Lolita Pille - Silencio Book Club

Writer Lolita Pille, whose first novel, Hell, made a strong impression in 2002, published this spring the essay "Antigone Reine" with Éditions du Cherche Midi, dedicated to literature. In it, the author writes: "I am haunted by the identity of literature, by the nature of its influence on us and on the world, by its survival. When politics functions as an enemy factory, if an art of storytelling elevates us, it is indeed literature. An invitation to cultivate our 'extreme attention', it reveals to us other truths about ourselves than those wounded by power and media culture, reconciles our warring identities, and invites us to an experience of pleasure stronger than drugs.

I believe, following Virginia Woolf and Pier Paolo Pasolini, that art is inherently anti-fascist: it teaches us to become clear-sighted and, when necessary, revolutionary subjects."

In this book, Lolita Pille imagines literature in the guise of an Antigone standing up against modern tyrannies.

In this ardent, punk, and erudite essay, Lolita Pille pursues the wild project that aims to restore literature to a sacred place. Summoning her personal life as much as her favorite authors – from the ancient Greeks to Nietzsche, from Sylvia Plath to Marcel Proust –, the novelist invites us to choose art to reconnect with true love.