Paris (AFP)
He is not a writer but a legend who enters the Pléiade on Thursday. Joseph "Jef" Kessel, the journalist-novelist, committed witness to the march of the world, backpacker and member of the French Academy, joins his friend Romain Gary at the Pantheon of Literature a few months apart.
Of the 80 or so novels and stories written by Joseph Kessel, the prestigious Gallimard collection has retained around 20, presented in two volumes, in which "the very essence of the novel is found in Kessel: adventure", underlines Serge Linkès who edited this edition.
In addition to the release of these two volumes, a richly illustrated album devoted to the author of the "Lion" will be offered to buyers of three volumes of the Pléiade.
Volume 1 (1,968 pages, 68 euros) opens with one of Kessel's first texts, "L'Équipage" (1923), the writer's first commercial success. Volume 2 (1,808 pages, 67 euros) ends with the novel which definitively dedicated it, "Les cavaliers" (1967).
"After this last masterpiece, if no one dared to doubt his status as a writer, he himself had the greatest difficulty writing, wondering how he could do better", notes Serge Linkès, master conference at the University of La Rochelle and specialist in Kessel's work.
One of the great merits of this edition is to juxtapose works pertaining, to varying degrees, to fiction, story, reportage or what Kessel liked to call "documentary".
Reading the texts of Kessel, who died almost 41 years ago, one remains struck by their astonishing modernity. His books read, the characters that haunt them remain alive in our memory.
From "Belle de jour" to "The Army of Shadows", from "Slave Markets" to "La passante du Sans-Souci" and "Mary de Cork", Kessel drew the fresco of a great century and violent.
"Things, decor and people: he gave them back to us as a painter rather than a photographer, living his investigations like novels and giving his reports the movement and the life that animate fiction", summarizes Gilles Heuré who directed the album Kessel and which was already at work for the volume devoted to Kessel in Gallimard's Quarto collection.
- "Witness among men" -
But Kessel's most beautiful novel may remain his very life. His adventurous life, often heroic, is one with his work.
What a fate that of the child born in January 1898 in Argentina, of Russian Jewish parents. He spent his early childhood on the banks of the Urals before settling in France with his family at the age of 10.
The rest is known. Brilliant studies, volunteered in 1916. He ended the aviator's war with the military medal and the war cross on his blue jacket. Paradoxically, he only obtained French nationality in 1922.
Because he intends to be a "witness among men", he follows the drama of the Irish revolution, explores the shallows of Berlin, flies on the front lines of the Aéropostale with Mermoz, sails with the slave traders of the Red Sea .
In 1940, he naturally joined the Resistance and joined the Free French Forces of General de Gaulle.
In May 1943, he composed with his nephew Maurice Druon (to music by Anna Marly) the lyrics to "Chant des Partisans", destined to become the rallying song of the Resistance. In tribute to his fighters, he publishes "The Army of Shadows". He ended this war, captain of aviation and, again, decorated with the cross of war.
At the Liberation, he resumed his activity as a great reporter, attended the birth of Israel, followed the Nuremberg trial, traveled to Africa, Burma, Afghanistan ...
He collects adventures, wars, women, hard liquors, soft drugs, novels, glory, honors and misfortunes ...
François Mauriac, in his Notepad, sums up his life thus: "He is one of those beings to whom all excess will have been allowed, and first of all in the recklessness of the soldier and the resistant, and who will have won the universe without having lost his soul. "
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