Writers' Monday with Charles Berling

A man of the theater and cinema, a singer in his spare time, Charles Berling shows us with “Un homme sans identité” that he also knows how to handle the pen with panache and sensitivity.

His work is not a classical biography, but rather a kaleidoscope of impressions and various flashes of insight. A new milestone in his career as an accomplished artist who, after sixty-seven films and more than fifty plays to his credit, still retains the desire to reinvent himself.

Writers' Monday with Charles Berling

Charles Berling wanted this book to be “non-chronological, chaotic”, both as an artist and as a man. In other words, a book representative of a career as an acrobat which was necessarily built according to curiosities, desires, chances and meetings.
To symbolize the state of mind of his work, our guest wished to quote Simone Veil: “All that is impersonal in man is sacred and that alone”. This conviction accompanies him every day, and translates the way he apprehends his art of acting: to be diluted in the universe, and to be able to pass from identity to identity, until he has none that is his own and can totally summarize him… ” And so much the better “, he specifies. And so much the better” he specifies!

To tell one’s story, to look back on one’s journey, yes, but in a relationship to time that is that of a space, not of a chronology. Hence a book-confession that avoids a succession of well-ordered anecdotes in order to privilege instinct and sincerity. Charles Berling’s desire to work on the words and rhythm of the text not as an actor writing, but as a writer in his own right.

One of the highlights of this meeting was the reading of the last paragraph of the book. In response to the crucial question “For whom do I write?”, the author offered us a passionate monologue with a feverish literary breath, declaimed with his usual stage talent and the emotion of chanting his own words. In a style free of any straitjacket, Charles Berling multiplies bold images, metaphors both carnal and spiritual, revealing his deep feeling of having become through his art a protean being … ” A man without identity “. A man without identity”.
And when the book closes on the words “I live, and I am happy”, we understand that his curiosity and his appetite for life will lead him to great and beautiful experiences.