Second session of the Book Club

Second session of the Book Club at BPR – Wednesday, 19th October 19 – 8:30 a.m. – in the CDI

Aliénor began the session by presenting two books, Le Pays des autres, by Leïla Slimani, and Le Mur, by Jean-Paul Sartre.

In Le Pays des autres, the author tells the story of a French woman and her Moroccan husband who, in the 1940s, decide to settle in Morocco. The clash of cultures plays out and allows us to question the place of women in the French and Moroccan cultures. It also allows us to put into perspective the relationship between the colonised and the colonisers, far from the clichés of exoticism.

In the short story The Wall, Sartre challenged us on the meaning of existence, on the absurdity that seems to characterise the human condition, in a style that may seem sometimes a little cold and didactic. The characters are prisoners during the Spanish Civil War and are awaiting execution. They see the wall as the concrete materialisation of their condition.

Elise then presented Russia: the return of power, by David Teurtrie. By approaching the history of Russia since the Middle Ages, the author helps us to understand the forces behind the Russian will to power, and its current president in particular. In an accessible style, and following a well-structured reasoning, he allows us to better perceive the way Russia intends to weigh on international relations.

Mr. Loggia chose to evoke Les Chats éraflés, by Camille Goudeau, and Croire aux fauves, by Nastassja Martin.

In Les Chats éraflés, Camille Goudeau tells the story of Soizic, a young woman abandoned by her mother as a child and living with her alcoholic grandparents. One day, Soizic decides to leave her grandparents to settle in Paris, where she knows she will eventually find her mother. By chance, she becomes a “box opener”, that is to say, an employee in charge of opening the boxes of a book dealer on the quays of the Seine and of making the sales of the day in his absence. By necessity and soon by passion, she will experience the joys and vicissitudes of this way of life.

In Nastassja Martin’s Believing in the Wild, a book selected for the Segalen Prize, the author, an ethnologist by training, takes us into her participatory observation of the peoples of Kamchatka, in Russia. She also recounts how her encounter with a bear, which violently attacked her, turned her into a “miedka”, a privileged and feared being, on the border between humanity and animality.

Ms. Guidevay presented the last three books of the Segalen Prize selection. This prize was founded in the school some fifteen years ago, and has long mobilised French high schools in the Asia-Pacific region. Students in the second year of high school vote for their favorite book from a selection of four books. This year, in addition to Believing in the Wild, they will be voting for En attendant Bojangles, by Olivier Bourdeaut, Petit pays, by Gaël Faye, and the comic book dedicated to Alexandra David-Neel by Frédéric Campoy and Mathieu Blanchot.

See you on Wednesday 9th November for the next session!