A little Marseillais raised in Paris, son and nephew of a communist, a communist himself who quickly became an “irregular”, Gérard Guégan read everything he knew, made fun of everything, recounts his beginnings in literature, recounts an improbable meeting with Jean Paulhan, the great man of the NRF, that he advises him: “ don’t imitate than what you think you hate“. He thought he was Rimbaud, pretending his name was Arthur. He was the publisher of Champ Libre then Le Sagittaire, the author of “La Rage au Coeur”, a formidable provocative novel which made him known in 1974, then the maverick author of a host of iconoclastic works. This “song of books” is a bit like Guégan before Guégan, anti-memories in its own way, with jerky fragments, short chapters, brief sequences. He recounts his meetings with Louis Nucera, Alphonse Boudard, Michel Mohrt (of whom he draws a mischievous portrait), Charles Bukowski, Jean Giono, Philippe Sollers. His friends, his companions in spirit or in arms, to whom, among others, the book is dedicated, are named Hervé Prudhon, Jean-Pierre Enard, Bernard Frank or Armand Robin. Brief, but dense, ordered in appearance, but nicely all-encompassing, often disrespectful, always fascinating, this is the testimony of a mischievous and octogenarian kid who denies nothing of what he was.
The Song of Books by Gérard Guégan (Grasset, 140 pages, €16).
