Each Thursday, the editorial staff of the “World of Books”, offers you its literary selection.
by Florent Georgesco, Roger-Pol Droit, Raphaëlle Leyris, Denis Cosnard, Pierre Deshusses (Collaborator of the “World of Books”), Nicolas Weill and Juliette Einhorn
This week, an eclectic choice of recently published pocket books. Literature, with Salomé Kiner, Hervé Le Tellier, Ann Patchett, Mohamed Mbougar Saar (Goncourt 2021), Sacher-Masoch; But also in history with Alain Corbin, sociology with Dominique Schnapper or philosophy with Hermann Broch and Francis Wolff.
Philosophy. “Logic of a ruined world”, by Hermann Broch
Austrian novelist, which went into exile in the United States to flee Nazism, Hermann Broch (1881-1950), author in particular of the sleepwalkers (Gallimard, 1956-1957), left in his archives and in certain published articles Traces of an important work as a philosopher, which editions of the Eclat have been trying for years to make known. Despite her fragmentary and unfinished character, she imposed herself by her originality alongside the great currents of her time, whose themes she meets. The reissue of a collection of six texts on the value, history, music, decline or explosion of a modern civilization unable to restore a common idea, as could medieval thought, makes some lands emerge From a continent still immersed in France, and arouses the desire to rediscover it finally. N. w.
History. “The bells of the earth”, by Alain Corbin
At the beginning of the 1830s, a quarrel heated the spirits in the village of Brienne-le-Château (Aube). The mayor wants to sell the old bell of the church, most of the inhabitants, no. Rifts, threats, scenes of fervor and anger the day the bell, dismantled, is precipitated at the foot of the bell tower. The sub-prefect, who came to lend a hand to the mayor, writes in his report that men swear, kiss the bell, that women “lavish him [by crying the most tender expressions”. He adds: “I admit that I was far from expecting this scene of fanaticism.” Commentary by Alain Corbin, a century and a half later: “The astonishment of the sub-prefect results from the brutal revelation of ‘An attachment [raising] of a system of appreciation which is foreign to him. “
This scene, which opens the bells of the earth, one of the most important books of the great historian of sensitivities, published for the first time in 1994, concentrates the subject – a brilliant testimony of the dexterity with which Corbin makes speak the archives. The Brienne affair illustrates, of course, the tension between civil and religious powers born with the Revolution. But it uncovers more underground, and slower movements. Investigating the way in which the bells punctuated the laborious, festive, spiritual life of the countryside thus amounts to “accessing the understanding of the world that we have lost” when, gradually, “an increased desire for individual freedom [encouraged] to contest the ‘Uniformity of rhythms “, referring the” sound landscape “that the bells drew in” the inactual “and the” derisory “. Alain Corbin makes us resonate with rare power this “noise of another time” that he knows how to make suddenly closer than we could imagine, we who come from it, and who have erased him. Fl. Go
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