"It has been called "the most anticipated book of the year's end"-a chronicle of life behind bars by the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The book's title is "Le Journal d'un Prisonnier" ("The Journal of a Prisoner"). According to the author, it was written freehand in seven-to-eight-hour spurts from an uncomfortable chair at a flimsy desk in the twelve-square-metre cell that he occupied at La Santé prison, after being convicted in a campaign-finance scandal."
"Yet, like Devil's Island, where Dreyfus spent four years, largely in solitary confinement, La Santé is a trying environment. "Prison is louder at night than during the day," Sarkozy writes, as evening falls. "My neighbor in the cell next door passed part of his time singing 'The Lion King' and the rest of it banging his spoon against the bars of the cell, creating a deafening sound.""
Nicolas Sarkozy wrote a prison journal recounting his brief incarceration after a campaign-finance conviction. The manuscript was produced in long handwriting sessions from a small cell at La Santé prison. The text describes the sensory realities of the facility, including noisy nighttime disturbances and the routines of neighboring prisoners. Sarkozy compares his situation to Alfred Dreyfus and places himself alongside literary and religious figures, noting that he took The Count of Monte Cristo and a biography of Jesus into custody. The publication triggered significant public ridicule, memes, and critical commentary in French media.
Read at The New Yorker
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