Pennac, in the essay, deals with the problem of how we can help young people find the love for reading with alternative methods from the point of view of both novelist and professor, trying to reproduce "books as friends and not as bricks" . The book must be part of the formation of man, which starts from the child, to whom the parents read the fairy tales, to pass to the adolescent, who rebels and fights against the monotony of the compulsory school texts, up to the true reader.
When it comes to reading, we readers agree all rights, starting with those denied to young people who claim to want to start reading.
The right not to read
The right to skip pages
The right not to finish the book
The right to reread
The right to read anything
The right to bovarianism (textually contagious disease)
The right to read anywhere
The right to nibble
The right to read aloud
The right to remain silent
A policeman on a mission of mercy is shot dead at point-blank range by a sweet granny on a frosty morning. The neighbourhood, Paris's bubbling Belleville quarter, is already in uproar, because half a dozen other grannies have been found with their shrivelled throats slit. Into this tense situation stumbles Benjamin Malaussene, with his overly complicated life: his multitude of dependant siblings, their fecund and scatty mother, his stinking epileptic dog, Julius, and his journalist lover Julie, who would dearly like to keep all these complications to a minimum. Benjamin's unusual profession - that of a scapegoat in a publishing house - makes him the ideal person to be framed for just about everything, and he is. Meanwhile, two policemen are putting their all into solving the case: Van Thian, a cop ingeniously disguised, and his cherubic partner Pastor. The criminal galaxy explodes (not to mention the Paris police force) when the anarchic worlds of Benjamin, Julie, Thian, Pastor and the whole of Belleville finally collide...
... in the fleeting realm of smells.
At the time we are talking about, in the city there was a barely conceivable stench for us moderns. The streets smelled of manure, the inner courtyards of urine, the trumpets of rotten wood and of dung of rats, the kitchens of cabbage gone bad and of fat of mutton; the unventilated rooms smelled of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, the damp of the duvets and the pungent and sweetish smell of chamber pots. From the chimneys came the stench of sulfur, from the tanneries came the stench of solvents, from slaughterhouses stench of congealed blood. People smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes; from the mouths came a smell of broken teeth, from the stomachs a stink of onion and from the bodies, when they were no longer so young, came a smell of old cheese and sour milk and tumor diseases.
The rivers smelled, the squares smelled, the churches smelled, there was stench under the bridges and in the buildings. The peasant smelled like the priest, the apprentice like the master's wife, he smelled all the nobility, even the king stank, he smelled like a ferocious animal, and the queen like an old goat, both in summer and winter. In fact, in the eighteenth century, no limits had yet been placed on the disruptive action of bacteria, and so there was no human activity, be it constructive or destructive, or a manifestation of life on the rise or in decline, which was not accompanied by the stench....
