A. O. Barnabooth, son journal intime de Valery Larbaud ou le sens d’une écriture européenne

Leaving his native America, Barnabooth visits Europe’s major cities. What guides him is not identity anxiety, since he does not care about the nationalistic Europe that was constructed in the nineteenth century. Through his journaling fictional character, Larbaud calls for a cosmopolitanism that transcends subjective self-indulgence. This is the meaning behind the stringency of his writing - a rigor that is expressed with a self-deriding, aristocratic, and charming smile.