Toulouse: the Paper and Book of Job Meetings celebrate their tenth anniversary

Job’s Paper and Book Meetings (RPL) are celebrating their 10th anniversary. Nestled since their beginnings in the former Job paper factory transformed into a municipal cultural space, these new meetings on the theme “Living Waters” combine during the week debates, exchanges around paper, professional day “Towards an ecology of paper » and cinema on Friday. Saturday workshops, early childhood area and creative space. This Sunday, the book fair is taking place with publisher stands and “Têtes à têtes” with four authors. Water, so essential to life, which man mistreats, pollutes and domesticates, is at the center of discussions with Iris Dion, co-author of the comic strip “Climate horizons, meeting with 9 scientists from the IPCC” (Glénat), Florence Thinard and Caroline Carissoni who signed “Eaux” (Plume de Carotte-Terre vivant), an encyclopedic sum, as well as the novelist Clara Arnaud, with The Wild Chameau as guardian angel bookseller.

“There is no such thing as clean energy production”

Clara Arnaud became known to the general public in 2023 with her novel “And you will pass like crazy winds” (Actes Sud) which takes as a setting the Ariège Pyrenees and the relationship made of hatred, fascination and tensions, between shepherds , breeders and bears. This great traveler has also chosen to settle there. The naturalist writer comes to present her previous novel, published in 2021, “The Vertical of the River”, the story of which takes place in Central America, where the author lived for four years, against a backdrop of poverty, corruption and drug trafficking. In the natural setting marked by sumptuous mountains and a hitherto untouched river, Clara Arnaud depicts the epic construction of a hydroelectric dam, the upheavals taking place in local communities and the environment, the opposition that arises. out of breath in the face of the project which advances like a bulldozer… No Manichaeism or idealization but nuanced portraits such as that of the almost mystical engineer, dedicated body and soul to his project, that of a corrupting mayor and ambitious, those of three sisters in the antipodes whose mother was murdered because she fought against the dam, an assumed allusion to the murder of Honduran whistleblower and environmentalist Berta Cáceres killed in Honduras in 2016.

« Hydroelectricity is sold to us as so-called renewable energy, but there is no such thing as clean energy production. I don’t write essays but novels so that readers ask themselves the questions, even if it means they are lost when they close the book. » Open questions that readers will be able to ask Clara Arnaud directly on Sunday afternoon.