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Sartre and the old bookseller

2023-05-07T10:36:08.530Z


I am reluctant to believe the thesis that nobody now reads one of the greatest thinkers that France has ever had and who demonstrated it so much in his novels and essays, in which he was equally original and groundbreaking.


I spent a fortnight in Paris and, faithful to my old habits, I went for a walk every morning in the Jardin du Luxembourg.

One of those days, having a coffee and reading a newspaper, I met an old bookseller, who must be around ninety years old or a little less, and to whom, in my old days, I used to go to buy a copy that I had lost. escaped from Sartre's magazine,

Les Temps Modernes

, whose notes were always brilliant.

Although I know of the resistance of the French to the encounters in the cafés, the impulse was immense.

I went over to greet him and sat next to him to talk a little.

I reminded him of his bookseller's time, when we always chatted for a moment as well as buying the issue of that magazine that he hadn't read, for some reason, yet.

"I'm glad to find it," I told him, and I reminded him that decades ago I would look for those Sartre titles in his bookstore.

“Sartre?”, He answered me surprised, “now no one reads it.

And besides, the French believe that this is a disguised Stalinist.

Look at the injustice that has fallen on him."

I told him that in the year I had been a member of the Communist Party, Sartre's essays had always helped me defeat my comrades in arguments and avoid falling into cultural dogmatism.

"What an injustice," I told him.

“The best of his essays seemed to me to be the arguments that Sartre used against communism.

Where did they get this nonsense, accusing him of being a Stalinist?

"Nobody reads it now in France, that's the truth," he assured me and asked me a question, from the whopping age of his nineties.

"Are you also

a Sartrean

, like me?"

“Naturally”, I replied, “and I assure you that it is a pity that the French have stopped reading it, so he will go to them.

Because the only philosopher comparable to Heidegger, at this time, was Sartre, and I am not exaggerating anything.

The old bookseller had his shop where there is now an excellent and splendid fashion bookstore.

But all the “Sartreans” of that time —I'm talking about decades ago— remember that devil's shop, just a garage, where books and magazines were waiting for one to acquire them with joy and delight in those always stimulating and seductive texts.

The bookseller remembered that time, although without remembering me at all, and he told me, summarizing his anger: “I don't even recognize this France.

Do you want to know what the French are reading these days?

Erotic literature and little else.

I said goodbye to him giving him a hug and moved by his vitality since every morning he drank coffee and smoked a cigar (until a few years ago a Gauloise, now one I don't know) in that corner of Place Saint-Sulpice, longing for the times when Sartre was in all bookstores and libraries.

That beautiful square, which is a joy to walk through every morning, although I have not yet seen the beautiful Catherine Deneuve appear on the balcony of her house (but I have seen her once walking through the neighborhood).

It's true that hardly anyone reads Sartre now, judging from the things I've heard about him, but I don't think he's completely disappeared.

Personally, ever since I learned that, in an interview, Sartre had fired two African novelists, suggesting that they abandon literature in order to make a revolution first and create a country where literature was possible, I had turned away from him, fed up with his ideological comings and goings and their multiple contradictions.

But confirming, through the mouth of the old bookseller, that it was already rarely read in France, gave me a nostalgia for bygone times and I promised myself to read one of those dazzling essays that had me seduced for so long, and for so many years. and happy.

I am convinced that Sartre, apart from the ideological confusions with which his admirers were dizzy, was a great philosopher, probably the only one who was equal to the great German philosophers, and that, now that the years have passed and the controversies have quieted down, anyone who reads it without prejudice will discover it unequivocally.

The Paris of the sixties, when we were poor and dazzled by the richness of its essays, its poems and its theater, no longer exists.

Now, the French continue reading like never before, poems and novels and, above all, essays, although the ruling class has ceased to be revolutionary and has rather settled for what exists, which is saying a lot.

In these two weeks, I have seen splendid exhibitions and I have read some books that will take me many weeks to assimilate, in addition to certain essays that are now finally published, thanks to Sartre's daughter, who has taken it upon herself to rescue all those theses that are hidden in occasional magazines.

Like that splendid collection of essays that Sartre wrote while doing his military service in the solitudes of Alsace.

There it is, with splendid notes,

his ideas about the army, women, literary and philosophical vocation, written with a very convincing naturalness.

And the two volumes that Sartre got tired of writing and that refer to Taine's theses and his dialogues with Heidegger, which show how brilliant he was when he hesitated between philosophy and literature.

The truth is that he excelled in both genres, despite how anguished he was always about those two options: his thinking encompassed both worlds and is one of the few examples that exist of rigorous excellence in both.

which show how brilliant he was when hesitating between philosophy and literature.

The truth is that he excelled in both genres, despite how anguished he was always about those two options: his thinking encompassed both worlds and is one of the few examples that exist of rigorous excellence in both.

which show how brilliant he was when hesitating between philosophy and literature.

The truth is that he excelled in both genres, despite how anguished he was always about those two options: his thinking encompassed both worlds and is one of the few examples that exist of rigorous excellence in both.

I refuse to believe the thesis of the old bookseller, that nobody reads Sartre now.

It can not be possible.

The truth is that one of the greatest thinkers that France has had has been him, who demonstrated it both in his novels and in his essays, in which he was equally original and groundbreaking.

It is true that it was difficult to follow him in some initiatives, such as the speech he gave to the workers at the gates of the Renault plants, and some similar excesses.

And now should come the time for reflection and comparative analysis.

Opponents as determined as Raymond Aron and Jean-François Revel marked him out as one of the series of his generation and now it would be necessary to make a distinction between his serious texts and the gestures, often disguised, that marked his political commitment.

There is not yet an essay that examines his literary work,

but his stories and novels reached a wide audience and received an attention that few authors have received.

At the same time, his philosophical essays dazzled those who scrutinized them in the impersonal way they were meant to be read.

And, like the rain, that inevitable companion of all my mornings in Paris, surprises me reflecting on all this, I run home to read the newspapers, another of the pleasures that France gives us every day.

They will not have the manifestos of that time when we levitated with fury or adherence (although in my old Parisian years I was a reader of

Le Monde

, I secretly bought

Le Figaro

once a week to read Raymond Aron's column).

And they won't be as brilliant as the ones he wrote, but still, there will always be hard-hitting opinions that seduce or irritate us at the same time.

Because journalism in France is almost as good as its literature.

© Mario Vargas Llosa, 2023. Press rights in Spanish in Spain and Latin America reserved for Ediciones EL PAÍS, SL, 2023. Press rights in Spanish for other territories and for other languages, reserved for Mario Vargas Llosa c/ o Carmen Balcells Literary Agency, SA.

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Source: elparis

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