Collections Litterature Memoire

Everybody thinks they know Catherine Clément. Everybody knows about her passion for India, her philosophical novels, her years as a teacher and as a journalist, her missions for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which took her, together with her ambassador partner, to Vienna, New Delhi and Africa, and her mingling with the psychoanalytical circles... but this is not only a disordered but also an incomplete and over-simplistic summary. Through her rare autobiographical writings (for example Cherche Midi, Stock 2000), her readers have learned about her childhood as a French Jewish girl, but never before the publication of this book -certainly the most important of her life-, has Catherine Clément revealed so many secrets, unfolded memories and deep mysteries. From her fraternal complicity to her eternal friendships, we discover her as a young teacher, as an active member of the communist party, or close to certain politicians amongst whom two presidents: Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand. One reads with particular emotion the portraits she paints of her mentors, Jankélévitch, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss or those of thinkers like Roland Barthes or Jean-Paul Sartre. This book could have been a mere description of the exceptional career of an intellectual. Yet, thanks to Catherine's talent as an author, her freedom of expression, her humour, her tenderness and her total lack of complacency, it has become life itself. A life of somebody who has accomplished nearly everything, without even noticing it herself and who keeps within her a deep sense of love, friendship and justice which we are crucially lacking in our times. Catherine Clément has published about forty books: essays on anthropology and psychoanalysis, and very successful novels, best-selling in France and abroad (La Sultane, La Senora, Pour l'amour de l'Inde, Le voyage de Théo...)

'As wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.' David MitchellThis is the story of John McGahern's childhood; of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature.'Long before Frank McCourt made an entire industry out of twinkly eyed accounts of the poverty and institutionalised brutality of mid-twentieth-century rural Ireland, John McGahern, Ireland's greatest living novelist, had already shone wise and unsparing light on this same world ... Memoir is the full, unadorned story of his childhood and adolescence in Leitrim ... His finest book yet.' Stephanie Merritt, Observer'In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.' Andrew Motion, Guardian'I have admired, even loved, John McGahern's work since his first novel ... Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness.' Melvyn Bragg