in the head of Back Archive:Mathieu Lindon recounts a life surrounded by books alongside his father, director of Éditions de Minuit, choosing an emotional rather than a historical prism because, he says, “I am an archive for myself.”
“I knew he was a great writer before I read him.” This is how Mathieu Lindon speaks of Beckett, with whom he dined at the family table when he was 6 years old. In Archive:, he opens a life inspired by Éditions de Minuit, long run by his father Jerome, tells us behind the scenes of a child who lived through the plasticization of the house by the OAS, as an adult who lives to be born. a great generation of writers from Echenoz to Toussaint. It shines a light on the publisher and the man who was his father, unraveling a hauntingly romantic family story.
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Miss Figaro. – How is your book different from historian Anne Simonin’s book? Midnight Editions: ?
Matthew Lyndon. – On the one hand, Anne Simonin’s book ends in 1955, the year of my birth, on the other hand, my perspective is different: I am also writing this book as a living archive, and I am this archive. trying to decipher. What I have seen, received and felt all along, born and led this existence in books. I talk less about Jerome Lyndon or Éditions de Minuit than about the place they have occupied in my life.
The term archive takes on several meanings in the story and punctuates it almost musically…
Yes, it was natural. My father had great archival taste. In the book, a friend tells me that Pierre Bourdieu, when he was angry with my father, had this observation: This seemed more likely to me because in his family life my father was able to handle the documents he received or sent in the same way. This, moreover, is a problem that historians must face. 19 yearse In the 19th century, people did not know that the archives they left would be used, while today, they know that there are no more neutral archives… My father, for example, liked to keep them, but also to create them, and the archive. It seemed like an interesting prism through which to examine our relationship and the entire history of Éditions de Minuit.
You also say how a person builds himself against this inheritance. you didn’t fall in love with your father like your brother, you didn’t take up publishing like your sister and become a writer…
I was very proud to publish my first book with Minuit. I couldn’t imagine getting published anywhere else until my dad created stories for my second book (in fact, he was accepted with almost any author if the first novel wasn’t a huge success), and that made me happy. led to my transfer to POL. , which has become my new home in every sense of the word. Archive: follows what does love mean and to Hervelino, to the extent that I have the impression of writing an autobiography where I am not the main character. Perhaps the best way to talk about myself is to echo the greats like Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert and my father.
An archive by Mathieu Lindon, Éditions POL, 240 p., €19.
Source: Le Figaro
