Barbery, Gaudé, Carrère d'Encausse... What to read in a quarter of an hour according to the writers?

Poetry, biography, novel… Every literary genre lists its number of followers.

The national “quarter of an hour of reading”, organized this Friday, March 10, can be an opportunity to discover new ones.

The editorial team asked six writers for works which, in their opinion, deserve at least fifteen minutes of reading a day.

To discover

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Hélène Carrère d'Encausse chose…

Les Miserables

, by Victor Hugo.

Wherever you put your reading, you can open

without any risk of being disappointed.

The style of the author, the multitude of plots and the gallery of characters make Hugo's work a complete novel.

All the patterns of human behavior are there.

Characters, such as Monsieur Madeleine, represent redemption, and others, such as Javert, represent the horrible.

Moreover, it is a novel that embodies all the spiritual thoughts of the author, both non-believer and concerned about these issues.

It is therefore essential to read it.

Laurent Gaudé has chosen…

The sweet scent of the times to come

(Actes Sud), by Lyonel Trouillot.

This is a small book that I reread often.

It is the monologue of an old woman written in several poems.

A Haitian mother speaks to her daughter as she dies.

And what unfolds before us, through these prose poems, is perfectly free and therefore magnificently subversive speech.

A powerful and heady text to which you always have to come back.

Muriel Barbery chose…

A King Without Entertainment

, by Jean Giono.

I read it, reread it, and now I peck at it in disorder, opening a page at random and admiring the perfection of this text without waste, without weaknesses, which shows an incredible penetration of the soul. human at the same time as a total poetry.

Every sentence holds!

I am constantly amazed to have this experience at the same time that I think I have, thanks to this extraordinary novel, understood a facet of existence that has remained invisible until now.

Frédéric Beigbeder chose…

The Drunk Boat

, by Arthur Rimbaud.

I recommend going to read the poem on the wall of rue Férou, near place Saint-Sulpice, in Paris.

Funny contrast: this ode to escape written by Arthur Rimbaud at the age of seventeen is handwritten in large format on the wall of the tax office.

The reason is that he declaimed it for the first time in 1871, on the first floor of a café in the Place Saint-Sulpice, at the dinner of the “Vilains Bonshommes”.

At the end of the quarter hour and the hundred verses, I suggest going for a drink on the first floor of the Café de la Mairie, on the other side of the square, just to cast off.

Read alsoArthur Rimbaud's tasty words from the navy

Louis-Henri de La Rochefoucauld chose…

Literary Journal

, by Paul Léautaud.

It is a sum of several thousand pages: there is therefore plenty to do.

Whatever the end by which one takes this masterpiece, the pleasure of reading is guaranteed.

Mocking spirit, aphorisms, piquant portraits of a whole bunch of gendeletters, various pranks: we never get bored!

Behind the casual humour, emotion and depth surface on every page.

Léautaud was a diarist of genius.

There is still a risk when you devote a quarter of an hour to this madman: that of wanting to take a sabbatical year to read his

in its entirety .

Marc Lambron chose…

Sylvia

(Gallimard), by Emmanuel Berl.

Sylvia is a story that invites you to extend your stay beyond fifteen minutes.

Because it is one of the most beautiful books of French memory, war, dreamy loves, the scent of the past, as if Gérard de Nerval had fought at Éparges.