100 monuments, 100 écrivains : histoires de France
Under the direction of Adrien Goetz
Guides and monographs sometimes -or often- miss giving a soul to monuments. The Centre of national monuments, known in particular for its scholarly and austere publications, has decided to go one step further. It has revisited the nearly one hundred buildings in its «files» with an equal number of contemporary writers, who stage the site of their choice. The results are very varied and always very personal: Marie Nimier imagines the shooting of an ad for shaving foam at the castle of If while Jean-Marie Blas de Robles uses a tombstone from Glanum to bring back to life a gladiator’s last minutes in the arena of Arles. The readers who are not convinced by these stylistic compositions written by the cream of French writers (Robert Badinter, Christophe Donner, Marc Lambron or Hubert Nyssen are among them) may satisfy their appetite for more «traditional» knowledge with the additional notes.
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Review published in the newsletter #159 - from 28 January 2010 to 3 February 2010