecoanxiety, artificial intelligence, migrants or Quebecers’ vision of France. I felt spoiled reading this while sipping coffee on a terrace in the 20^e borough, while telling me that we should have special issues written by writers in our own newspapers much more often.

It comes a bit from Martine Delvaux, the “e” added in red to the word writer on the front page, because in her text, she dreams of an issue entirely written by women. Release asked him for another text in reaction to very Parisian news: the Legion of Honor awarded to Thierry Ardisson by Emmanuel Macron, a reward which is in the crosshairs of another writer, Christine Angot. Delvaux and Angot make quite a pair, I think.

Martine Delvaux’s text is entitled “Be beautiful and don’t speak with that accent”.

Read the text by Martine Delvaux (subscription required)

One of the aspects of the attraction for Quebec literature at the moment lies in feminism, many people here have told me that. Young French women, as elsewhere, are looking for texts committed to this, while a new #metoo wave is shaking the French artistic world in a sort of time difference, and Quebec has plenty to provide them. At the same time, I learned through an alert on my iPhone that Emmanuelle Pierrot had just won the College Literary Prize for her first novel. The version that interests no one. It’s actually a version that interests a lot more people than we think.

At the end of this rather busy first day of the Paris Book Festival, I asked Sarah-Luna Aboulfath, a young cashier at the Pavillon du Québec, which books made her drawer resonate the most. Spontaneous response: poetry. That of Hélène Dorion and Denise Desautels. Also Chrystine Brouillet and Qimmik by Michel Jean.

Book fairs are also sales, even if that doesn’t sound very poetic. In fact, you don’t hit the jackpot during a show, it’s the meetings that propel sales in the long term. And it’s funny, because there was talk of money during the last discussion of the day between Alain Farah and Dany Laferrière entitled “A thousand secrets for a certain art of living”, which united their titles A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers And A certain art of living. Laferrière recalled that in his youth, when he was pulling the devil by the tail, he calculated the price of a book by the number of meals it was worth. A new Bukowski meant eight meals for him. “I remember the first book I bought without reading it right away, because it was the beginning of the bourgeoisie,” he explained to Farah.

This is what every writer, Quebecois or not, should think about when you come to ask for a dedication.

As for me, I will come back to you on Monday, for an assessment of this Quebec literary spring in Paris, which I find more flowery than I expected.