Bernard-Henri Lévy takes a drag from his cigarette…

Ordinarily, I prefer to go after what someone has actually written; one shouldn’t be held to quite the same standard when speaking. But Bernard-Henri Lévy is truly begging for it, and it’s not like he writes any differently than he speaks.

I couldn’t make up this introduction to his interview in the portentously-named Guernica (was Kristallnacht taken?):

When we sat down to speak this summer at the Carlyle, Lévy was wearing one of his expensive white shirts open to the belly button. I began with his family, about which he rarely speaks. He was very reticent, almost whispering his answers. On his childhood? “I never talk about it. I have very few memories of that period.” Why? “It does not interest me. It is repressed. Not repressed… remote. I never think about it. I don’t cultivate it. I was born in a place I did not know till [I was] forty-five years old.” Where? “Algeria. I have a strange memory. And it’s ok. I think the peculiarity of a writer is that he’s born twice or maybe three times. I was born once—which was my [actual] birth, which is not so important. And I was born a second time when I began to write [at twenty-four]. And I will be born a third time when I die, when my books continue on.”

What kind of answer is that? How many times was he born? One. The answer is one time. He’s not Robocop.