We are publishing the prose collection 『The Little Party Dress』 by Christian Bobin, a beloved French poet and essayist.
This writer, who lives in Creusot, the city where he was born, and devotes himself solely to writing, is praised by the French literary world, the press, and readers alike for his profound thoughts gleaned from silence and his clear and transparent writing style, reminiscent of his childlike, innocent smile.
Bobin's books all observe ordinary daily life and nature, respond to art, and listen to the people around them, all of which shine through Bobin's perspective and prose.

Bobin's prose collection, "The Little Party Dress," is a beautiful journey that begins with reading and writing, passes through a place where solitude and silence, sorrow and joy come together, and finally reaches "a poem of love."
The author, who says that a life without reading books is “a life that does not let us go even for a moment” and “a life that feels suffocated by the accumulation of all kinds of miscellaneous things like the stories in the newspaper,” draws an exit from a world without an exit filled with noise and bustle, and guides us with a constant, calm, and quiet voice that spreads from deep thought.

Although it is a short collection of prose, composed of a short introduction and nine subsequent texts, it is a book that requires frequent pauses and breaths, allowing one to surrender to the breath, fragrance, and vibration of each sentence.

There are the white hands of those who have money, and there are the delicate hands of those who dream.
But on the other hand, there are people who don't have hands at all.
There are people who have been deprived of both gold and ink.
In fact, I write because there are people like that.
That's all for this reason.
If not, then it cannot be an interesting piece of writing unless it is written with the reader in mind.
Writing is about seeing the end of a divided world, about turning our backs on the class system and touching the untouchable.
To dedicate to them a book they will never read.

--- p.14

What on earth is a 'great poet'?
It's a meaningless statement.
This is really nonsense.
The greatness of the man behind his writing comes only from complete submission to raw life.
Those who spend countless nights searching for the right words only cultivate within themselves the careful concern that lovers pour out for each other and that a mother pours out for her children.
Art, the essence of art, is but the residue of a loving life, and a loving life is the only life.
Words like great, poet, and literature are meaningless.

--- p.25

How do we recognize the object of our love? It's when a sudden silence settles within us, and our heart bleeds as if a knife had been stabbed in it.
The bleeding of silence that occurs in words.
The object of our love has no name.
Before we can even find the words to stop it, before we can even call its name, before we can even stop it by calling its name, it comes to us and puts a hand on our shoulder.
That which we love is like a mother, who gives birth to us and makes us be reborn a thousand, ten thousand times.

--- p.37

Reading calmly and objectively is not perfect reading.
That kind of reading is not reading that gets to the core.
Such reading does not touch the black veins of the book.
It cannot touch the sparkling core of truth that is contained in the book and exists beneath your eyes and in the depths of your life.
In your eyes, the depths of life.
In other words, only another reading that gets to the root will attract your heart.
Reading that reaches directly to the roots of the book within you, reading that touches the very core of your being with each sentence.

--- p.45

In fact, there is nothing to learn or know in life except about yourself.
Of course, it's not something you can learn alone.
To get to your innermost self, you have to go through someone.
What kind of love, what kind of words or face must it pass through?
--- p.56

You move from one book to another, from one campsite to another.
So reading never ends.
As love is, as hope is, without hope of realization.

--- p.68

Very little is required to write.
All I need is a poor life.
A life so poor that no one wants it.
It is a life that takes refuge in gods or things.
There is an abundance of nothingness there.
It is the opposite of a life lost in its own rumors, made up of noisy noises and countless doors.
I can't write properly with lives like that.
Because in that kind of life, there is nothing to talk about.
We can only see properly in absence, and only speak properly in deficiency.

--- p.84

The moment you read a book, you pass from your life to life itself, from the simple present to the completed present.

--- p.92

We read books as if we were making love.
Immerse yourself in the book as if falling in love.
Be hopeful and impatient.
Driven by the desire to find sleep in a single body, to reach silence in a single sentence, we commit the insurmountable error of that desire.
Feeling impatient, I have hope.
Then sometimes something happens.
Like this voice heard in the darkness, something that drives away all impatience and casts a pall on all hope.
It soothes without comforting, and ecstatic without seducing.
It is something that contains within itself the sadness and darkness of its own end and death.
--- p.102

Outside of love, nothing can be known.
In love there are only things that are unknown.

--- p.113