Word: pivots
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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...
...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...
...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 The unpublished letter had been sent to Pivot by a friend researching a Camus biography.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...
...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...
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...