He spent his early childhood on the banks of the Urals before settling in France with his family at the age of 10. What a fate that of the child born in January 1898 in Argentina, of Russian Jewish parents. His adventurous life, often heroic, is one with his work.

'Things, decor and people: he gave them back to us as a painter rather than a photographer, living his investigations like novels and giving his reports the movement and the life that animate fiction', summarizes Gilles Heuré who directed the album Kessel and which was already at work for the volume devoted to Kessel in Gallimard's Quarto collection.īut Kessel's most beautiful novel may remain his very life. His books read, the characters that haunt them remain alive in our memory.įrom 'Belle de jour' to 'The Army of Shadows', from 'Slave Markets' to 'La passante du Sans-Souci' and 'Mary de Cork', Kessel drew the fresco of a great century and violent. Reading the texts of Kessel, who died almost 41 years ago, one remains struck by their astonishing modernity. One of the great merits of this edition is to juxtapose works pertaining, to varying degrees, to fiction, story, reportage or what Kessel liked to call 'documentary'. 'After this last masterpiece, if no one dared to doubt his status as a writer, he himself had the greatest difficulty writing, wondering how he could do better', notes Serge Linkès, master conference at the University of La Rochelle and specialist in Kessel's work. Volume 2 (1,808 pages, 67 euros) ends with the novel which definitively dedicated it, 'Les cavaliers' (1967). Volume 1 (1,968 pages, 68 euros) opens with one of Kessel's first texts, 'L'Équipage' (1923), the writer's first commercial success.

In addition to the release of these two volumes, a richly illustrated album devoted to the author of the 'Lion' will be offered to buyers of three volumes of the Pléiade. Of the 80 or so novels and stories written by Joseph Kessel, the prestigious Gallimard collection has retained around 20, presented in two volumes, in which 'the very essence of the novel is found in Kessel: adventure', underlines Serge Linkès who edited this edition. Joseph 'Jef' Kessel, the journalist-novelist, committed witness to the march of the world, backpacker and member of the French Academy, joins his friend Romain Gary at the Pantheon of Literature a few months apart. He is not a writer but a legend who enters the Pléiade on Thursday.

The Lion by Joseph Kessel