While Bernard Pivot announced Tuesday to leave the prestigious Academy Goncourt, he was Saturday the guest of the show "It arrived tomorrow". He confides on his future readings and readings at the microphone of Patrick Cohen.

INTERVIEW

Tuesday, Bernard Pivot turned the page of the Academy Goncourt after five years of presidency to enjoy life and its summers. A time available that the famous journalist will now devote to his family and reading classics of French literature, always sitting at a table.

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"To read, you have to have a very stable ass"

The 84-year-old journalist, known for having animated every Friday evening the literary program Apostrophes between 1975 and 1990, will no longer devote his summers to read between 50 and 70 novels for the Goncourt. From now on, he will be able to read and read books for pleasure, but he will not change his reading habits. Because Bernard Pivot never reads "lying down, lying down, nor at the edge of the sea". "I'm at a table," he says. "I can take a book and then take notes, without comfort." According to the journalist, to read, "you have to have the ass very stable and rather hard".

Bernard Pivot will finally be able to reread the classics of French literature, which he has never been able to do so far: "I have never read again, I have never had time! How do you want me to do? Now, I'm going to re-read Huysmans, I have not read it much.As he goes out in the Pléïade, I'll enjoy it and take it away at Christmas. "

"It's been 50 years since I put a nose in a book by Chateaubriand"

For fun, the journalist will also read Chateaubriand. "It's been 50 years since I did not put my nose in a book by Chateaubriand." Memoirs from beyond the grave , will it fall to my hands or will I rather enjoy it? ? "asks Bernard Pivot. He will also take the opportunity to read writers he does not know well as the poet Patrice La Tour du Pin. "Everyone was talking about it in the 70s and finally I never read it, and I always said 'it's a professional mistake my poor Bernard!' My happiness is also to take a volume of Voltaire in the Pléïade then read the correspondence of Voltaire It is a pleasure to read his letters, "he explains.

For Bernard Pivot, "what is important is the writing: the writing of Jean-Louis Hue when he tells the rain, the writing of Houellebecq, some do not like but it is interesting and original". He also notes the writing of Jean-Paul Dubois, Prix Goncourt 2019, "formidable". And that of Amelie Nothomb, in her book called Soif : "she found a way to make Jesus say words that smell a little sulfur but it is remarkably written," says the journalist.