“I am writing this book to get fired,” says the narrator on the first page of Frédéric Beigbeder’s 99F, a satire of the world of advertising. It worked – the author, an award-winning adman, was summarily sacked by his company, Young & Rubicam, the world’s largest ad agency. The publicity – he is taking them to court for wrongful dismissal – has made Beigbeder the star of this year’s rentrée littéraire, and hasn’t done his sales any harm either; he’s top of the best-seller lists.
Which isn’t to say that 99F isn’t a good read. Proust it ain’t, but it’s a sharp, delirious take on the evils of consumerism that had me giggling deep into the night, even if I didn’t get all the in-jokes. “This novel describes the marvelous world of modern communication,” Beigbeder explains. “A world where we spend millions of francs to make people who don’t have the means buy things they don’t need.”
Deliberately or not, Beigbeder has found a clever way to get noticed among the seven trillion new titles of this rentrée. So has Amélie Nothomb, another media-friendly provocateur who made her name on TV talk shows by wearing strange hats, and discussing her fondness for eating rotten vegetables. Her new novel, La métaphysique des tubes (Albin Michel), is an autobiography from ages zero to three; the first half is told from the point of view of God, starting with the egg’s descent to the uterus. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “navel-gazing.”
Also selling well is Dans ces bras-là, by Camille Laurens (P.O.L.), who like Beigbeder and Nothomb is on the long list for this year’s Prix Goncourt; Jean-Christophe Grange’s Le concile de Pierre (Albin Michel), the follow-up to his serial-killer best-seller “Blood-Red Rivers” (Harvill; French title Les rivières pourpres), just released as a big-budget film; and Il neigeait (Grasset), Patrick Rambaud’s sequel to “The Battle” (Pimlico; French title La bataille), the fictionalized story of Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign.
Among the translations are Englishman Stephen Fry, whose comic novel L’hippopotame (Belfond; English title “The Hippopotamus”) follows the success of last year’s Mensonges mensonges (“The Liar”), and Cuban Zoë Valdès, exiled in Paris for the last five years. Her bitter-sweet love song to Havana “Yocanda in the Paradise of Nada” (Allison & Busby) appeared in English in 1999, and this year sees two new French translations: Le pied de mon père (Gallimard), an autobiographical novel about growing up under Castro, and Mon premier amour (Actes Sud).
In non-fiction, the rentrée is dominated by the memoirs of two ex-ministers. Claude Allègre’s Toute vérité est bonne à dire (Laffont) is a siren call for education reform, while L’abolition (Fayard), by human rights activist and ex-justice minister Robert Badinter, tells his role in the end of the death penalty, from 1972 – when he watched an execution – to 1981, when he led the Senate in its vote for its abolition.

Tintin in Palestine
The re-issue of an early Tintin album has cast some interesting light on an ongoing trouble spot: Palestine. Last week saw the re-publication of the original 1950 edition of Au pays de l’or noir (Casterman, 109F), known to English fans as “Land of Black Gold.” Unlike the current edition, which takes place in an imaginary country called Khemed where various Arab groups are at war, the original is set in Palestine just before the declaration of the state of Israel. The baddies include the British occupiers, who throw our boy reporter in prison, and various warring Jewish and Palestinian groups. Apparently all this politics – not to mention the role played by the British – upset the English editor, who convinced Hergé to “touch up” the album in 1971.

News & Reviews
“No Logo” by Naomi Klein (Flamingo)
This intelligent and surprisingly calm polemic is an attempt by a 30-year-old Canadian journalist to chronicle the creeping ways in which corporations are invading our public spaces and private lives. Her main targets are brand-marketeers like Nike and Coke who have given up making products (that sweaty work is subcontracted out to the Third World) and moved into selling brand names as lifestyle.

“Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits” & “Tête à Tête: Portraits by Henri Cartier-Bresson” (both Thames & Hudson)
One lived for color, the other works uniquely in stark black and white. Both are masters of portraiture, as these two excellent and richly illustrated volumes prove.
“What impassions me most” van Gogh wrote to his sister in 1890, “is the portrait, the modern portrait.” Like his fellow introspective Dutchman Rembrandt, van Gogh painted dozens of self-portraits. He was also a great painter of others, with a tenderness that makes your hair tingle, as the 228 portraits in this luscious book show. They range from early sketches of beggars to the great painting of Doctor Gachet, whom Vincent tried to capture wearing “the heart-broken expression of our time.”
The Cartier-Bresson book contains 134 portraits. A few are of ordinary people, like the earliest, of a beggar in the Warsaw ghetto in 1931. The rest is a rollcall of the 20th-century avant-garde: Jung, Sartre, Capote, Picasso, Chanel, Matisse, Che, Beckett, Genet... The introduction, a marvelous meditation on portraiture, is by another great chronicler of the 20th century, art critic Ernst Gombrich: at 91, he is a year younger than Cartier-Bresson.

“Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and The North American Indian” (Verve/S&S; French edition Marval)
Published to accompany the exhibition at the Hôtel de Sully (Sept 28 to Jan 3, 62 rue St-Antoine, 4e, tel: 01 42 74 47 75), this superb volume contains 150 of Curtis’ photos, all reproduced from the original master prints. Curtis is often criticized for staging his photos, but they are the most important visual legacy of a vanished way of life, drenched in dignity and sorrow. Is this why the West was won?

Briefly Noted
“Super-Cannes” by J.G. Ballard (Flamingo), “1984” for the dot.com age, an air-conditioned nightmare set in a futuristic business park on the French Riviera, by the man The Guardian called “the Dr Moreau of British fiction.”

“Me Speak Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris (Little Brown), in which the under-achieving American author comes to Paris and tries to learn French; some parts, notably the Easter bunny sketch, are very funny.

“Negrophilia” by Petrine Archer-Straw (Thames & Hudson), the story of 1920s Paris’ love affair with all things black, from African art to Josephine Baker. Great illustrations, worthy but rather stodgy text.

“Artisans and Guilds of France” by François Icher (Abrams), a richly illustrated account of the stonecutters, plasterers, woodworkers et al who built France’s great cathedrals and châteaux, translated from the French.