Book madness. Something to be admired when you know the difficulties linked to the production of books. Something to smile about too, as there are so many “books” that will remain so only for the authors
Livres en folie has the merit of giving rise to a madness for books or books, at least among the authors.
The event remains major in this respect and provides annual proof of the vitality of book production in Haiti, which far exceeds that of most other countries of the South of its size. In this country, people write and publish.
Things carry within them the defects of their qualities. This beautiful madness of books has its share of haste, of smoke and mirrors, of ridicule. It is the same in all countries, the publication of major books and non-books.
What is probably missing here, and it is not the fault of the book fairs or the authors, is the systematic and intelligent character of the review. Almost total absence of academic criticism as of journalistic criticism. This remark is not to deny the almost heroic efforts of journalists and researchers whose merit can only be saluted.
But it is not systematic, classified in the media.
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Authors as well as readers are thus left to their own devices. The moral of the reception of texts in general and literary texts in particular remains plurality. In France, Mauriac denounced Simone de Beauvoir’s literature as abject, and if American critics had seen in The Grapes of Wrath a masterpiece with prophetic accents, others, now forgotten, had found it only vulgar realism.
However, precisely because it is a polemical space, criticism opens the book to a broader debate including conceptions of literature, social and economic theories, visions of the world and of art.
Criticism is the place where literary and intellectual production is extended and evaluated in its tendencies and disagreements. It thus enlightens readers who may wonder why one critic sees a bestseller as a pathetic railway novel and another as an important work. The reader, of course, retains the freedom of his choices, but he is not alone in his entry into the “general circulation of seeds”.
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Book madness. Something to be admired when you know the difficulties linked to the production of books. Something to smile about too, since there are so many “books” that will only remain so for the authors. And this distressing lack of critical readings that inform us a little about what we are going towards. Perhaps we should demand that books be produced earlier, which would allow relatively authoritative voices to read them in advance and support our choices.
Par Lyonel Trouillot
Cover image: 29th edition of Livres en Folie: June 8, 2023, Karibe Convention Center. UNIBANK
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Poet, novelist, literary critic and screenwriter, Lyonel Trouillot studied law.
