Parmi les arbres. Essai de vie commune

ALEXIS JENNI

PARMI LES ARBRES

ESSAI DE VIE COMMUNE

MONDES SAUVAGES

Pour une nouvelle alliance

11.5 × 21.7 cm 128 pages 10 black and white illustrations softback october 2021 estimated retail price: 19 €

A teacher of natural science, Alexis Jenni embarked on his career as novelist in stellar fashion in 2011, when his debut novel L’Art français de la guerre (Gallimard) won the Goncourt Prize. Since then, he has regularly published both novels and essays. Arboricoles was his first collaboration with Actes Sud and the “Mondes sauvages” collection. It was the first book in which he married his two loves: science and literature.

Essai de vie commune AMONG THE TREES

An essay on communal living

Alexis Jenni

Ilove literature, science and trees, but “ for many years I couldn’t find a way to marry the three – each of these passions took their own separate paths without ever intersecting. And then one summer while walking in the forest in the Pyrénées, the solution came to me. I felt the urge to speak of trees, to speak both about what they are and how we live with them. I started writing on my telephone as I walked, and I’m sure the people I met along the way took me for a city type who was incapable of looking at the natural world around him, but in reality I had finally found a way of talking about what I saw. I want to talk about these extraordinary beings with whom we share the Earth, who are alive like us but in a different way and with whom we have an ongoing relationship which we don’t spend enough time reflecting on, so deeply is it ingrained within us. Deep down we are arboreal – we have always lived with trees. So rather than turning them into anthropomorphic beings, I wanted to convey their strangeness as seen through the lens of science but also bring out their closeness to us through anecdotes that highlight the familiar place that they occupy in our lives, and we in theirs. In blending these two points of view courtesy of the power of literature, I want to pay homage to these life companions, these co-tenants of the Earth without whom our planet would be uninhabitable.” Alexis Jenni