Toulon Soon to turn one century old, the Charlemagne* bookshop is a “95 year old girl” Always moving. Founded in 1927 by the brothers Émile and Jean Rouard, it is today managed by Jacques and Olivier Rouard, perpetuating the human adventure with the enthusiasm of its founders. Available in several bookshops in the Var (Hyères, La Seyne-sur-Mer, La Valette-du-Var, Fréjus and Toulon, where it all began), the company aims to be an actor involved in the cultural and economic life of the region.
An essential partner of the Var Book Festival, on 18, 19 and 20 November it will host, among others, Sorj Chalandon, Irène Frain, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, Patrice Franceschi and former rugby player Daniel Herrero. In keeping with his time, it is exported outside the walls thanks to the Camion qui livre, a Volkswagen combi that crosses the markets of the region, and offers a cafeteria space, helping to make the bookshop a living space. Leading us this week are Anne Sportouch, head of the French literature department, and Guillaume Leroux, co-director of the bookstore with Laurence Thomas.
Best seller: “There is no Ajar”, Delphine Horvilleur, Grasset, 96 pages
Émile Ajar does not exist, has never existed. He is the result of a literary trick imagined by Romain Gary. In this play, however, it is his son, Abraham Ajar, who addresses the reader/viewer with his own “monologue against identity”. In Living with our dead (Grasset, 2021), writer and rabbi Delphine Horvilleur has helped us make peace with our ghosts. Here she faces one of the main conflicts of the living: their identity obsessions that lock them in and suffocate them.
And he presents them, as a remedy, with the figure of Émile Ajar, an allegory of the Same and the Other, proof that man cannot be reduced to what he thinks and says he is. With the humor and empathy that characterize her pen, the author questions our relationship with identity and truth through a great writer who has never stopped reinventing himself. A text of searing relevance, at a time when nationalism, obsession with gender and cultural appropriation infuse political debates.
Favorite: “Vivance”, David Lopez, Seuil, 288 pages
The style, above all: powerful, radical, in the continuity of a first novel (Feud, published in Le Seuil) crowned with the Inter Book Prize 2018. Then the story: that of a wayfarer on a bicycle who, over the landscapes crossed, reflects on the meaning of his life, of life. What is he running from? Why did he choose to leave to wander from Bled lost in desolate countryside, to meet their shadows? After describing in Feud a peripheral France between suburbs and countryside, David Lopez takes his reader on a journey whose destination seems secondary to the feeling of feeling alive. Sometimes soft, sometimes harsh, Vivance is a tense text that celebrates the taste of effort, the magic of an encounter, natural cycles. Daydreams of a lonely cyclist.
Discovery: “Attacking the Earth and the Sun”, Mathieu Belezi, Le Tripode, 160 pages
Algeria, mid 19th century. Séraphine and her family have a dream: to turn their backs on poverty to conquer the paradise praised by the French government. But the promised land turns out to be uncultivable, and the Algerians, a people with whom any contact seems impossible. At the same time, an unnamed soldier and his companions take part in the massacres ordered by their captain, as mad as he is charismatic. Their barbarism seems to respond to that exercised on the colonists who, like Séraphine and her family, believed the lies of colonization. Without proposing an incriminating text, Mathieu Belezi disarms his reader by confronting him with the absurdity of blind violence. Author of an Algerian trilogy, he offers a dazzling text, macabre in subject matter, sublime in language. A tragedy without greatness or heroes, like this forgotten page of our history.
* 50, boulevard de Strasbourg, 83000 Toulon. bookstorecharlemagne.com
