The 100 novels that have enthusiastic "Le Monde" since 1944
The demon of any list is called arbitrary.Rather than exorcising it, it is better to recognize it from the start: dear readers, dear readers, the list that you will discover does not pretend to draw up an objective record, nor a representative panorama of literature since 1944, date on which the worldwas born.
More modestly, it reflects a few moments of a founding story, since our newspaper has been celebrating books from the start.This story is the adventure of the world and its feathers through the literature of the last seven decades.Aventure necessarily subjective, carried away by a host of human feelings, curiosity, admiration, fervor, of course, but also annoyance, boredom or lazy ...
On November 9, 1968, Pierre-Henri Simon, then soap operator of the "World of Books", defeated his coulpe with the readership.To explain how he was able to totally miss the novel by Albert Cohen Belle du Lord, who was a huge success, he invokes "an unworthy motive of laziness" and adds: "But we have extenuating circumstances.When, among the six or eight daily packages, the generosity of the publishers, we open one that contains, which contains, five centimeters thick in large format, a volume of 850 pages of discreet margins, Proustian paragraphs and fine characters, weRather want, especially during the weeks of vacation, to quibble two hours a news from Françoise Sagan or the latest booklet of the Journal de Jouhandeau.How, of course, we are wrong, because we must never forget that the great novels have the right to be big ... "
Moved wandering
The material reality of the books that flock every morning, imposing their weight of desire and guilt, everything starts from there.
"At the moment, it is ten pounds a day," said in 1946 the first soap opera in the world, Emile Henriot."Of the hundred books received every week, how to choose?""Asked nearly four decades later, in 1982, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, who held the soap from 1972. Let almost spend almost four decades or almost to come to today, and we see that the criticisms of the worldNo longer receive ten but fifty, sometimes a hundred pounds a day ... a hundred!This list does not count more for a period of seventy-five years.
Vertigo of the necessarily partial, fatally biased selection, and the very imperfection of which is both manifest fragility and elucidation power."Pilot in sight between the fear of neglecting a genius and the temptation to see it everywhere, if you think it's easy!", Ironized Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, and we have felt this dilemma ourselves by establishing the list.
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