Charles Dantzig
Charles Dantzig is a French author, born in Tarbes on October 7, 1961.
Early life and career
Charles Dantzig decided to study Law after his baccalauréat. Having completed a doctorate in Law from the university of Toulouse, he moved to Paris.A few years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he published an essay on Remy de Gourmont entitled Remy de Gourmont, Cher Vieux Daim !, soon followed by his first collection of poems, Le chauffeur est toujours seul'', to critical acclaim.
Author and publisher
Charles Dantzig joined the publishing company Les Belles Lettres, launching three new collections: "Brique", specialising in contemporary literature, "Eux & nous", in which French writers discuss the authors of classical Antiquity, and "Trésors de la nouvelle", which, as its name suggests, specialises in short stories. He published the first French translation of a collection of poetry by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thousand-and-First Ship, and himself translated the play The Vegetable. He also translated the first French edition of a collection of Oscar Wilde's journalism, Aristotle at an Afternoon Tea. Charles Dantzig also oversaw the publication of Marcel Schwob's complete works.Les Belles Lettres published his early essays, including Il n'y a pas d'Indochine and La Guerre du cliché, and his poetry collections Que le siècle commence, Ce qui se passe vraiment dans les toiles de Jouy, and À quoi servent les avions ?, which foreshadowed the events of 9/11. He later wrote, "A few people have said to me that the mysterious power of poetry is such that it foresees events. I'm not so sure. Poetry reasons rather than foresees. The result – as in all literature, and even in all works of art – is thought. Except that rather than obtaining it by sparking speculations, it does so by sparking images, within the demands of rhythm, and in some cases, prosody". The first selection of his poems was published in 2003 with the title En souvenir des long-courriers. 2003 also saw the publication of the Bestiaire, a collection of animal poetry.
He then moved to Grasset, where he oversees the "Cahiers Rouges" series, breathing fresh life into the list by publishing cult classics as well as major twentieth-century diarists and authors of memoirs, or publishing brand-new anthologies. As an editor at Grasset's, he published many award-winning literary authors.
Between 2006 and 2008, Charles Dantzig penned the epilogue for the special reports in the monthly Magazine Littéraire, offering his iconoclastic literary views on various topics, from the French-speaking world to authors and psychoanalysis. From 2011, it has been followed by the literary chronicle in the Magazine Littéraire. He iss also a producer on the cultural public radio France Culture, where he created "Secret professionnel" on the artistic creation, now followed by "Personnages en personne", a weekly portrait of a fictional character.
In 2011 he re-created the famous Stendhal Club, which he presides. It has only 12 members in the world. The Stendhal Club has published two issues of his "possibly annual review".
In 2015, he landed a new literary collection under the name, "Le Courage". It is the only multilingual review in the world, presenting every text in its original language and with its French translation. In 2017, the review has received the Paris Rive gauche award of the Best literary review
He was awarded the Grand Prix Jean Giono for his body of work and the grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand.
Novels
Charles Dantzig's first novel, Confitures de crimes, was published by Les Belles Lettres in 1993. It recounted the life of a poet elected president of France, who went on to start a war. This work of fiction was the first indication of Charles Dantzig's passion for literature and his ironic handling of posturing and comedy. His second novel, Nos vies hâtives, was awarded the Prix Jean-Freustié and the Roger Nimier Prize. The third, Un film d'amour, was published in 2003. It was a choral novel with a scholarly structure that supposedly drew on a TV documentary on the death of a young film-maker by the name of Birbillaz. "At first, the reader takes this book – intelligent from the first line to the last – for a formalist whimsy, before grasping that it aims for a kind of totality, like all great books. It leaves behind its ostensible subject, the portrait of the absent figure, Birbillaz, to focus on his brother – his double, his mirror image – like something out of Robert Louis Stevenson: a failure in life, bitter, rotten to the core, who says no to everything, to the point of obstinacy and pain. No to love, to talent, to creativity, to goodness, to beauty. A "no!" that he shouts in people's faces, to the very gates of Hell – and no doubt beyond.". Grasset published Charles Dantzig's fourth novel, Je m'appelle François, in 2007. It was inspired by the real-life crimes of Christophe Rocancourt, which the author transformed and transfigured into a new fictional destiny. In August 2011 appears "Dans un avion pour Caracas", a novel entirely happening in a plane flight between Paris and Caracas.In 2015, Grasset published Charles Dantzig's fifth novel, Histoire de l'amour et de la haine, which tells about the turmoil that occurred in France in 2013 on the occasion of the voting of the law for same-sex marriage. The plot is developed in a very innovative way. Each chapter is a theme or an image that is addressed by the polyphony of the thoughts and experience of the seven characters in a surprising choral structure.
