7 new essays to put under the tree

For some time now, the young intellectual guard has been dusting off the form of the essay to get out of
a bit of a high-sounding academicism and produces texts that read like novels. With like
always, in the line of sight, the blurring between reality and fiction.

1 A musical epic: Barbès Bluesby Hajer Ben Boubaker

Hajer Ben Boubaker dynamites the conventional form of the essay and the often heavy tone of research books devoted to immigration to offer us one of the best books of the fall, an unclassifiable object that we devour like a choral novel. The bet of this child from Belleville, Barbès and Goutte-d’or? Retracing the history of neighborhoods marked by immigration, which were bastions of avant-garde struggles, while drawing on an original thread, that of Arab music, which she made her preferred research subject.

From the legendary Sauviat record store where we could hear Slimane Azem, the first Algerian artist to receive a gold disc at the success story Tati sung by the 113, passing through the Tam-Tam cabaret, we stroll alongside this historian of a new genre, in the streets of a Paris which was built to the rhythm of the communities she welcomed.

2 A black series: Burned: the monster’s childrenof Philippe Pujol

Ten years ago, Marseille journalist Philippe Pujol won the Albert Londres prize for a series of articles devoted to drug trafficking in the northern districts of Marseille. Since then, he has tirelessly continued his investigation through a fascinating literary enterprise. A trilogy like a meticulous and sprawling x-ray of this city within the city, its codes and its power games. If The monster factory (2016), a sort of overview of these unique neighborhoods, and The fall of the monster (2019), an analysis of the political-mafia system that reigns there, was based on numerous figures and statistics, this third opus, The monster’s childrenis above all thought of as an immersive story. Philippe Pujol reconnects with the field investigation and the novel of reality which provide all the salt of his sharp pen.

He goes to meet “kids”these children who wander, survive or, even more serious, participate in one way or another in trafficking of all kinds which plagues the cities. A story like a cry of warning to no longer turn a blind eye to the fate of this sacrificed youth. An impressive investigation which, through its clinical precision and taste for storytelling, recalls the work of David Simon in Baltimore, which subsequently became a cult series, perhaps the most acclaimed on the small screen, The Wire.

3 A pop philosophy: Ultra violetby Margaux Cassan

With the publication this fall ofUltra violeta tasty philosophy of tanning, Margaux Cassan continued her chair of philosophy initiated last year with Living nakedin which she questioned, through the subject of naturism, our relationship to nudity. At only 27 years old, she intends to shake up Dad’s philosophy in the themes she addresses, but also in the forms she allows herself. To erudite, not to say vaporous, convolutions, she prefers hybrid essays mixing intimate investigation, social reflection and pop references.

From an image, that of his mother, Icarus of modern times and addict in the last degree of sun, who, barely recovered from skin cancer, flies to Africa to find her deckchair, she rushes on the heels of human passions linked to the cult of Helios. By using mythological and religious references, and by reflecting on social issues, she demonstrates to what extent tanning is much more than an aesthetic motive. It is first of all a means of expressing one’s freedom, of having one’s body as one wishes, of proclaiming one’s right to be different. But above all it is the quest for another self, more beautiful, healthier, richer too, and therefore more desirable. A dialectic of pleasing and proof symbolized by those she calls the “Rastignac of the sun”a boys club from another time led by Jacques Séguéla, Jack Lang and even Jean d’Ormesson, who, with their exaggerated tans, sent a signal of belonging to the intellectual and social elite.

But above all the book tells how the dynamic has been reversed today. How this tanorexic age gradually gave way to the kingdom of shadows. The sun no longer has good press and each of its rays brings global warming or a danger from which we must protect ourselves. By refusing this quest for tanned skin, we are sweeping away an entire era, embodied by May 1968 and its call to enjoy without hindrance and especially by the 1980s and their incitement to Sea, Sex & Sun. A time of carefree and hedonistic times when simply lying in the sun was an activity. How far away the summer holidays seem.

4 An impossible investigation: The third lifeby Fabrice Arfi

Just a few months after being put in the spotlight by the success of the Canal+ series Of money and bloodtaken from one of his books, the investigative journalist of Médiapart brings out a new investigation into the mazes of power. Known for his numerous revelations on the Woerth-Bettencourt affair, the Karachi affair, the Sarkozy-Gaddafi affair or the Cahuzac affair, this time he plunges further into the past to unearth a very strange espionage affair at the heart of the Cold War.

