He's just as French as Chopin :)
>What I'm trying to say it's that I find very interesting this distinction between mainland Europe vs UK + USA when it comes to books and the so-called "high culture". You'd think that 70+ years of mass consumption and Western mono-culture would have totally erased any differences by now but there are still some hold-outs.
Established erudite culture, for lack of a better term, is less permeable to pop-culture. Strong cultural institutions are a good bulwark against acculturation. Churches played that role for a long time.
As I recall, the book I picked up had a blurb by Susan Sontag, a fairly big name in the US literary world. I have the impression that Martin Gardner included a piece on Cioran in his collection The Night Is Large, but I can't be sure.
(Now I want to catch the bus to Bridge Street Books to see if they stock Cioran.)
He kind of was pretty popular in the 1920s and the 1930s, at least in francophile countries and on the European continent generally speaking (I suppose Egypt's intelligentsia from back in the day was heavily influenced by what was popular in mainland Europe). For example Emil Cioran [1] had his graduation thesis on Bergson.
I'm mentioning Cioran because I myself am Romanian and whenever I visit any bookstores outside of the country I usually check the philosophy shelves for Cioran's books, because I'm curious about his reception. Well, he's basically considered as one of their own in France, he's also pretty popular in Spain and in Italy (I mean, as popular as a guy writing about nothingness can be), I think I also found his books in Austria, but in London he is virtually unknown. I remember reading an interview in the Financial Times with a French billionaire, with the billionaire citing Cioran and with the interviewer (I suppose he was British) asking who that was.
What I'm trying to say it's that I find very interesting this distinction between mainland Europe vs UK + USA when it comes to books and the so-called "high culture". You'd think that 70+ years of mass consumption and Western mono-culture would have totally erased any differences by now but there are still some hold-outs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran