The Institut français is pleased to welcome author Pierre Bayard on 16 January to discuss his latest book How to talk about books you haven’t read (Minuit, 2007; Granta, 2008), a massive best-seller in France and New York last year (where 20,000 copies were sold in just three weeks).

Pierre Bayard will be in conversation with Robert Hanks who will review the book for The Independant.

There are infinitely more books than anyone can read in a lifetime. In How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard looks at the variety of different ways we talk about books we’ve not read; but find that we have opinions about regardless – such as the latest Man Booker Prize winner, a classical text, a celebrity biography or a massive bestseller. There are books that we have skimmed and others that we’ve just forgotten; books we’ve heard discussed so much it feels as though we have read them and others we feel we can judge simply by looking at the jacket.

Pierre Bayard argues that it’s more important to know the location of a book in our culture and its relationship to other books than to have actually read it, and underpins his argument with discussions of tests from Oscar Wilde to Montaigne to Graham Greene.

He shares tips on how to discuss a book you haven’t read with the author, and how to review an unread book, and shows how the most creative conversations can be had with someone else who hasn’t read the book either.  At its heart though, this is a book about the experience of reading, what reading means to all us, and how books – read or not read – form our identity.

Pierre Bayard (b. 1954) is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst. How to read books you haven’t read is Bayard’s eighth book in the ‘Paradoxes’ series published by Editions de Minuit. In them, he has argued for Freud to be read in the light of Laclos (Le Paradoxe du menteur, 1993) and Maupassant (Maupassant, juste avant Freud, 1994) rather than the other way around, and for a version of A la recherche du temps perdu shorn of its digressions (Le hors-sujet, Proust et la digression, 1996). His Comment améliorer les oeuvres ratées (2000) suggests ways in which the reader can take pleasure from second-rate books by imagining how they would have been written by better authors or by undiscovered authors, such as themselves, while his Enquête sur Hamlet, Le dialogue des sourds (2002) suggests a provocative answer to the question: Who killed Hamlet’s dad? (Answer: Hamlet!).

Perhaps the best-known of his earlier works for Anglo-saxon readers is his delightful re-opening of the Hercule Poirot mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which he concludes, after re-examining the clues scattered throughout the book, that Agatha Christie and Poirot framed an innocent man! (Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd ?, Minuit, 1998; Fourth Estate, 2000 ). His next book to be released in the same series is L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville (2008). In it, he argues that literary characters have their own autonomous existence inside the text, and may even go as far as to commit a murder without the author finding out. Understanding this, Conan Doyle allowed Sherlock Holmes to make a mistake and falsely accuse the hound of the Baskervilles, leaving the real killer still on the loose. Bayard’s book promises to reveal the identity of the true killer.