Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 192 pages.
In this intimate essay, Françoise returns to her passion for words. Not by navel-gazing, as René de Ceccatty rightly said in a literary review of Le Monde in 1997, but to remind us of Danièlle Sallenave’s saying: “The book does not replace anything, but nothing replaces the book”.
La Liseuse et la Lyre is a magnificent essay in which Françoise, again, touches on the universal. But in a detached and almost serene tone that we knew little about her, reminding us how wide her palette was. (Vincent)
The analogy of this too abstract passion with drug addiction inspired an author of the interwar period to denounce under this title: “This unpunished vice, reading”. How could he give this warning? With a text.