Archive, An

I wanted to tell the story of Les ditions de Minuit as I saw them as a child. And also to tell the story of my father, J r me Lindon, as I saw him and loved him. Are there archives for that? And how to be an archive of the child that I once was?

An Archive tells the story of Les ditions de Minuit, the legendary Parisian publisher of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Monique Wittig, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Marie NDiaye, and so many others. It is the tale of its editor, J r me Lindon, who directed the publishing house from 1948 until his death in 2001. It is also the chronicle of growing up in a family of writers who were, to the eyes of a young child, the temple of literature. Looking back on a childhood immersed in books, Mathieu Lindon draws a portrait of his father, narrating his use of power and his avarice, but also his generosity, his enthusiasm for literature and defense of authors, and his commitment to politics--during the German Occupation, through the Algerian War of Independence, and for the Palestinian cause after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Opening the archive of his own memory, Lindon gives a moving, ferocious, and often funny account of a defining period of twentieth-century French intellectual history.