Essays
2005 saw the publication of Charles Dantzig's Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française, which was awarded a number of prizes, including the Prix Décembre, The Prix de l'Essai de l'Académie française and the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. The Dictionnaire gave him free rein to develop his aesthetic vision of literature, illustrated with numerous comments on style. The work enjoyed considerable critical and popular esteem, not only in France but also abroad, and was hailed as the major literary event of the year."A bestseller in the francophone world, Dantzig's Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française is en extraordinary undertaking, and anyone who buys it is expecting a fact-filled reference book will be either disappointed or, more likely, happily surprised. Biased, mischievous, provocative, Dantzig is also massively well read, funny and instructive. He is an elegant writer, and is clearly passionate about books." Patrick McGuinness, Times Literary Supplement, jul, 14. 2006
In January 2009, Grasset published a new major work by Charles Dantzig. The Encyclopédie capricieuse du tout et du rien, written as a compilation of lists, enjoyed considerable success. It met with wide critical acclaim and made the front cover of Le Monde in a cartoon by Plantu. It won the Prix Duménil in May 2009 following a unanimous vote.
Charles Dantzig published his essay on reading, Pourquoi Lire ?, in October 2010. It again met with immediate critical acclaim and popular success and was awarded the Grand Prix Giono.
"Divided into over seventy short chapters, the book is an impassioned, wide-ranging and occasionally humorous meditation, buttressed by well-chosen quotations, on reading in all its aspects from "Learning to read", in which he says that he has never understood the pejorative tag attached to the word "bookish", through "Reading aloud" to "How to read".", Adrian Tahourdin,
In 2012, he published a page in the French newspaper Le Monde called "Du populisme en littérature" where he expresses his concern on a dangerous trend in modern literature. Wouldn't more and more "realist" writers be in fact serving some obscure reactionary forces? It has raised a huge controversy all over the world...
In January 2013, he publishes a new essay on masterpieces in literature, the first one in French language, "A propos des chefs-d'oeuvre." The book is already translated in many foreign countries, Italy, Germany, China.
Faithful to his fondness for anglophone literature, Charles Dantzig publishes in May 2013 a new French translation of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with a long foreword, "La première Gay Pride". He stresses the too often forgotten gay subtext of Wilde's play. This foreword echoes a tribune he published in Le Monde, "Non à la collusion de la haine", against the wave of homophobic hatred in France during the gay wedding quarrel. This tribune was signed by dozens of French writers, intellectuals and artists, gay and not gay.
In 2016, he published at Laffont, in the famous collection "Bouquins", a book entitled Les Ecrivains et leurs mondes which includes the Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature, the Guerre du cliché, and a new essay called Ma République idéale. He became the youngest author published in this collection.
In 2017, he published at Grasset Traité des gestes, a thorough study of all the well-known and less-known gestures done by the human being. Based on personal memories, historical or artistic examples, this various and startling essay raises the questions of the permanence of gestures and their true meaning, whether it can be found. The literary magazine Transfuge has dedicated to him his cover for the third time, which makes him the only author having been given this distinction.
In 2019, Charles Dantzig published his Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature mondiale.
Poetry
In January 2010, Charles Dantzig published two books of poetry simultaneously: a collection of his own new poems in Grasset's Collection Bleue, Les nageurs, and an anthology of his poetry with new writing and critical essays, La Diva aux longs cils. The poems were selected by Patrick McGuinness of St Anne's College, Oxford. At the same time, Charles Dantzig's novel Je m'appelle François was published in paperback and his translations of Oscar Wilde and F. Scott Fitzgerald were republished in the Cahiers Rouges collection. Les nageurs and La Diva aux longs cils were presented at the Maison Française in Oxford in 2010.In 2018, he published a new volume of poetry, Démocratie de bord de mer.