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Robert Laffont
EAN : 9782221218396
Shaping : BROCHE
Pages : 180
Size : 130 x 205 mm
The Cowards

Collection : Mauvais esprit
Release date : 27/08/2020
Iconoclast that he is, Patrick Besson uses aphorisms and incisive sketches to unmask the false idols and preconceptions of the literary, intellectual, and media scenes. An exhilarating patchwork of ideas.
~“The writer is a coward. The proof? He writes. If he were brave, he would live. The writer, after shying away from existence, will lie flat on his face before power. Whoever he is. The dominant ideology dominates authors first.” Patrick Besson doesn’t spare his colleagues as the game begins,... ~“The writer is a coward. The proof? He writes. If he were brave, he would live. The writer, after shying away from existence, will lie flat on his face before power. Whoever he is. The dominant ideology dominates authors first.” Patrick Besson doesn’t spare his colleagues as the game begins, opposing their supposed intellectual courage with the contrary example most of them have long provided—“an impressive amount of chickens, swindlers, opportunists, and sellouts.”
He is not any softer on the media, ridiculing their vain pretention of “creating the event” while “they stumble along after it, a horde running in circles, like armies of ants.”
He goes on with this same ironic insight and biting provocation that characterizes his writing, through observations, impressions, and reflections made over the course of his readings, meetings, and travels.
His is faithful to his moods and prejudices.
Nostalgic for a certain notion of communism that he continues to demand in the name of his enduring fascination for “the misunderstood, the wayward, the outcasts.” Executing Éric Zemmour with a single phrase (“it is as though the pages of his books are stuck together by their author’s tacky thoughts”), this maverick prefers the “outlaws” who, in his eyes, are more truly free, like Michel Onfray or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of whom he writes, “the thought police will not rest until they can bring them down.” Besson goes after “the uniform language of the conformists on both the right and the left,” for whom “every free and singular word” is already accused of populism, and shoots point blank at “the old moons of conservativism,” for whom “an unexpected jeer or a critique taken the wrong way” becomes a lack of taste. In this register, he does not hold back from ridiculing all those who for him embody the vacuity, if not the imbecility of our times, mocking the likes of Laurent Ruquier, David Guetta, Doctor Dukan, Patric Bruel, Guy Konopnicky, Annie Ernaux, Éric Chevillard, and those who he calls “the Race of Normaliens.”
We also find a wandering melancholy à la Bernard Frank in his manner of crossing the world and capturing the essence of life in the everyday.
 
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EAN : 9782221218396
Shaping : BROCHE
Pages : 180
Size : 130 x 205 mm
Robert Laffont