Alexandre Postel's "All Ears": The Walls of Sound

Satire requires a desire to play with forms and to hold up a mirror to the reader that distorts and disturbs them. It presupposes a degree of bad spirit, a desire to laugh at one's own misery and that of others, to kill emphasis with comedy and certainties with ambiguity. It treats seriousness with the absence of seriousness. This is probably why it is no longer fashionable. Tout ouïe , Alexandre Postel's fifth novel, is therefore not a fashionable novel, but it is a successful satire. It is not published by Gallimard, the publisher of the author's previous books, but by Éditions de l'Observatoire.

"I've never met a single author who is surprised to be published," notes Violette Letendre, an experienced editor at the declining Monteverdi publishing house. She publishes writers she nicknames "the Pug" or "Miss Vetiver." Her colleague Bastien Testevuide has just been appointed literary director: "His gestures and facial expressions embodied, with a little too much diligence, the man touched by an insolent favor ," writes Violette. "He knew very well that this position should have gone to me." He readily repeats a phrase from the founder of the house: "Short stories are like spinach. Everyone praises their qualities, but no one buys them." The fact that she was trained by "the beautiful Dorothée" is undoubtedly not unrelated to Violette's disgrace: "This was the nickname given to the late editor whose flair and