Café littéraire - Changer de vie

2pm at the St Exupéry social centre
Eugène Ionesco, born on 26 November 1909 in Slatina (Romania) and died on 28 March 1994 in Paris, was a Romanian-French playwright and writer. A major exponent of the theatre of the absurd in France, he wrote numerous works, the best known of which are La Cantatrice chauve (1950), La Leçon (1951), Les Chaises (1952), Rhinocéros (1959 - this play depicts an imaginary epidemic of "rhinoceritis", a disease that frightens all the inhabitants of a town and soon turns them into rhinoceroses), and Le roi se meurt (1962).

Theme: Changing one's life, being born into another world, seeing the other within emerge - the fantastic experience of metamorphosis has inspired many writers, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's La Métamorphose, and Bertrand Leclair's Transformations (Actes Sud 2025)...
...including Dante's The Forest of the Suicides / Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros / Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward / Michel Butcher's The Modification... Lovecraft /La Modification by Michel Butor / La belle image by Marcel Aymé / Truismes by Marie Darrieusecq /Le système du Dr Goudron by Edgar Allan Poe /La petite sirène by Hans Christian Andersen /Alice au pays des merveilles by Lewis Carroll /Les aventures de Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi /Terremer by Ursula La Guinée /Métamorphoses by Jim Harrisson / Les métamorphoses d'un vampire by Jean Louis Thérasse / Le pays sous l'écorce by Jacques Laccarière /Orlando by Virginia Wolf /À la table des hommes by Sylvie Germain /Si j'étais vous by Julien Green / etc.