Eugène Green and Bruno Racine: Two New Books from Gallimard

Jacques Henric reviews two recent Gallimard publications: Eugène Green's "Les Atticistes" and Bruno Racine's "Adieu à l'Italie." Green, a filmmaker and writer born in New York who fled the US for France in the late 1960s, presents a philosophical tale diagnosing modern Western society through the rhetorical lens of Atticism versus Asianism. His narrative parodies intellectual battles from the 1968 Sorbonne protests to contemporary gender studies, using characters with whimsical names. Racine, former director of the Villa Medici (1997-2002), president of the Centre Pompidou, and of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, offers a biographical essay on 19th-century painter François-Marius Granet. Through Granet's unfinished works "Messe sous la Terreur" (1847) and "Service funèbre pour Mme Granet" (1848), Racine explores themes of artistic doubt, historical trauma, and personal loss. An erratum corrects the title of Philippe Sollers's novel from "Miroir parfait" to "Discours Parfait."