École des filles

Meeting on 13 August at 15:00

  « Alejo Carpentier, from Brittany to Cuba »

Travelling and meeting different people will be at the heart of these two books. "Which of us will be the other?" tells the story of twins arguing about the meaning of the world. The first  dreams of literature, the second only swears by its opposite. One carried away by his travels, the other experiences them only from afar through him. With them, a continent torn from the North to the South. They thus meet Pablo Neruda, the voices of Mercédès Sosa and Violetta Parra, but also great figures of the sciences, Yves Meyer, Georges Charpak, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. These journeys around the world, whether real or imaginary, always bring them back to the Breton lands. They even claim, in "Alejo Carpentier: From Brittany to Cuba ", bringing him back there too. Journalist, radio columnist, musicologist and above all a famous writer (Cino del Duca, Cervantes, Medici), probably a Literature Nobel Prize winner if the death had not taken him too soon, Alejo Carpentier has always claimed his Breton ancestry . Was he really a Cuban, or a Breton?

Jean-Louis Coatrieux is a research director at Inserm and a writer. As a researcher, he has participated in almost all the adventures related to the exploration of the human body, including X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, 3D imaging and medical robotics. His work has been the subject of several hundred articles in the most prestigious international magazines and have won him numerous awards. As a writer he is the author of  a douzen of books ranging from novels ("Where the River Sits") to poetry ("Inland Lands", "Tango-Monde" insipred by the paintings of Mariano Otero), all published by La Part Commune, but also by stories and short stories ("Calling Mary" and "When the body is broken", Riveneuve editions, "Xiaoling.News from China ", editions La Part Commune) or collective essays (" Shake Britain ", editions Apogée). He is a member of the editorial board of the magazine "Hopala! Brittany in the world ".
 « Vacation in Brettany , 1815 -1965 »

" Holidays are, for everybody, an enchanting parenthesis, a journey out of time, out of everyday life.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Brittany has attracted travelers, by its uniqueness and its picturesque scenery and its natural richness. "

It is a book of social history but also a great album of souvenirs offering everyone the keys to the holiday home that one always carries within him.

The author invites us to look at the old jerseys mixed with the evening gowns in the chest of drawers, to flip through the album of the postcards which have never been sent, to open the iron box where the yellowed photographs replaced the cookies, to open the shutters to hear the cries of children carried by the wind with the smell of seaweed.

Illustrated with 255 photographs and drawings, half of which have never been unpublished before, this book tells 150 years of holiday in Brittany.

François de Beaulieu was born in 1947 and lives today in Morlaix. His wish to better understand the world in order to transform it, made him study literature, history and ethnology; which led him to teach  literature and sociology in a college at the University.
Since 1967, he has published some fifty books and several hundred articles on the natural and cultural heritage of Brittany. He is also committed to the protection of nature and especially the Breton moors. In 2017, he published at Skol Vreizh, "Holidays in Brittany, 1815 - 1965".