Baudry (Jean-Louis) : Les Corps vulnérables

“Les Corps vulnérables” was composed by Jean-Louis Baudry between 1997 and 2010. 1200 pages to say the love and the mourning of the dear one. Here, “corps” (body) has different meanings : the common one, but also a symbolic one : the bodies are shadows that poets – visitors of the Underworld – have encountered, but also representations of memories and feelings. This work aims to gather everything that has been lived with the woman now dead, so as to maintain her presence and to explore the depths of memory.

2017
14 x 22 cm
1256 p.
ISBN : 979-10-92444-50-6

Novel / Memories / Poetry / Love / Loss

Date de publication : 22 août 2018

The body is vulnerable. What is left to save when the loved one disappear ? The author holds on to the body and the substance of memory, to the volume of a life shared. This book – more than a thousand pages, nearly fifteen years to tell the love, the loss, the mourning of the loved woman – is the patient conservation and the faithful reconstitution of a life shared, of everything that will one day be lost. Day by day, details by details, step by step, the book brings the loved one back from the dead. An act similar to the one of Orpheus – not as a symbol, not as a poet’s dream, but as a humble work, tireless and faithful. Writing is a way to fight death, but it also brings back the past, which progressively stands in the place of the present. The book we hold is heavy with the vivid burden of memories, heavy with the presence of the woman long gone, but who keeps on living through those pages.

Jean-Louis Baudry was born in 1930. He published his first novel in 1962. He then joins the comity of the review Tel Quel, and contributes to the questioning of the traditional character and narrative modes. Author of several essays on literature, he also wrote three novels during the 90’s : Personnage dans un Rideau (1991), Clémence et l’hypothèse de la beauté (1996) and À celle qui n’a pas de nom (2000). Jean-Louis Baudry also published two essays on the act of writing and of reading. He died in 2015.

Foreign Rights

L’Atelier contemporain attempts to publish books of art and literature and books which associate artists and writers, with the concern to revive a dialogue between the literary and plastic arts.
The ambition is to explore the « paths of the création » through five collections gathered within the company : essays on art, written by artists, conversations and correspondences, monographs, and literature.

Autres livres de cette collection