Book - Mountain Chronicles T2

“I never have time to disgorge a twentieth of what I accumulate, and later, it will be too late.” To respond to this emergency, Alexandre Vialatte (1901-1971) created a literary genre that he pushed to perfection: the chronicle.
From his twenty-first year until his death, he composed hundreds of them, for The Rhenish Review , The Crapouillot , The Intransigent , The Monitor , The Epoch , The New French Review , The Weekly Review , Marie-Claire , The Eastern Journal , The Little Dolphin and, during the last eighteen years of his life, for the major Auvergne daily The Mountain . This daily offers him half a column or a whole column every week and leaves him complete freedom to talk about what he wants, with the exception of politics.
So, every Sunday evening, Vialatte takes his copy to the Gare de Lyon, drops it off in the postal car of the 11:15 p.m. train. In eighteen years, it was only two or three times that he missed his appointment. And what does he talk about week after week? Everything, nothing. Sometimes he tackles a novel, sometimes a play or a collection of poems, sometimes he talks about an encounter, evokes a film, makes fun of a primary truth, delves into a commonplace, comments on a proverb. The chronicle is the work of a walker, a stroller, a curious person and a philosopher. “We went looking for men, like Diogenes, to ask them for maxims or windows on the horizon.” It is an essentially poetic genre, which can catch any subject on the fly. Even the most ephemeral will find itself, through the grace of style, loaded with meaning. “A chronicle should be made to grow like a grass in the cracks of a wall, in the stones of the timetable.” Pierre Vialatte, in his own way, gives us back lost time. He belongs to the Saint-Simon and Proust family.
Number of pages: 1056
Dimensions: 13.30 x 20.00 x 3.00 cm

Assembly: France

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Book - Mountain Chronicles T2