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Apostrophes (the name comes from both the punctuation mark and the word for a rhetorical statement) is so successful at boosting book sales in France that Pivot reigns as the most influential literary figure in the country. "Ask a publisher or bookstore owner what it would be like without Pivot," declared the French newsmagazine Le Point, "and then look at the expression on his face. It's one of a lone sailor at sea who's just lost the mast of his ship...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Video: The Carson of the Literary Set | 7/13/1987 | See Source »

...What Pivot has done, of course, is adapt that venerable French institution, the literary salon, to television. Each week the program, live and unrehearsed, arranges four or five guests around a low table, with a small studio audience behind them and Pivot at the head. Pivot devises a specific theme for each show (the body and how we conceive it, love in the ancient world), carefully choosing his guests in order to orchestrate a lively discussion. Each is given the works of the others well in advance and is expected to read them thoroughly. Current books are discussed along with...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Video: The Carson of the Literary Set | 7/13/1987 | See Source »

...Although Pivot adroitly keeps the spotlight on his authors, he has his own flair as well. At the end of a show devoted to French collaboration with the Germans during World War II, Pivot suddenly pulled out a piece of paper and ( began to read. It was a letter from Albert Camus to fellow Novelist Marcel Ayme explaining why, despite a colleague's treasonous embrace of fascism, Camus was willing to plead for the condemned man's life. The unpublished letter had been sent to Pivot by a friend researching a Camus biography. As his guests sat in silence, awed...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Video: The Carson of the Literary Set | 7/13/1987 | See Source »

...Pivot has had his share of scoops. In 1983 he was the first to be granted a television interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn after the Russian writer moved to the U.S. This spring he made headlines after he flew to Poland and surreptitiously taped a lengthy conversation in Gdansk with Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa, whose autobiography was recently published in France...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Video: The Carson of the Literary Set | 7/13/1987 | See Source »

Almost always dressed in a natty but rumpled suit, Pivot, 52, is an unlikely candidate for stardom. The son of a winegrower and grocer in Lyons, he attended journalism school in Paris. In 1958, after dabbling in financial reporting and writing a novel, he applied for a job on the literary supplement of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Pivot knew little about literature, but the editor happened to be a wine connoisseur and was impressed by Pivot's knowledge of Beaujolais, the wine from the countryside near Lyons. Thus Pivot broke into the life of letters "totally by chance...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Video: The Carson of the Literary Set | 7/13/1987 | See Source »

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