In a collection of 13 delicious short stories devoted to New York, the little French people prove that they too know how to write the city that never sleeps.
Through Marine de Tilly
Published on 01/17/2014 at 12:23 pm
– Modified 01/17/2014 at 12:34 pm
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Go with me
Of course, New York is simple, obsessed with simplicity. Paul Morand had described it so well in the 1930s. It is an elementary geometric figure, a grid, direct, determined streets, with no other possible interpretation than what they show: parallels, perpendiculars, angles and square roots. They don’t even have names, just numbers. Seen from above, New York is not about literature, it is about arithmetic. Nervous, metallic, electric, she neither wakes up nor falls asleep, she pulses, insomniac, she rushes down, tick, tock, New Work in progress. In its desert of glass and steel glide time, people and feelings at full speed, New York is a turbine, an ultra-living factory turned towards the future; even that she is able to remember the future … When it is noon in New York, it is still 1980 in Paris. And the best thing that she has always produced is the dream.
New York is a chimera factory, a refinery of utopias, it methodically manufactures and exports all fantasies. And at the very end of its prodigious mental production chain, there are the artists, the last artisans of the myth. Photographers, musicians, filmmakers; and writers. Paul Auster, John Dos Passos, Bret Easton Ellis, Fitzgerald, Henry James, Henry Miller, Tom Wolfe, Edith Wharton, Whitman, Melville, Salinger, Colum McCann …
Oh, there are many across the Atlantic to have made the interpreters of this dream. But as Vincent Jaury, a fine connoisseur of American literature, editor-in-chief of the very fashionable review, rightly points out Defector and master of ceremonies of this collection of short stories: “We saw New York, we read New York” (let us even add that we drank it to the dregs), but “few French writers there are collared “. Faced with this almost unthinkable – there had indeed been Céline, Decoin, Simenon, Perec or Beigbeder after them – he asked 13 French authors to tackle the “monster with a thousand heads, stretched towards the sky”, New York , this reversed Paris. This book is the compilation of these hexagonal voices.
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