In those early days, the poet’s mother was an idolized figure, the object of the poet’s total love. ‘At least you are an eternal book’, Baudelaire wrote at the dawn of his 18th birthday to the woman who made the mistake of marrying the austere General Aupick, only a year after his father’s death. Collected under the title Cette maladresse maternelle qui me...
Read MoreRe-reading Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’
“Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” writes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague (La Peste). “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.” Albert Camus never made the...
Read MoreAn Illustrator and a Writer
Rarely would you find the union of an author and an illustrator so steadfast, so artistically productive as that of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel laureate in literature and Pierre Le-Tan who passed away on 17 September. Le-Tan’s cover drawings have so informed the pocket editions of Patrick Modiano’s novels that for many readers even the themes of Modiano’s...
Read MoreSaint-Exupéry’s Creative Spirit: The Craft of living
Anxiety about the future haunts the tales of . When the pilot in his plane (Vol de Nuit) feels the anguish of never landing again because he has lost his way, because he has drifted away, because now he sees nothing and understands that he lives his last minutes before his engine runs out of fuel that will hurl him into the sea, he also experiences the...
Read MoreFrançoise Mallet-Joris: a long literary career
The author of L’Empire Céleste and a member of l’Académie Goncourt, Françoise Mallet-Joris died on Saturday, August 13 2016. The sad news of her death was announced by Pierre Assouline, writer and journalist, who succeeded Françoise Mallet-Joris on the Goncourt jury after her resignation in 2011 for health reasons. What Pierre Assouline said about...
Read MorePaul Valéry’s Mauvaises Pensées
Towards the end of his life, as his muse, Jeanne Loviton, is about to leave him, the French poet Paul Valéry collected in the many pages of his Cahiers some aphorisms, maxims, speculations and questions under the title Mauvaises pensées (Evil Thoughts). The man who enjoyed the status of the official poet has already been a victim of his outdated and faded...
Read More
-
- Benoite Groult-pencil sketch
-
- Manohar Malgonkar
-
- Ajit Dutta
-
- Satinath Bhaduri
Recent Comments