Le Petit Sauvage
Presentation copy inscribed by the author to Sylvie Genevoix: “Pour Sylvie Genevoix, mon imprévisible Petit Sauvage. Bien à vous, Alexandre, 7/07/92.”
Alexandre Jardin’s fourth novel, published when he was twenty-seven, drawing on personal memories: a book that was thoroughly savaged on publication, “strewn with irrelevant calligrams, typographical games and redundant, pointless drawings. Even to ‘make ends meet’, can the most prestigious publisher of French literature this century allow this sort of product into its famous ‘Blanche’ collection? The pretentious foolishness of Le Petit sauvage, a ‘book-clip’ posing as a literary text and displaying crude contempt for the ‘general public’, goes too far. Alexandre Jardin wants supposedly uncultured readers to believe he is following in the footsteps of Apollinaire, Raymond Queneau (the mixing of styles and registers), Henri Michaux and a few others, all published under the NRF imprint. This is not merely bad taste, it is insulting to them.” A savage three-piece suit of a review, though its author is unknown: the piece was, rather less than courageously, unsigned (Le Monde, 28 August 1992).
A fine copy with a distinguished publishing provenance: Sylvie Genevoix, a journalist at Le Figaro and L’Express, was literary director at Éditions Albin Michel, which she had joined in 1992. She is the daughter of the novelist and academician Maurice Genevoix, author of Raboliot and Ceux de 14.