Dawn, Dusk or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy

Name: Dawn, Dusk or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy
Brand: Reza, Yasmina
SKU: PR-9780307269218
Price: 5.54 EUR
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 2.8 (150 reviews)

2.8

(150)

Le Pitch

Présentation de l'éditeur An enormous success in France and a media sensation around the world, Yasmina Reza’s Dawn, Dusk or Night will startle English-language readers with its utterly unorthodox (and candid and witty) portrait of a man in his quest for ultimate power. In 2006, Yasmina Reza, the most celebrated playwright in France, asked Nicolas Sarkozy a simple question: Would he allow her to spend the next year with him and his team as he campaigned for the French presidency? His response was an unqualified yes. To the alarm of his advisers, and the consternation of many of her friends, who feared she was making a pact with the devil, she picked up her notebook and her pencil, and off she went. It is not enough to say that she was an observer of Sarkozy’s rise to power. Rather, hers is the account of a brilliant woman of letters dancing in orbit with the most powerful man in France. Their casual exchanges, her remarkable insights, their phenomenal experience exist as a play of words and glances, framed as scenes from a headlong drama. Through the greenrooms, bus rides, and flights, along the campaign trail; in strategy sessions and at meetings with heads of state;, in all hours of the day and night, they develop a relationship that knows no parallel, bridging the arts and politics, abiding within a purely intellectual sphere without judgment, conflict, or competition. The groundbreaking Dawn, Dusk or Night defies genre to offer a spellbinding look at the interplay between two formidable champions bound by intellect and nation. Extrait Man alone is a dream. Man alone is an illusion. One likes to think of them in an emblematic solitude, but men only pretend to be alone. This is deceiving. Predators, they are called, but predators are solitary. Without doubt, within their territory, men can be predatory. Elsewhere, they are tame. In the office at Place Beauvau, where we meet for the first time, he listens graciously, and then I very quickly perceive, in little ways, something with which I am all too familiar, impatience. He has understood. He is “honored” that I would like to do his portrait. He says, So, you want to be there. I say, Yes. Later, I am talking with my friend Marc in a café. Anyway, you’ll reinvent him. Writers, like tyrants, are capable of bending the world to their will. No landscape. No city. For a long time, I will not see a thing. Not a place, not even him. Thus, this day, a highway through nowhere. Road signs, exit. Warehouses. Venue. Headlong rush into the dressing room. Constant stream of things to nibble. In the prefabricated makeup room, some prunes, some chocolate, candied fruit squares. Him nibbling constantly. Nibbling, gobbling, rushing. I had noticed that he ate fast, just as I had noticed that he limped. Getting dressed, after the meeting in Agen, he keeps repeating, They want to cut down on the working hours, when we want to boost the purchasing power. He has said it during the speech, in front of six thousand people—had said it solemnly the night before, during the dinner, in his apartment at the Ministère (with a slightly ridiculous solemnity, as if seriously testing). He repeats the sentence over and over to these people he has no need to convince, he is happy, he repeats the words as he changes his shirt, still in disbelief, still waiting, like a child, for the umpteenth approval. In front of André Glucksmann asking questions (twenty-five minutes each, in a slow and didactic voice) on Europe’s future, EU energy policy, or the fate of Africa, he slouches in his chair, upper body projecting patience, legs restless, opening and closing in perpetual motion. As the Bastille Day garden party winds down, he is hugging Christian Clavier. They are hugging the way actors do. Wild with joy, with love, with You, I mean you, my pal, shouted at the whole world. The kind of hug I have seen a thousand times, other places, other faces, actors hell-bent on hugging publicly, drunk Afficher moinsAfficher plus

Dawn, Dusk or Night: My Year With Nicolas Sarkozy

2.8

(150)

Indisponible

Le Pitch

Présentation de l'éditeur An enormous success in France and a media sensation around the world, Yasmina Reza’s Dawn, Dusk or Night will startle English-language readers with its utterly unorthodox (and candid and witty) portrait of a man in his quest for ultimate power. In 2006, Yasmina Reza, the most celebrated playwright in France, asked Nicolas Sarkozy a simple question: Would he allow her to spend the next year with him and his team as he campaigned for the French presidency? His response was an unqualified yes. To the alarm of his advisers, and the consternation of many of her friends, who feared she was making a pact with the devil, she picked up her notebook and her pencil, and off she went. It is not enough to say that she was an observer of Sarkozy’s rise to power. Rather, hers is the account of a brilliant woman of letters dancing in orbit with the most powerful man in France. Their casual exchanges, her remarkable insights, their phenomenal experience exist as a play of words and glances, framed as scenes from a headlong drama. Through the greenrooms, bus rides, and flights, along the campaign trail; in strategy sessions and at meetings with heads of state;, in all hours of the day and night, they develop a relationship that knows no parallel, bridging the arts and politics, abiding within a purely intellectual sphere without judgment, conflict, or competition. The groundbreaking Dawn, Dusk or Night defies genre to offer a spellbinding look at the interplay between two formidable champions bound by intellect and nation. Extrait Man alone is a dream. Man alone is an illusion. One likes to think of them in an emblematic solitude, but men only pretend to be alone. This is deceiving. Predators, they are called, but predators are solitary. Without doubt, within their territory, men can be predatory. Elsewhere, they are tame. In the office at Place Beauvau, where we meet for the first time, he listens graciously, and then I very quickly perceive, in little ways, something with which I am all too familiar, impatience. He has understood. He is “honored” that I would like to do his portrait. He says, So, you want to be there. I say, Yes. Later, I am talking with my friend Marc in a café. Anyway, you’ll reinvent him. Writers, like tyrants, are capable of bending the world to their will. No landscape. No city. For a long time, I will not see a thing. Not a place, not even him. Thus, this day, a highway through nowhere. Road signs, exit. Warehouses. Venue. Headlong rush into the dressing room. Constant stream of things to nibble. In the prefabricated makeup room, some prunes, some chocolate, candied fruit squares. Him nibbling constantly. Nibbling, gobbling, rushing. I had noticed that he ate fast, just as I had noticed that he limped. Getting dressed, after the meeting in Agen, he keeps repeating, They want to cut down on the working hours, when we want to boost the purchasing power. He has said it during the speech, in front of six thousand people—had said it solemnly the night before, during the dinner, in his apartment at the Ministère (with a slightly ridiculous solemnity, as if seriously testing). He repeats the sentence over and over to these people he has no need to convince, he is happy, he repeats the words as he changes his shirt, still in disbelief, still waiting, like a child, for the umpteenth approval. In front of André Glucksmann asking questions (twenty-five minutes each, in a slow and didactic voice) on Europe’s future, EU energy policy, or the fate of Africa, he slouches in his chair, upper body projecting patience, legs restless, opening and closing in perpetual motion. As the Bastille Day garden party winds down, he is hugging Christian Clavier. They are hugging the way actors do. Wild with joy, with love, with You, I mean you, my pal, shouted at the whole world. The kind of hug I have seen a thousand times, other places, other faces, actors hell-bent on hugging publicly, drunk Afficher moinsAfficher plus