Chronicles of the Mountain, volume 1 - Alexandre Vialatte

"I never have time to disgorge a twentieth of what I accumulate, and later, it will be too late." It is to respond to this urgency that Alexandre Vialatte (1901-1971) created a literary genre of his own: the chronicle.
From his twentieth year until his death, he composed hundreds of them, for La Revue rhénane , Le Crapouillot , L'Intransigeant, Le Moniteur , L'Époque , La Nouvelle Revue française, Marie-Claire , Le Journal de l'Est , Le Petit Dauphinois and for La Montagne . This Auvergne daily newspaper offered him a column every week and gave him complete freedom to talk about everything except politics.
Thus, for eighteen years, every Sunday evening, Vialatte took his copy to the mail car of the eleven-fifteen train. He only missed his appointment two or three times. What does he talk about? Everything, nothing. Sometimes he tackles a novel, sometimes a play or a collection of poems, he evokes a film, mocks a basic truth, explores a commonplace, comments on a proverb. The chronicle is the work of a walker, a flâneur, a philosopher. "A chronicle," said Alexandre Vialatte, "should be made to grow like grass in the cracks of a wall, in the stones of the timetable. Pierre Vialatte, in his own way, gives us back lost time. He belongs to the family of Saint-Simon and Proust.
Robert Kopp.