Book lovers spread the word at French readfest

Book lovers spread the word at French readfest
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

Paris, Oct 11: Hardcore Bibliophiles will be out in force this weekend as France's cultural authorities organise a three-day word-fest during which hundreds of actors and amateurs take to the streets and other public places for an orgy of reading aloud.

Railway stations, cafes, bookshops, buses, hospitals and even dance-halls and prisons will ring to the sound of voices reading texts of every kind poems, detective thrillers, plays, fairy tales in the 12th annual festival known as "Lire en Fete", roughly translatable as Reading for Pleasure.

As many as 6,000 readings have been lined up in France and its outposts around the world in a campaign of bringing culture to a wider audience comparable with the spring-time "Fete de la Musique", another 1980s innovation from the fertile imagination of then culture minister Jack Lang.

The increase in popularity in live-reading events in recent years is seen as a clear consequence of the annual "Lire en Fete" festival. "The object of the exercise is to get as many people as possible to participate, not just those who are already used to handling or reading books but also small communities in the villages and countryside, for example," an organiser said. The success of these events, by the organizers is due to a growing appreciation for "conviviality around a text," she explained.

With France currently holding the European Union presidency, the National Book Centre has invited writers from all its European partners to join in the festival starting on Friday, including Antonia Byatt and Tim Parks from Britain, Michael Collins from Ireland and the Anglo-German writer W G Sebald.

Several towns are organising book fairs, notably Bordeaux which is holding its 14th annual Salon du Livre, Marseille and Cognac. Inevitably the greatest concentration of imaginative literary initiatives is to be found in the Paris region. The Fleche D'Or dance-hall in eastern Paris is staging its "Bal a la Page", a "literary ball" where salsa and waltz sessions will be broken off sporadically to allow thriller writers to read extracts from their latest work. An abandoned factory in the 11th arrondissement has been temporarily refurbished as a venue for readings from novels about working life. In the Seine-Saint Denis department just north of Paris, 27 bookshops are to hold 27 simultaneous readings by black-robed actresses of "Jacques L'Eventreur" (Jack the Ripper), a text by the surrealist writer Robert Desnos about the famous Victorian serial killer.

The Saint-Lazare rail terminal will see two days of readings by detective thriller-writers from their latest works (the French state-owned railways SNCF) has initiated an annual best thriller prize), while the Gare de L'Est on Saturday sees readings for children of stories of witches. In the first such initiative by a public administration, the economy ministry has urged every one of its 180,000 employees to donate at least one book to voluntary associations who will pass them on to libraries in Armenia, Benin, Cameroon, Madagascar, Niger and Romania.

Meanwhile, French writers have been invited to offer readings at culture centres in such cities as Krakow (Poland), Turku (Finland), Cairo, Yerevan and Almaty. Last year France's exercise in spreading French took in no fewer than 91 other countries.