A Book Celebrates the Art of the Comma and a Legendary Publisher

A new book offers a tribute to Jérôme Lindon, the late director of the renowned French publishing house Éditions de Minuit. The author, acclaimed writer Jean Echenoz, expresses deep admiration for Lindon, describing him as a rigorous and uncompromising figure who profoundly shaped French literature.

Lindon, who led Éditions de Minuit for decades, was instrumental in nurturing the careers of many major French writers. Echenoz characterizes Lindon not just as a publisher but as a formidable reader and talent scout, whose literary convictions were absolute. Publishing, for Lindon, was less a commercial venture and more a profound commitment, marked by unwavering loyalty to his authors and an insistence on absolute rigor.

The book recounts several encounters between Echenoz and Lindon, revealing their personalities and the deep respect they held for each other. Their relationship, characterized by mutual esteem expressed through their work rather than overt affection, is illustrated by a particularly telling anecdote: an entire afternoon spent debating the placement of a single comma. This meticulous attention to detail, even in punctuation, underscores a profound dedication to the craft of writing and a specific vision of literature as an art form demanding painstaking precision.

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…Except, almost every time, on the question of commas, our only fundamental aesthetic divergence. Jérôme Lindon is in favor, whenever possible, of a demonstrative scansion of the sentence using commas, while I maintain that it is better, as long as one can, to do without them, and that the internal rhythm of the sentence should be able to sustain itself without resorting to them. Sometimes, on such and such a comma, I am the one who yields, but sometimes it is he on such and such another.