Monsieur Nostalgie wanders between daydreams and literary memories in these uncertain days which bridge the gap between Christmas and New Year. He gives us some reading ideas to annihilate time…
It feels like the end of summer, when the beachgoers pack up their seaside gear and the children settle their sand loves. This in-between end-of-year holiday season leaves an impression of great indecision and sometimes moral despondency. It’s time for assessments and recovery plans. We scribble on a spiral notebook the tiny victories that will never make us forget the defeats. Man builds himself in failure, he makes it his bed. Ephemeral and fragile successes are just there to make us wait. They are decoys. We would like to project ourselves but the very idea of using this progressive verb imbued with votive demagoguery disgusts us. We are in a state of waiting. We therefore say goodbye to this year 2024 without regret as Giscard did in his televised speech on December 31 with the vintage 1974 and a pathological emphasis.
All Western philosophy is based on this paradox: illusions of a lost world and weariness of a chaotic future. This year which is ending in fog and government uncertainties, we have read, seen, written more than is reasonable, despite this permanent gesticulation, a taste of unfinished business takes hold of the Men who remain on their guard. In just three days, we will land in 2025 in a country more fragmented than ever; this time, there will be no more Olympics or resurrection of Notre-Dame to cajole us. The Disco exhibition at the Philharmonie de Paris will only open its doors on Valentine’s Day. The election of Miss France having been completed, the next stage of our national barnum is planned for April with the Paris-Roubaix and at the end of May in the boxes of Roland-Garros. Sporting events are the last markers of our memory. We no longer remember the name of this Prime Minister, what was his name, the ceremonious old gentleman with white hair, athletic appearance, and then this other, young and talkative, who jumped from gueret to gueret, from ‘a set at an agricultural event, like Jean-Paul Belmondo in a Lautner comedy, his name escapes me.
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Only the champions, heralds of the track, endure in national history. The others disappear from the annals of the Republic. France is exhausting its political personnel as much as its citizens, battalions of dissenting voters. This is the charm of old nations which drift without direction but certainly sink into dead ends. So, to get through these few days that separate us from wet party favors and blunt champagne, we grumble in our corner, and we take refuge in reading. Men of action cycle or run, others of my species pick up books like one hand fishes in a river, out of idleness and forbidden pleasure. Have you felt the quiver of a brown trout slipping beneath your hands and escaping you? This impromptu delight is a provincial luxury. In libraries, the books are more disciplined although some are fidgety. You know that in December, I have a grenadine heart, I forget for a moment the flood of new releases that flood the bookstores and I fall back on my Sunday columnist fancies. Often chance guides my choices and, by miracle, we come face to face with a writer that we had neglected and who reminds us of the glorious days of the presses.
In quick succession, I reread two books by François Bott, who died in 2022, in September, almost to the day, a year after the hasty departure of Roland Jaccard, his traveling companion. A book on Radiguet, The child with a cane published by Flammarion in 1995 and The crossing of days at Cherche midi in 2010. With Bott, we whip from the Roaring Twenties to the grand boulevards, from France-Soir au Mondeit’s a whole section of literary criticism that parades. We meet his friends there, Boudard, Nucera, Cioran, Jacques Laurent, Sagan, Morlino and Cérésa. Its bosses, as admired as Pierre Lazareff, as hated as Françoise Giroud at L’Express (“Despite appearances, she totally lacked kindness and kindness. Some found his smiles disarming. In any case, they were never disarmed”). In his memories of the Republic of Letters from 1958 to 2008, Bott reignites the flame of the written press, its brilliance and its wave. He even “rehabilitated” the Boyard: “Brassaï measured the exposure time by smoking cigarettes: a Gauloise for the light of dawn, a Boyar if it was dark. By the way, the boyar didn’t even have a “necro” when she was suppressed by the Régie. However, she deserves a thesis at the Sorbonne, since Sartre also burned this large module to write Being and Nothingnessand Godard to turn Pierrot the Fool ».
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We often wonder what literature is for. Well, reading an author in the torpor of the holidays, being seized by a sentence, amused by a word, caught up in the past. Bott pushed me to investigate. I then went looking for tobacco sales prices from SEITA (Tobacco and Matches Industrial Exploitation Service) dating from May 1955; I learned there that the case of 20 Boyards cost 120 francs, more expensive than the pack of 20 Gauloises Disque Bleu (90 francs) and less expensive than the case of 20 “Week-end” (140 francs). The prize for the most expensive cigarettes in 1955 went to the pack of 20 American “Kent” filter tips at a price of 250 francs. Thanks to Bott, we touch the essence of literature, its unnecessary importance.
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