It is hard not to twitch with embarrassment at the plight of new French culture minister Fleur Pellerin, who was unable to name a novel by France’s recent Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano despite having enjoyed a “wonderful” lunch with him.
Perhaps, being charitable, it was one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments, when the words you’re looking for slip out of your grasp. We’ve all had them. Perhaps she has read all of Modiano’s oeuvre. But then she admits: “I’ve no problem in confessing that I’ve not had any time to read for the past two years. I read a lot of notes, a lot of legislative texts, news, AFP stories, but I read very little,” squirming when it was noted that a culture minister might, well, enjoy partaking of a novel or two here or there.
At any rate, she’s not the only politician to incur the wrath of the world of literature. Another French minister, Frédéric Lefebvre, slipped up in 2011 when he was asked about the book which had made the greatest impression on him. It is, he responded, “without doubt” Zadig et Voltaire. This was not, in fact, a book, rather a French clothes chain.
“It’s a lesson about life, and I reread it pretty often,” said Lefebvre, who had meant to refer to Voltaire’s philosophical novel Zadig. “We are in France, a country where literature is placed on a pedestal and above all where it goes hand in hand with power,” said a piece in response to his slip-up in Le Figaro. “Even if, since the departure of Mitterrand, literature has deserted the Elysée, it is always bad for a politician to confuse a clothing brand and a philosophical tale.”
And how about Sarah Palin, whose interview with Katie Couric back in 2008 makes Pellerin’s comments pale into insignificance, on the embarrassment front. Couric asked Palin which news sources she read regularly.
“I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media,” responded Palin. But which, exactly? “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years ... I have a vast variety of source where we get our news. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, ‘wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, DC, may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?’ Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.” The horror.
I have my own literature-related moments which still make me hot with shame. Spelling Ian McEwan wrong, when I’d just started work at The Bookseller (so much for subject knowledge!). Gesticulating so dramatically during a seminar at university, while discussing Les Murray’s wonderful poem The Last Hellos, that I whacked a glass out of someone’s hand. It smashed against the wall. Silence. Mortification. I don’t think anyone remembered the point I was trying to make.
Still not as bad as Pellerin’s though. How about you? Can you top it?
