Praise
[Jérôme Lindon is] well, maybe not sprightly, because sometimes peeved or frustrated, but moving, heartfelt, immediate.
— Lydia Davis
I laughed out loud reading Echenoz’s charming and lively tribute to Jérôme Lindon, even as it made me nostalgic for the lost literary life I dreamt of being part of when I was young. A beautiful book that celebrates an utterly singular character.
— Nicole Krauss
Jérôme Lindon’s compact pages, translated by Mark Polizzotti with an attention to language which does great justice to its subject matter, can be read in a morning’s commute. It is perhaps best read this way, in the margins of a workday, as an unusually affirming account of the value of a life’s work.
It isn’t easy to be a good writer in France. The official literary culture is suffocating. But then there are certain French writers who are so free of all that, Annie Ernaux and Jean Echenoz among them. In Jérôme Lindon Echenoz gives us a portrait of his publisher in all his vanity and vainglory. Echenoz isn’t looking to be kind or generous. Too much is at stake here. He has to be precise and his honesty is breathtaking. We are reading a love story, one that hasn’t been told before, the recitatif of mutual desire and affection and hurt that attends creation.
— Dan Simon, Publisher of Seven Stories Press
Reading this remembrance is like tagging along for a dream that celebrates the vulnerability, love, and complicated relationships from which all great art springs.
— DW Gibson
This funny and quietly tender reflection from novelist Echenoz recounts his friendship with his editor Jérôme Lindon, who headed the French publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit from 1948 until his death in 2001 and published the work of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, among others . . . Echenoz offers glimpses of the humanity beneath Lindon’s gruff exterior, revealing him to be a passionate, reliable editor. The result is a charming portrayal of the often complicated writer-editor relationship.
The succinct, startling prose of Jean Echenoz has achieved the condition of a highly durable, transparent membrane, something like the trompe l’oeil mesh used to mask scaffolding on building facades under repair.
— Gary Indiana
Jean Echenoz is a master of the insignificant, outlining the lives of great men by portraying them in all of their banality.
— Albertine
Beautifully presented with Echenoz’s own handwritten notes lining the inside of the covers and running across the centre spread, this touching little memorial work is an honest and unvarnished portrait . . . It strikes just the right note and is guaranteed to make you smile, maybe even laugh out loud.
Echenoz loosely chronicles the publisher-writer relationship, with its ups and downs, closeness and distance . . . a nice little personal tribute.
A tiny and unusual book to adore . . . [Jérôme Lindon's] brief diarylike entries begin in 1979 and end in 2001, at Lindon’s death. Through them we understand how a fruitful relationship might form and progress between author and a publisher—the author a self-confessed neurotic and the publisher an idiosyncratic and sharp-tongued Man of Distinguished Taste . . . A portrait of an industry, a portrait of a friend.
I read Jérôme Lindon as an exercise in narrative persuasion. What does it matter to me who this Jérôme Lindon fellow was? . . . Echenoz traces the evolution of a relationship, and the ways in which the two men showed their appreciation of and respect for one another. And since this is a word of thanks for the gift of a friendship, Echenoz humbles himself before the memories and lessons given him through it. How could it not matter who Jérôme Lindon was?
[Jérôme Lindon is] a tribute to Echenoz's publisher written shortly after his death in 2001 . . . there are tussles over titles, and at one point Lindon tells him to withdraw from a new series for a different publisher, though when he does Lindon 'stares' in 'astonishment' . . . this book is above all a character sketch. Yet, despite its brevity, when, in the final few pages, Lindon becomes ill, the reader too can feel a loss.
