Julie & Julia de Julie Powell

Julie & Julia, My Year of Cooking Dangerously (Julie Powell, usa, 2005)

Julia est une presque trentenaire new yorkaise heureuse en ménage et s’ennuyant au travail. Elle décide sur un coup de tête, suite à un compliment sur sa cuisine, de réaliser en un an toutes les recettes du fameux –aux zuèss- livre sur la cuisine française écrit par Julia Child et de raconter ce projet dans un blog. Ce blog est devenu un livre. Ce livre est devenu un film que je me réjouis de voir, mais je voulais lire ce livre avant.

J’ai dû m’accrocher à la lecture car j’avais décidé de continuer sur mes bonnes intentions de lire en V.O. et la langue de Julie est riche, même si familière, et des nombreuses descriptions de réalisations culinaires m’ont partiellement échapées. Mais malgré cette difficulté, j’ai pris un énorme plaisir à déguster l’humour corrosif de l’auteure, sa mauvaise foi récurrente assumée et son grand talent pour mélanger des anecdotes apparemment sans lien aucun. Le côté journal intime, qui n’est pas forcément mon truc en littérature, m’a rendu Julie extrêmement attachante et je n’ai qu’une envie : relire quelque chose de sa plume… ou devrait-on dire plus logiquement dans son cas, de son clavier.

Un extrait pour le plaisir... to blog or not to blog...

"On January 1, 1660, a young government worker in London started a diary. He wrote about going to church, where the preacher was saying something or other about circumcision, and about lunch afterward; he mentionned that his wife burned her hand while heating up turkey leftovers.
For the next time nine years this guy wrote every single day. He withnessed the Great Fire of London and some disappointingly overdone roasts. He went to hundreds of plays, vowed to quit drinking then changed his mind. He ate a lot - no matter the precarious state of the union, a barrel of oysters was always appreciated - and worked a lot, and fondled whatever girls would deign to allow it. And he wrote about all of it - honestly, self-indugently. He was often entertaining, often mind-bogglingly boring, every now and then ablaze with life - the Sid Vicious of seventeenth-century diarists. And the, on May 31, 1669, he just stopped.
Some bloggers might say that Samuel Pepys was sort of proto-blogger, but we're not a terribly measured lot, so I don't know that I'd listen to us if I were you. Sure, Pepys obsessively chronicled his interior-decorating ups and downs ant the time he masturbated in the water taxi. Sure, he wrote in his pyjamas. But although he carefully saved his diary, volumes and volumes of it, for the rest of his life, he never showed it to a single soul. Today, when we blog about our weight-loss problems and our knitting and our opinion of the president's IQ level, we do it on the blithe assumption that someone give a shit - even though there's a guy stuck in Baghdad who blogs, and a Washington DC staff assistant who gets paid by Republican appointees for sex who blogs, and our own jottings must all be dredfully dull by comparision. Nowadays anyone with a crap laptop and Internet access can sound their barbaric yawp, whatever it may be. But the surprise is that for every personn who's got something to say, it seems there are at least a few people who are interested. some of them aren't even related.
What I think is that Sam Pepys wrote down all the details of his life for nine years because the very act of writing them down made them important, or at least singular. Overseeing the painters doing his upstairs room was rather dull, but writing about it made overseeing the painterns doing his upstairs rooms at least seem interesting. Threatening to kill his wife's dog for pissing on the new rug might have made him feel a bit sheepish and mean, but write it down and you have a hilarious domestic anecdote for the centuries. Imagine if he'd had, say, a safely anonymous pamphlet cranked out on a press and passed around on the streets of London. Wouldn't he have enjoyed occasionally overhearing some fellow in a tavern recounting to general hilarity Pepys's own yarn about the king's spaniel shitting ont the royal barge?
There's a dangerous, confessional thrill to opening up your eminently fascinating life and brain to the world at large, ang the Internet makes it all so much faster and more breathless and exciting. But I wonder - would we still have Sam's jack-off stories, the records of his marital spats, if he'd been a blogger rather than a diarist? It's one thing to chronicle your sexual and social missteps to satisfy your private masochistic urges, but sharing them with the world at large? Surely there are some limits, aren't there?"

Ce livre a directement atterri dans ma sélection de romans culinaires, où l'on trouvera aussi, dès que j'ai le courage de m'y mettre, mes sélections de romans autour du monde du cinéma et de films autour de la cuisine. D'ailleurs, si vous en avez pour alimenter ma PAL, c'est volontiers !