“The Book Club” by Marie Richeux is a gift. With incredible ease and a certain sense of listening, she brings the authors, their texts and their memories into dialogue on France Culture, and manages to collect meaningful and sensitive words. So many invitations to read and programs you can listen to again and again.
On Friday, the producer leaves her studio and offers to discover the artist library. It’s his “tell me where, how, in what place, with whom, why and what you read, I’ll tell you who you are”. On September 1, Dominique Blanc, member of the Comédie-Française, opened the ball. In another episode, author Valérie Zenatti talked about some of the books that make up her library: those by Aharon Appelfeld, of which she is the precious translator; the correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem; Le Nocturne, by Vladimir Jankélévitch – “I bought this book for myself with the savings I had made when I quit smoking. I wanted to buy it not only because it is signed by the author, but above all because it was published in 1942, the time when Jankélévitch was expelled and removed from the French university. He no longer teaches, he has lost his French nationality, because he is Jewish and born to foreign parents.
And then there is None of Us Are Coming Back, by Charlotte Delbo: “This book made me hear a voice that I had never heard, that I needed to hear, and that I always would hear,” says Valérie Zenatti. Charlotte Delbo found language at the crossroads between fear and poetry. »
Other worlds
Poetry was also discussed with the director and actress Noémie Lvovsky when she mentioned Kaddish, by Allen Ginsberg: “It’s a poem that has accompanied me since I was 18 or 20, since my friend Arnaud Desplechin gave it to me. This magnificent text shows in a profound way how the misfortune of the world becomes ours and how we can go crazy about it. » Madly in love too, perhaps, when she asks Alfred de Musset: “Can we love without always loving? Can we unlove? »
Micha Lescot, who plays Richard II at the Théâtre des Amandiers, in Nanterre, until December 22, in the production of Christophe Rauck, has also agreed to open his library. And it’s wonderful to hear the actor read and talk about certain texts, like Quai Ouest, by Bernard-Marie Koltès; to hear him talk about Luc Bondy, the director who died in 2015, to whom he was very close, to remember, moved and amused, the antics of the man who always had “three books in his pocket”.
This Friday, December 8, it’s the composer and performer Babx who talks about his “crazy” library. It was, he confides, with Prévert and Le Petit Prince that he learned to read. Marked by the poetry of Rimbaud, this is what he says when he thinks back to his reading of The Theater and its Double, by Antonin Artaud: “It’s as if someone had cast a spell on me, it’s magic. order of cataclysm, it changed a whole vision of life. »
Casting a spell on us and, above all, opening windows onto other worlds through these libraries, this is what Marie Richeux and her team succeed so well.