Julien C.
The year 2024 has once again allowed me to diversify my reading, from cookbooks to thrillers, including science fiction, essays and white literature. Among the hundred books read, if only one had to be kept, Well-being by Nathan Hill (Gallimard) would win without debate. Read in the middle of summer, when the Olympics were in full swing and your servant was only thinking about the literary season, the big novel by the American writer fascinated me. It contains first of all the best begins of the year, and addresses a variety of themes (the couple, modernity, the family, etc.) so complex that this book will become a classic within a few years. I took great pleasure in telling Nathan Hill all the good things I thought of his book at the Festival America in Vincennes.
Complexity always, the big novel by Frédéric Paulin, No enemy like a brotherabout the Lebanese civil war, swept me away. The second volume arrives at the end of February 2025, and I will of course report on it in these columns!
The little joy of the year is also receiving a kind word from a playwright, Marion Stenton, for her play created and read this summer: Like after a bomb.
We are not going to rewrite history either: 2024 has not only brought great texts. I am thinking in particular of the very light The better life by Etienne Kern, to the unnecessarily complicated book by Jérôme Ferrari or even to The Blue Hour by Peter Stamm who lacks issues. It is not appropriate here to stupidly bash authors that we usually like, but rather to hope that we will find them in better form for their next books.
And finally, new on my side: the review of comics and graphic novels. In a world where there is still a lot for me to discover, I particularly appreciated the very sensitive Azure Asphalt by Sylvain Bordesoules and the immensely cute Happy Endings Lucie Bryon.
Jean-Marie
The most touching book:Great Lord by Nina Bouraoui. A writer, at the bedside of her dying father. I was struck by the grandeur, the beauty of the relationship between a daughter and her father. Very moving. And I was seduced by the elegance and nobility of Nina Bouraoui's writing.
The most enjoyable book to read: The flickering light by Nino Haratischvili. I read with delight the seven hundred or so pages of this novel about Tbilisi in the 1990s. I will not forget these four friends. They are endearing, captivating. This book was a perfect companion for my summer vacation.
The most enlightening book: A meaning of life by Pascal Chabot. From this question of the meaning of our life he develops a totally original construction of the human psychic. I really liked his sense of balance and openness. This book seemed to me totally innovative, exciting, very intellectually stimulating.
Laura
Read, read… By the fire or spread out in the grass, burned by the sand or stunned by the subway, well this year, to my great dismay, I read little. Little but striking, little but out of time. It's not on purpose, I confess, but this year I read The Lover ! Durassian masterpiece, disturbing book. He is 40 years old, but he has lost none of his literary splendor, he nevertheless contrasts with the times, other mores…
Yael
The book I couldn't put down all summer is Amir Tibon's essay Les Portes de Gaza (Christian Bourgois). Or the account by a thirty-year-old survivor with his granddaughters and his wife of the pogrom of October 7 from the Kibbutz closest to the Gaza Strip. But also an investigation through the history of this idealistic Kibbutz of the failure of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. I was happy to find Gaël Faye with Jacaranda (Seuil) and among the novels of the year 2024, it is the style of Cécile Coulon which struck me the most in The Language of Hidden Things (The Iconoclast).
Nicolas V.
Apart from works consulted in libraries and online, outside of books Cinemadance and catalogs of exhibitions like the one this summer in Stockholm on the Swedish Ballets, I obtained and, where appropriate, bought, the work of Marion Carrot, Dancing in silent films (Presses Universitaires de Rennes), that of the couple Séverine Danflous/Pierre-Julien Marest, Busby Berkeley, the man who stared dizzy (ed. Marest) and that of Jean-Max Méjean, Opera on screen (Gremese).
Sylvia
Interviews with Édouard Glissant by Hans Ulrich Obrist (co-edition LUMA/Seuil) is a sensitive event for me. One of the interests of a book is to observe what we retain from it. In this respect, everything that is still entangled with my affects and reflections is astonishing: the depth of conversational reflection punctured by archives, the power of the utopia which we miss, and which is nevertheless concrete. Hans Ulrich Obrist's interviews with Édouard Glissant are a breath of fresh air. At any time, we can stop the scrolling of the pages, isolate a particular fragment of conversation – and not another –, follow the dotted lines of an intuition, an idea, and recognize what is at stake today, on a larger scale. ladder. And quite simply, understand how the thoughts of Édouard Glissant are still trembling in a whirlwind of encounters. “When the walls fall…”. It’s time for (re)findings.
Édouard Glissant: In an unpredictable world, utopia is necessary -ARCHIVES HANS ULRICH OBRIST, Payot, 36 CHF.
