One Summer with Baudelaire

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• Antoine Compagnon

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TIM press is pleased to anounce a new book by Antoine Compagnon One Summer with Baudelaire.

From the author of One Summer with Montaigne, the French literary theorist and professor at the College de France, comes another book made from the series of shows on the radio France Inter. After the unexpected success of the show in 2012, Compagnon reached for the microphone again and talked about the poet The Flowers of Evil.

Is there anything more absurd than a summer with Baudelaire? A question that might come to mind to many connoisseurs of the work of the poet of sunset, shadows and autumn. Nevertheless, the poet who admired Delacroix and Manet was one of the most prudent observers of the desecration of art in the modern world. A dandy and a rag-picker at the same time, left and right wing anarchist, Baudelaire was a man of paradox and uniqueness.

Antoine Compagnon begins his first chapter in an apologetic manner given that Baudelaire was not a friendly man. Placed out of context, some of his ideas today may seem displaced and unworthy of such erudition, but his timeless poetry represents an extraordinary pleasure even to a modern reader. A work that speaks for itself, a non-porous literary legacy anchored in the century that he marked overlaps some of his views – on democracy, women, the death penalty - which are unpleasant, even scandalous.

The author of The Flowers of Evil, and even more the author of Paris Spleen, is an injured and a bitter man, a merciless fighter, a mad genius that causes insomnia. Baudelaire's work is diverse, dispersed: poems in verse and prose, art and literary criticism, intimate records, satire and pamphlets. If there was such a thing as "Baudelaire's school" by the end of his life, which he found irritating, it took a long time for his work to find its place in the scholar system, and even now high school students remain surprised when they discover some of his poems in verse or prose.

One can find this paper-back edition by a professor at the College de France encouraging because it shakes up clichés and approximations attributed to the poet of giant wings. In this small format the author analyses the life and work of a man who was stuck in his century, clarifying his thoughts, from those malicious to those imbued with light stars. In thirty three chapters Antoine Compagnon deals with Baudelaire's realism and classicism, the importance of Paris and Honfleur, the city and the sea, but he also speaks of procrastination and laughter.

One Summer with Baudelaire is a book tailored to fit each collector's library as well as expectations of those who seek pleasure in reading in a shade of a parasol.

• ISBN: 978-953-8075-16-2
• Dimensions: 110x170 mm
• Number of pages: 168
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2016
• Original title: Un été avec Baudelaire
• Original language: French
• Translation: Vanda Kušpilić