The Oulipo in full light

Welcome to the Box Office, the weekly Soft Power show. Every week, we look at cultural trends and the biggest hits of the moment. In partnership with the GfK research institute for books and video games and CBO Box Office for cinema.

Literature. Almost two months after being awarded the 2020 Goncourt Prize, the novel L’Anomaly Hervé le Tellier is still number 1 in sales. A victory that he shares with his literary troupe, the merry men of L’Oulipo.

L’Oulipo

This literary movement was born in 1960 around two troubadours, Raymond Queneau and Francois the Lionnais. Queneau was the first to be an incorrigible frivolous; ex-surrealist repented, afflicted by the spirit of seriousness of his old Stalinoid friends, he becomes a pataphysician, “scientist of imaginary solutions”. With the second, François le Lionnais, the one they would call the Fraisident Pondateur, they brought together a handful of joking artists and founded their own company, L’Oulipo.

Game of forms, style exercises, anagrams, imposition of rhymes, lipograms (prohibition of using a letter): the Oulipians are invented “One hundred thousand billion” obstacles and must overcome them in style. It is sometimes illegible; it doesn’t always sell; it’s zutic without Rimbaud. Except when it was George Pérec, a top verbicrucist, who joined the company in 1967 and made lipogram a brilliant book, Disappearance, written without the letter E. Literary movements have always claimed to seek the True, the Beautiful, the hill of Parnassus, pure Poetics. But Queneau and his friends don’t care, with talent. They are there to unblock literature, to slaughter the precious, to transform the haughty lover into a hopscotch friend. The ulipian is not a hero, he is a rat; a “Rat which itself builds the labyrinth from which it intends to escape”.

The problem with the Oulipo is that they didn’t sell much! Few could read their little navel-literary exercises. Today, with hundreds of thousands of copies sold for The Anomalies, the Oulipo takes revenge and becomes mainstream : the rat is out of the labyrinth; he deserved the full light.

Familia Grande and Consent at the top of non-fiction sales

In non-fiction, The big family is still in first place in sales, followed in 3rd place by The consent by Vanessa Springora who has a second success in her pocket, in the context of free speech on incest or pedophilia. A newcomer joins them in the ranking, the rock-star of the judges of instruction, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who publishes his “Memoirs of a too independent judge ”. Since his retirement from Rennes, the former judge looks back on Karachi, on Clearstream, on 40 years of politico-financial scandals. Happy retirement, Mr. Justice.

Annus mirabilis for Netflix

While the cinemas are still closed, Netflix released this Tuesday, January 19 (with a touch of insolence) its 2020 figures. And of course, it’s daunting. 2020, the miraculous year of streaming, Netflix claims more than 200 million subscribers with 37 million new subscribers … just this year.

Start of a miraculous year for Oliva Rodrigo

2021 is off to a very good start for 17-year-old American Oliva Rodrigo. If you don’t know it yet, that’s normal; she hadn’t done anything yet. But dubbed by Taylor Swift, Oliva Rodrigo arrives with her first single Drivers License straight to the first on the Billboard Hot 100 and first place in the world chart on Spotify. “It’s crazy,” said Oliva Rodrigo, herself amazed by her success while still in school and, maybe, just about to pass her driver’s license. It doesn’t make a career, or even a good record, but in terms of records it’s not bad at all.

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