Bernard-Henri Lévy: By the Book

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/books/review/bernard-henri-levy-by-the-book.html

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The author of “The Genius of Judaism” believes the current political situation in the United States is best illuminated by Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

I’m answering your questions from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where I am making a documentary on the battle for Mosul. In biblical times, Mosul was known as Nineveh, the city in which Jonah delivered his prophecy. So the book that lies on the table in my little hotel room tonight is the Book of Jonah, which figures prominently in my own book, “The Genius of Judaism.” And next to it, since this is the only way to read texts like the Book of Jonah, is one of the great commentaries that Jonah provoked, that of Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno. Sforno, a rabbi and philosopher who lived in Italy in the first half of the 16th century, imparts to Jonah’s wild and marvelous story (the story of a prophet who prophesies not in Israel but in the capital of evil that was Nineveh) its great metaphysical depth.

What’s the last great book you read?

“The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” Nabokov’s first novel in English. Reading it, one senses, almost physically, the change in languages, the metamorphosis from one language to another — and thus the very work of literature. I could also cite a novel by Serge Joncour, a French writer who is, I believe, unknown in the United States. His “Repose-Toi sur Moi” is a very beautiful love story.

What’s the best classic novel you recently read for the first time?

Goethe’s “Elective Affinities.” It’s strange, these great writers whose reputation looms so large that it eclipses their works and gives you the feeling of having read them in the distant past. When chance puts one of those works in your hands, you’re dazzled, as if you were reading the first words of a very young and very talented writer.

What’s your favorite book that no one else has heard of?

Balzac’s “Treatise on Modern Stimulants.” It seems that very few people know this work, at least in the United States. The five stimulants in question are coffee, alcohol, tea, sugar and tobacco. And in this essay, one gets the sense that Balzac is rereading his entire “Human Comedy” with an eye to the influence that each of the five might have had on his characters.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, philosophers, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes. Michel Houellebecq, the cardinal writer of my generation, the one before whom all of us, whether we like it or not (and without his having willed it), have had to measure ourselves. This actually worked out well for me, because we wrote a book together (“Public Enemies,” Random House, 2011). And last I want to cite essayist Christopher Hitchens, who died a few years ago, though I think of him so often that I sometimes have the sense that he’s not quite dead and still here.

What books do you think best explain or illuminate the political situation in France today? In Israel? And in the United States?

With respect to France, the answer is a forthcoming book on terrorism by another fine writer named Yann Moix. For the United States, it’s Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” What better depiction of the country that has just elected — evidently without shame — the incredible Mr. Trump? As for Israel, I will go for Amos Oz’s “Judas.” I know the story is set in 1950s Jerusalem, but in a way that doesn’t matter: The book seems to speak to us solely of today.

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid when writing?

I read books that help me tune out my own music and prevent me from wallowing in my own effects and rhetoric. Conversely, I avoid writers who are too close to me stylistically so as to help me “bend the stick.” In short, I find other people’s writing very useful as a remedy for my own — an antidote, if you will.

What moves you most in a work of literature?

The inducement of a feeling, a shiver, a way of viewing or assessing the world of which I had previously been wholly unaware. That is the sole attraction of literature for me: to add something to the world and to my idea of it; to explore other ways of existing.

Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

What I would love to read is an epic, a real epic on a scale commensurate with the upheavals of civilization through which we are living, an epic of the migrations, revolutions, assorted mutations, prostitutions and emotions that are the hallmarks of our age. But the epic genre requires a suitable language. Which of today’s languages would be up to the task? Certainly not French, no more so than English. Hebrew, perhaps.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night?

I read on paper and on the screen — either way. Several books at a time, obviously. Because if the appeal of literature is to help you tunnel into other worlds, other languages, other sensations, and so on, why hold back? Why not take full advantage? Why not pursue to the limit this prodigious multiplication of visions of the world and of other languages?

How do you organize your books?

