Between introspection and lightness, an insomniac and unexpected BHL… With sleepless nightBernard-Henri Lévy reveals a new face, far from the certainties which have sometimes made him hermetic, notes our columnist, rather charmed
After reading sleepless night by Bernard-Henri Lévy, as questionable as this first impression may be, I thought of the Mots by Jean-Paul Sartre. There is indeed, in the general tone of this book, an uncompromising introspection which, all things considered, seemed to me to be of the genre that Sartre had magnified by offering a heartbreaking farewell to literature. sleepless nighthowever, appears to me as an unidentifiable literary object in BHL’s multiple creations.
Sleepless night, happiness of the day…
The style is sparkling as usual but it allows for more lightness, deliberate ease, almost a relaxation which adapts perfectly to the substance of this unclassifiable work. I appreciate that it is irrigated by a rich culture, omnipresent but yet far from any ostentation, slipped with simplicity into pages which it enriches but without ever usurping the place of the essential.
This essential could resemble a comedy by Molière since for BHL it is a question of exposing us to the thousand ways of not sleeping, of trying to cure one’s insomnia, of presenting to us, with a detailed precision which the author enjoys , a pharmacopoeia intended to facilitate falling asleep, then waking up, to repair the contrasting effects of too much sleep, of too long waking, in adventures that are both plausible and burlesque.
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We discover a BHL extremely gifted for comedy, hilarious scenes (his relationship with the cat!) and, beyond that, for the relationship of his daily life, going, with great delicacy, to the point of evoking his links and the modalities of their union with the one he calls A.
An almost modest BHL
I admit to having felt like a happy surprise this familiar, almost prosaic BHL, emerging from the heaven of ideas and revealing to us, without the slightest restraint or desire to be “seen well”, its ills, its weaknesses, its limits, its imperfections. . He escapes what could be artificial in this type of narration, never falling into a falsely contrite sincerity or a narcissism feigning modesty. He himself must have, I am sure, experienced a sort of joy in opening wide the windows of the systematically serious, of the implacably serious to abandon himself less to the futile than to a nostalgia for a childhood, a youth, jokes, collective joys, friendships, fraternities where today’s BHL was not even in the beginning.
A BHL writing a book, without thought, politics and international tragedies having their place, would not be conceivable. But on this level also he does not hesitate to change his tone and to take us, as it were, behind the scenes of his mind and his personality. We can only rejoice at the erasure of what could often have irritated him: an assurance, almost an arrogance which excluded any contradiction because on his side was the True, the Beautiful and the Good. While in sleepless night he does not hesitate, not to weaken himself, that is the opposite, but to explain himself, to exalt his masters and his inspirations, to evoke those who have passed away who I also miss – for example Thierry Lévy.
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He defends himself from any Manichaeism and admits the existence, within him, of at least two BHLs: one who defends Israel and the other who is at the same time moved by the death of the children of Gaza. He thus reveals the pangs of a personality that his insurmountable talent for writing and orality sometimes reduces and deprives of his doubts and his complexities. After reading this lively, witty, brilliant little book, intimate without immodesty, political without hostility – yet he knows them, these bitter, hateful enemies who want his downfall to the point of forcing him into permanent protection! -, I agree with my initial feeling. We want to go further than these pages and meet this personality, this author who gave them a beautiful image. To continue the dialogue he maintained with himself.
192 pages.
sleepless night
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