Une archive

by Mathieu Lindon

Je voudrais raconter les éditions de Minuit telles que je les voyais enfant. Et aussi mon père, Jérôme Lindon, comme je le voyais et l'aimais. Y a-t-il des archives pour ça ? Et comment être une archive de l'enfant que j'ai été ?

Genres: Paris

240 pages, Paperback

Published January 5, 2023

About the author

Mathieu Lindon is the author of nineteen books and a staff writer for Liberacion. Learning What Love Means received the prestigious Prix Medici in France in 2011. It is the first of his works to appear in English.

Reviews

[Tosh]

I’m an American writer who can’t speak or read French, yet I’m obsessed with French publishing houses, such as Les Éditions de Minuit. Started up in the heat of the Occupation in France in 1941, the press was publishing subversive and anti-Vichy literature. Jérôme Lindon became the publisher after the war in 1947 and served until his death in 2001, when his daughter, Irène Lindon, succeeded him. My interest in this press is that it published Nouveau Roman (New Novel) writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, among others. Also, published literature that was very much pro-Palestine, and other causes from the Left.

Publishing is a strange mark to place in the world. I think people rarely do it for money, but more out of a “show & tell” feeling than anything else. Exposing an inner world to the masses appealed to me when I started my press, TamTam Books, to publish the French writer/musician Boris Vian. Lindon, who grew up in the world of French letters, came across the writers of Nouveau Roman, and I suspect he fell in love with them. The son expresses a similar love by writing this memoir about his dad, who ran Les Éditions de Minuit. Marguerite Duras is the one writer who put a stamp on the publishing house, and, like my obsession with Vian, Lindon’s father had a passion for Duras’s presence in post-war Paris, as well as for her literary works. A remarkable book for those who love literary publishing houses and, of course, the writers who were/are published by this press.

[Pierre-Alexandre Buisson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un bel hommage de Lindon à son père, et aux Éditions de minuit. Il ne faut pas s'attendre ici à une structure quelconque, ou à un ordre cohérent. Le fils passe du coq à l'âne, déversant ses souvenirs à mesure qu'ils lui viennent. Le style un peu ampoulé se met parfois dans le chemin de la fluidité et de la cohérence, mais c'est globalement une belle collection d'anecdotes et d'observations qui m'a fait passer un bon moment à une autre époque, que je n'ai malheureusement pas connue, mais qu'il m'arrive d'idéaliser.

[Zouakia Karim · Rating 2 out of 5]

tomber des mains 3 fois ... peut-être à bientôt ?

histoire de Jérôme Lindon par son fils Mathieu. l'histoire de l'homme a l'origine des éditions de minuit et du combat pour le prix unique du livre

[Lau · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pas tout à fait terminé mais bon c’était un peu boring