In piles and jumbles in my library, near my bed, on my desk, in my car, in the hallways of my apartment — everywhere! But your real question, of course, is how they’re arranged on the shelf. Our first impulse is usually to shelve them alphabetically by author. But what happens if you don’t know the author’s name? Or when you know that you’ll forget the name as soon as the book is shelved and therefore lose any chance of ever finding it again? Well, you use the other alphabet, the alphabet of themes. Judaism, ethics, America, Europe, autobiography, Goethe, Faulkner, Spanish Civil War, Bosnia, resistance, Islam, rock ’n’ roll, painting, all of the books on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Spinoza or the Talmud. . . . A juxtaposition of both alphabetical orders, in other words: by author and by subject. It is the mix of orders that makes the library truly mine and ensures that the library reflects the writer.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

The books of ideological adversaries whom I respect. As a matter of fact, I was tidying up my library before leaving for Erbil. And I realized that I had, neatly arranged, all of the books of Edwy Plenel, a French journalist and essayist who was editor of Le Monde before founding a site called Mediapart. He takes positions opposed to my own on numerous questions that matter to me. But I respect him.

What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,” edited with a glossary by W. J. Craig, published by Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

The heroine is Ariane from Albert Cohen’s “Belle du Seigneur.” The hero is Jordan from “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” An antihero, also from Hemingway, is Col. Richard Cantwell from “Across the River and Into the Trees.” Cantwell is not a villain, of course, but he clearly is an antihero!

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was a dreamer. And, if I remember rightly, a compulsive reader. I had the idea that real life, life full and fulfilled, lay as much in books as in life. But I didn’t read children’s books. I never liked what goes by the name of “children’s literature.” My recollection is that I gravitated very early toward real literature — Walter Scott, Dickens, Jules Verne and good spy novels.

If you could require François Hollande to read one book, what would it be? And the American president?

For Hollande, who has never married, I would recommend Dostoyevsky’s “The Eternal Husband.” And for Trump, E. E. Cummings’s “Complete Poems,” edited by George J. Firmage, if only for the line that became famous after Woody Allen put it in the mouth of one of the characters in “Hannah and Her Sisters”: “nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I think I would choose to bring three people back from the dead: Rashi; Emmanuel Levinas; and the great kabbalist rabbi, author of “The Soul of Life,” Chaim of Volozhin. The three of them would have the most extraordinary and unimaginable Talmudic discussion! To this meeting I would also invite my daughter, novelist Justine Lévy.

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

The new one, of course: “The Genius of Judaism.” It sums up all the others, serving as a sort of point of convergence of everything that I’ve tried to do, everything that I’ve written, and nearly everything that I’ve experienced over the past 40 years. The great reckoning with myself, with my memory, and with those close to me.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

The last book that I wasn’t able to finish was “Petrolio,” the long, unfinished novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini that was published 17 years after his death. The overrated book par excellence is Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” There is, of course, the anti-Semitism with which it is infected. There is the anti-Jewish rage that reaches peaks rarely seen in modern literature and that demonstrates, parenthetically, that the United States is less immune than it thinks to this strain of madness. But beyond that, beyond the tragic manifestation of American anti-Semitism, I find that the book is simply boring and meager.

Whom would you want to write your life story?

The story of my life? Gilles Hertzog. He has written two books. “Les Brigades de la Mer” recounts one of the least known and most beautiful episodes in the history of the international brigades that formed to fight nascent fascism in Spain in 1936. His next book was “Le Séjour des Dieux,” a sort of historical novel depicting the dialogue, confrontation and, basically, the twin ambitions of Michelangelo and Titian. Plus, he’s one of my closest friends. And he’s been with me at the riskiest times of my life.

What do you plan to read next?

Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles,” which Simon & Schuster published in 2004. I am one of those who were pleased that he won the Nobel. There is, in Dylan, a bit of the legacy of the greatest European and American poets. But I also want to read the book because I hope to find in it (I’m probably kidding myself) the secret key to his work and the reason why I find it so admirable.

Responses translated from French by Steven Kennedy.