With a mischievous eye, cigarette holder in his mouth, the writer, long accustomed to television sets, walked in recent years with the help of a cane but his pen remained alert. "I may run slower but I think faster," he boasted, in a book of interviews with his friend Josyane Savigneau published in January 2019.

Born on November 28, 1936 in Talence (Gironde) in a family of industrialists, left-wing Gaullists and Catholics, Philippe Sollers quickly abandoned his studies to devote himself to literature. But, above all, he exchanged his surname of Jewels for that of Sollers, from the Latin "sollus" and "ars" ("all art").

At the age of 22, he published his first novel "A Curious Solitude", praised by Aragon. "The destiny of writing is before him, like an admirable meadow," wrote the poet in the Lettres françaises. Three years later, in 1961, his second novel, "Le Parc" received the Prix Médicis.

A promising young writer, Philippe Sollers founded, with Jean-Edern Hallier, the literary magazine "Tel Quel" in the spring of 1960. In the epigraph, it takes up a formula of Nietzsche: "I want the world and want it as it is, and still want it, want it eternally".

The magazine intends to highlight all forms of avant-garde, including literary. It defends the Nouveau Roman and authors such as Francis Ponge or the future Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon. She lent her columns to writers such as Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, before opening up to semiology and defending Roland Barthes. "Tel Quel" will also publish Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.

In the early 1970s, the magazine took up the cause of Chinese Maoism. In 1974, a delegation composed in particular of Philippe Sollers and Roland Barthes went to China at the invitation of the government. This blindness vis-à-vis the Chinese authoritarian regime will earn the writer the sarcasm of the sinologist Simon Leys.

Philippe Sollers denied ever having been a "Maoist" but, in the book of interviews with Josyane Savigneau, he said: "I persist in saying (...) that this appalling revolution means that China is now the world's leading power."

As a sign of his fascination with China, all his books contain references to this country.

Double love life

After Mao's death in 1976, the magazine changed course and took up the cause of the United States. The author publishes an article in Le Monde to castigate not only Maoism but also Marxism.

In 1982, he founded a new magazine, L'Infini. He also left Éditions du Seuil for Gallimard, where he became a member of the reading committee and collection director.

As such, he refused Amélie Nothomb's novel "Hygiène de l'assassin", finally published by Albin Michel.

It was with his novel "Femmes" (1983) that Philippe Sollers achieved notoriety. Critics denounce the "pornography" they detect in this text. "This is my best book. My unsurpassable paradise", retorts this fine connoisseur of Casanova (to whom he dedicated a biography), author of a dictionary in love with Venice.

Married since 1967 to the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, with whom he had a son David, he devoted a "crazy love" to the Belgian writer Dominique Rolin, 23 years his senior.

Their half-century correspondence was published in 2017 and 2018. He had revealed his double love life in 2013 in "Portraits of women".

To his detractors, he was "futile", "worldly", "boring" and proud. To the question, "if you were to die tomorrow, what would remain of you?", he replied: "a box of books", adding: "One will wonder how one could have been taken in the image of such a media and casual Sollers when he is a hard worker."

© 2023 AFP