Patrick Rambaud

Patrick Rambaud is a French writer, born with Paris in 1946. He wrote about thirty books of which several parodies. He obtained in 1997, for the Battle (Grasset), the Prix Goncourt as well as the Grand Prix of the novel of the French Academy.

Biography

With Michel-Antoine Burnier, Patrick Rambaud made forty Pastiche S, energy of the text runs to the true book - the such Roland Barthes without sorrow , the trunk and the bark (François Mitterrand), the joke of the things (Simone de Beauvoir) or a ship in your eyes (Francoise Sagan). Among the other victims of the tandem: Louis Aragon, Charles de Gaulle, Philippe Sollers, Andre Malraux.

The two authors also published Journalism without sorrow (Plon editions, 1997), raised in the form of handbook of the journalistic tics (Métaphore S lame, Typographie generating confusion, etc). They raised there in particular the rise of the “Novlangue”: “today, the words which run up per too much realism must be softened. One will not speak any more death but of not-life, of blind man but of blind man. The not-will of the government marks a refusal better carefully. Badly-including/understanding passes better than idiot. ”

They observe in the same book the impoverishment of the vocabulary by the journalistic use of “reducing” words such as “revisiting”: “reducing are presented in the form of formulas to all to say. Their goal is clear: to reduce the diversity of information. Instead of having to choose between seven verbs (to adapt, to change, to correct, to modify, to reconsider, to renovate, to re-examine), you will have recourse to revisit (of English to revisit: to turn over to see). ”

Under the pseudonym of Marguerite Duraille, Patrick Rambaud parodied Marguerite Duras twice: Virginia Q. in 1988 and Mururoa my love in 1996.

It is, in addition, one of the journalists emblematic of the magazine Actuel .

With the Battle, It snowed, Absent the and the Cat boot, it tells in a fictionalized way of the Napoleonean historical episodes. In each one of these four novels it creates or deepens a supporting character (soldier, officer of the Napoleonean army, average Frenchman…), which gives the opportunity to him to show Napoleon and his close relations. the Village idiot takes again the topic of the immersion in the past.

Random links: