Sunday, in "La Voix est livre", the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire returned to his love for literature and unveiled some of his favorite authors, including Marcel Proust, "a revelation" when he was teenager.

"Absolute fan" of Faulkner, he also confides his admiration for the freedom of American literature. 

INTERVIEW

A leading political figure since the mid-2000s, Bruno Le Maire is also a regular on the shelves of bookstores.

Since 2004, the current Minister of the Economy is the author of several novels and essays, some of which, notably

Absolute Music

, have been well received by critics.

And on January 14, he published

The Angel and the Beast

, in which he tells the story of the handling of the coronavirus epidemic.

A great reader of Proust, he received Europe 1 in the program La Voix est livre, and notably reveals his love for American literature.

>>

Find all of Nicolas Carreau's shows in podcast and replay here

"Chronologically, I am first and foremost a writer", confides the former LR, who claims to have written his first short stories at the age of 18-19, before being published for the first time in 2004 with

The Minister,

in which he tells his story. passage to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as adviser to Dominique de Villepin. 

For Bruno Le Maire, "literature is first and foremost a pleasure".

"I have immense pleasure in discovering a text, exactly as one discovers a landscape", he says again.

And in politics, continues the minister, literature can be used to "fix things".

This is what Bruno Le Maire is trying to do with his new book.

"If I wanted to write this book in the midst of the crisis, it was precisely because I wanted to get as close as possible to the truth. It's too easy to write your memoirs five years later, when the dust is fallout. And in general, let's be honest, we recompose things to their advantage, "explains the boss of Bercy. 

"Proust was a revelation for me"

In his living room, Bruno Le Maire has installed two large libraries filled to the brim, with a part containing about twenty pleiades.

When the minister is asked to name his favorite authors, he immediately quotes Marcel Proust, and in particular "In search of lost time".

"This obsession with lost time that we find in literature, that has a lot of meaning for me", develops Bruno Le Maire.

But his relationship with Proust is even "more personal".

"He was a revelation for me," he says.

"Around 16-17 years old, I began to read

In Search of Lost Time

on the recommendation of one of my literature teachers, and I had the feeling, as rarely when opening a book, of entering a book. world that touched me deeply. " 

From Proust, Bruno Le Maire also praises his ability to convey emotions through words, and can recite by heart the incipit

From the side of Swann

.

"The beginning of

Du Côté de Chez Swann

, when the narrator falls asleep, dreams return and he is awakened by his own sleep, it's something extraordinary (...) It's a universe which touched me deeply and immediately. "

Proust, he concludes, "it is first of all an emotion, before being a reflection". 

The "immense freedom" of American literature

In his library, Bruno Le Maire has stored only a few essays, and therefore almost exclusively novels.

Among them, many works by American authors, such as the poet Walt Whitman.

"Whitman describes the forests, the autumn leaves, the scents, the moss, the lakes wonderfully. It all touches me deeply."

More broadly, "what pleases me above all in American authors is this feeling of unlimited freedom", explains Bruno Le Maire.

Whereas European literature "is a literature of detail and attention", American literature "is immense freedom, moral freedom".

And to quote in particular Philip Roth, for example, and his book

Portnoy and his complex

, in which it is of "a sexual and moral freedom completely improbable".

Among the Americans, the Minister of the Economy also praises their "freedom of space" as well as "freedom of construction, of style", as with Faulkner, of which he says he is "an absolute fan". “All of a sudden he makes you see a radically different world, seen through the gaze of a person with mental retardation, or through the gaze of a young black girl who is oppressed. me what literature is fundamentally: openness to worlds you would not have discovered otherwise. "