Damien Soitout
A paper's note on a book is a reading aid. It gives you the pitch. It is not the day the book began.
A paper's note points you at the book. The pages are the work. The clipping is the introduction.
On 28 August 2022, at 17:53, PresseLib published a short piece under the heading Atypique. The address is the paper's own: Atypique, et un nouveau roman pour Damien Soitout. I am the person in it, and I am the author of the books it names. I am writing on 7 September 2022 because a note like that gets used for the wrong job. People treat the morning a paper mentions a book as the morning the book began, or as a launch. A paper's note on a book is a reading aid. It tells a stranger what the book is about, and where the author was standing when the paper called. Then the stranger's job is to read, or to decide not to.
I keep a press page for the clippings, and a biography for the longer public account of the work. Neither of those pages is the novel. A newsroom writes to a length. It chooses a few sentences that will survive a busy afternoon. Those sentences are useful. They are not the text, they are not the contract, and they are not the day a story came into the world. If you meet an author through a clipping, read the clipping for the pitch, then go to the book if the pitch is yours. Do not promote the clipping into a birthday.
The same habit applies when the author is not me. A note can be warm and still be thin. It can get a title right and a date wrong in the reader's head. The correction is simple. Ask what the paper claims the book is. Ask what the paper claims the author was doing. Then check those claims against a page that sells or describes the book in the author's own catalog, and against the book when you have it. I am going to do that here with the two titles the 28 August piece puts in front of a reader, and with the earlier novel it uses as context.
The novel is Le poids d'un amour. PresseLib presents it as a second novel, after Nos plus belles annees, which came out in 2010. The story, as the paper tells it, was written about ten years before the note and shaped in the years after. The pitch stays inside what that piece gives a reader who has not opened the book. Dave is a young writer. He wants a life in the United States. He meets a student. The force of the story is perseverance. That is the reading aid. It is enough to know whether you want the book. It is not a substitute for the chapters, and it is not a date of publication.
Decitre's page for the author says the same book was inspired by a true story, that it was written in 2012, and that it took about a decade to take its shape. The sacrifices are part of that catalog description, beside the perseverance. The page is here: Damien Soitout at Decitre. I stand behind that pitch because I wrote the book. Dave's want, the meeting, and the cost of staying with a difficult hope are the spine. A true story as an origin is not a promise that every scene is a diary. It is a promise that the pressure in the book came from life, and was then made into a novel. The paper's job was to hand you that spine in a few lines. It did.
If you want the earlier book as context, start with Nos plus belles annees. It is the 2010 novel. It is not a 2022 publication, and the August note does not turn it into one. A second novel is easier to place when you know there was a first. You do not have to read them in order to understand the note. You do have to stop treating 2010 as if it happened again because a paper mentioned the title in 2022. Context is a map. It is not a reprint.
A decade between a draft and a shape is ordinary in work that depends on judgment, and it looks suspicious in a culture that wants a launch every season. I have said elsewhere that reading is a practice, not a pose, and that speed is a tool when the text deserves to be finished. Le poids d'un amour asked for the slow tool: time. The note is allowed to say the time was long. The long time is not the news. The news, for a reader, is whether Dave's perseverance is a story they want in the house.
The same PresseLib piece mentions 100 Hours. It calls that book the introspection before a new project, a step toward a life the author means to live on purpose. That description is fair, and I can say what the book actually contains, because I wrote it. The English title is 100 Hours: to accomplish the extraordinary, don't be ordinary. The paperback is the edition on the shop: 100 Hours. I wrote it against the idea that success has a recipe. Effort, time, commitment, discipline, and a focused mind are the conditions. They are not a formula that guarantees a result, and the book does not pretend they are.
The introduction asks the reader to do the introspective work, not to copy my life or anyone else's. The chapters then give that work a path. They go through what childhood and education leave in a person, through beliefs and the standards you raise, through the way media and habit steer attention, through health and stress, through a victim stance and a leader stance, through books and the people you learn from, through how you filter advice, through time, through money, and through the life of a project from growth to the risks that show up later. There is a short annex on making a map. The point of the path is the questions. If you finish a chapter with a better question than the one you brought in, the chapter worked.
I have written a shorter piece on purpose, how to find your purpose in life, and 100 Hours is the long version of that demand. It is not the novel. Dave is not a workbook. A reader who opens Le poids d'un amour looking for exercises will be in a story. A reader who opens 100 Hours looking for a plot about a student in the United States will be in a set of tools. The paper names both because both were part of the moment it was describing. The note is for sorting them. Once they are sorted, you pick the one you came for.
Operators sometimes want a shelf of business books and nothing else. I keep a list for that appetite in books for entrepreneurs. 100 Hours can sit on that shelf because of the chapters on time, money, standards, and the life of a project. It will disappoint you if you wanted a script. The novel will disappoint you if you wanted a script as well. Perseverance is not a method you can paste onto a Monday. It is a story about someone who stayed. Introspection is a method only in the sense that you have to do it yourself.
Authors worry, when a paper appears, that the appearance is the legal event. It is not. The World Intellectual Property Organization explains, on its copyright page, that copyright is the set of rights a creator has in a literary work, that the protection covers the expression rather than the bare idea, and that under the Berne Convention the protection does not wait for a registry. A newspaper note is one more expression, the paper's, about a work that already existed. The note can quote, describe, and point. It does not become the novel by being newer.
That is why I refuse the habit of dating a book from the clipping. Le poids d'un amour was written long before 28 August. The note points you at the pages. The pages are the work.
