The journalist, who has just left the airwaves of France Inter where he presented Boomerang for eight years, succeeds François Busnel at the controls of La Grande Librairie, Wednesday September 7 at 9 p.m. on France 5.
What feelings predominate when you are entrusted with the keys to a magazine as emblematic as The Great Bookstore?
Augustin Trapenard: It’s first of all the joy because I have the chance to do a job that gives me this jubilation. Then it’s an honor. The Great Bookstore is a rather unique setting of its kind, which is part of a strong French tradition dating back to Bernard Pivot and who made me who I am today.
How will you print your paw?
Francois Busnel and I have a lot in common but we don’t necessarily have the same tastes and excitements when it comes to books. So I’m going to bring a different color to the show, in the programming and in my questions.
Are you going to fight to invite certain personalities in the magazine?
If I fought for a guest, it would be at the expense of others. I never had to struggle to invite them in Boomerang and I wish it were the same in The Great Library. But all this takes time and it is a bet against the perpetual epilepsy of our time. This will not prevent certain great voices, certain great consciences, from sometimes being present on our stage.
Do that The Great Bookstore be as eclectic as possible, is that one of your goals?
Yes, but it’s something that will be judged over an entire season. My only guarantee is what I did in Boomerang, where I was able to receive as well Danielle Steel and Guillaume Musso that Patrick Modiano.
Aren’t you tempted, like other literary critics, to take up the pen?
There is a difference between writing and reading. It is something that in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, we did not necessarily understand. Which gave us the right to the best, and especially the worst! I don’t have that talent, that urgency in me. The characteristic of the writer is to offer a model of intelligibility of the world. The journalist belongs to another category, even if literature has also been a way out for me, which has allowed me to save myself in every sense of the word, to break the codes, the constraints of the milieus and circles to which I belonged.
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