The third lifeit is first of all a family fresco retracing the history of the Benedettos, an Italian lineage settled in France, in Villeurbanne, and trapped in the whirlwind of the First World War before emigrating to Romania. But the real story, the one full of secrets and mysteries, begins in 1969, when a Romanian industrial designer named Vincenzo Benedetto arrived with his wife in the Lyon region to find a part of his family that he did not know. To escape, above all, the regime of the “Genius of the Carpathians”, Ceausescu. Eleven years later, the man was arrested by French counter-espionage, accused of being an agent of the Romanian secret services, imprisoned before being strangely released and disappearing into the wild.

Who really was this man? Did he benefit from complicity at the highest level of the State and in particular at the heart of the Mitterrand government? To answer this question, we had to work the old-fashioned way. Searching archives, going to Romania, going door to door, filling in notebooks, hoping to find a thread to pull. A pure treat of literary investigation.

5 An examination of conscience: Monsters, separating the work from the artist?of Claire Dederer,

This is a delightfully confusing book. From the point of view of form, already, because in France we have little opportunity to read these American-style essays, mixing university erudition, pop references and self-analysis. But from a substantive point of view too, since Claire Dederer, renowned journalist, film critic and avid reader, poses head-on the question of “the separation of man and artist” by appealing to her own feelings and telling of the perpetual confrontation between our personal tastes and the moral demands of society.

She is a great admirer of Roman Polanski’s cinema. She knows him like the back of her hand and loves the films of a man who “drugged and sodomized 13-year-old Samantha Gailey. There you have it, the facts are irreconcilable”. How to deal with this? Is it wrong to continue to appreciate the works of men who have committed unforgivable acts? By diving deep into one’s own inner psyche, by meeting fellow critics, friends or evoking family memories, but above all by multiplying the parallels – with Wagner, Hemingway, Nabokov or even JK Rowling and Michael Jackson – , Claire Dederer attempts to answer the question by providing intimate insight into a debate that unleashes passions. Disturbing.

A cross-portrait of artists: Dickens & Princede Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby is the most music-loving of writers. All you have to do is reread High fidelitya cult novel for an entire generation – adapted for the cinema by Stephen Frears and in series with Zoë Kravitz, a soul, pop, rock anthology, disguised as a romantic comedy –, to see it.

Thirty years later, he delivers a new declaration of love for music with a strange literary object. His bet: to encounter the dazzling and tragic destiny of his supreme idol, « His Purple Majesty » Prince, with the immortal work of the writer who saved his adolescence and precipitated his vocation, the English national novelist Charles Dickens. By rhyming Purple Rain et Oliver Twistby exploring the throes of creation, the British writer reveals himself as rarely and pays a moving tribute to the geniuses whose works change lives.

Breathtaking non-fiction: The art thiefby Michael Finkel

Long a distinguished journalist for the New York Times before being accused of having invented the character of one of his reports – a perfect illustration of the porous border which now exists between the journalist and the novelist – Michael Finkel took his revenge by becoming in recent years one of the the most exciting writers of non-fiction and literary reporting. One of his specialties: sticking to the coattails of an extraordinary personality to dissect him from every angle. After jumping into The last hermit following in the footsteps of Christopher Thomas Knight, a man who decided to live as a hermit in a forest in Maine for 27 years after the Chernobyl disaster, he has found a new target of choice.

“The Arsène Lupine of museums”this is how we nicknamed Stéphane Breitwieser, the very real protagonist of the art thiefnew book by Michael Finkel. Between 1995 and 2002, the Alsatian, son of the painter Robert Breitwieser, is said to have stolen more than 200 works of art across Europe, in particular Flemish works from the 16th century, with the sole weapon of his nerve, his blood -cold and his meticulous observation of museum surveillance systems.

With his long coat and his Swiss army knife, it only took him a second to grab a canvas. Thanks to long investigative work, but above all by meeting the perpetrator on several occasions, Michael Finkel tells the extraordinary story of a thief who stole not to resell, but to keep in his home, purely aesthetic taste. A strange man who justifies his crimes with an overflowing love for art.