Bernard Pivot, the host of “Apostrophes”, is useless | EUROtoday
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Ln Friday night, round 9:30 p.m. to 10 p.m., literature entered each house in France. A middle-aged man with contagious enthusiasm requested falsely naive inquiries to half a dozen company. He hardly ever reduce them off, bullied them even much less typically, appeared keen about their solutions, congratulated them, by no means put them in competitors. The decor was Spartan: an viewers with salt-and-pepper hair, pale decor, low tables, charmless armchairs and some notes from Rachmaninov to open and shut this suspended time. Our moms and grandmothers had been swooning. They carefully famous the title of the creator and the title of the work that he had come to defend.
I'm speaking to you a couple of time that these beneath 30 can not know. It was earlier than ! Before Amazon, earlier than information channels, earlier than digital books, earlier than any “celebrity” thought they had been licensed to inform us about their life, earlier than TV columnists made the legislation on the small display screen. At the helm, as arbiter of magnificence, Bernard Pivot, who died on the age of 89. A tireless reader, an alert journalist who’s each a expertise scout and respectful of his elders.
The final items of a now submerged Atlantis
Marguerite Yourcenar was acquired there with deference; Jean d’Ormesson as a rock star; Bernard-Henri Lévy and the brand new philosophers made a sensational look there; François Mitterrand displayed his tradition there; Charles Bukowski was delirious and staggered with drink; Denise Bombardier paid herself Gabriel Matzneff; Eugénie Carle, Catherine Paysan, the novelists of the School of Brive proved that Saint-Germain-des-Prés was not the middle of French literary life; Marguerite Duras received her Goncourt prize there; Dai Sijie printed his first novel there, Balzac or the little Chinese tailor; François Nourissier made his mocking erudition roar; Patrick Modiano honed his timid speech; Paul-Loup Sulitzer was confronted by his “nigger”… We listened with a imprecise understanding that we had been witnessing uncommon moments. We didn’t but perceive that these had been the final items of a now submerged Atlantis.
And don't allow us to criticize the individuals of the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties! Styron, Solzhenitsyn, Tom Wolfe, John Le Carré, the Dalai Lama, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov shed their gentle on the beginnings of globalization. For greater than twenty years, future Nobel Prize winners and as many Goncourts got here to provide one of the best of themselves. On June 22, 1990, Bernard Pivot closed his Apostrophes after 724 broadcasts (from 1975 to 1990) to prepare dinner for an additional ten years a Culture broth simply as considerable and stimulating.Fired from Figaro by Jean d'Ormesson
For service to literature, tv, tradition and France, Bernard Pivot was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 2004. Ten years later, he took over as president. And dusted off the habits and customs of an establishment that was buzzing: age restrict, voting course of, higher consideration of publishers who till now remained on the doorways of Drouant, transparency… Here too, there was a earlier than and an after -Bernard Pivot. In December 2019, he left this interior circle which suited him so effectively. “Make room for young people,” he assured. After spending my days studying, I wish to do one thing else, to journey, to see my family members. » Everyone believed it, however his associates, who knew or guessed he was ailing, understood that he was starting the final chapter of a life the place literature typically gave approach to soccer and wine, his two different passions. The birds conceal to die and Bernard Pivot, the eagle of literary journalism, started to fold his wings.
This Lyonnais who made his first journalistic debut in Progress then at Literary Figaro, then at Figaro, from which he was fired by… Jean d'Ormesson in 1974, would regretfully put an finish to the story of his life. The two males, nevertheless, established a strong friendship and this conflict provided Pivot the chance to create, on the instigation of Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, the month-to-month Read, {a magazine} fully devoted to literature.
This son of grocers, who had given a style for studying and a love of literature to so many viewers, after having interviewed the best writers (from Bukowski to Marguerite Duras by way of Soljenitsyn or Milan Kundera), died this Monday on the age of 89, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/bernard-pivot-le-roi-lire-est-mort-06-05-2024-2559570_3.php