Pierre Bayard reopens the case of 'Vertigo' in a new book
The essayist and self-styled literary detective publishes 'Le Mystère Vertigo' at Minuit, arguing that Hitchcock's classic conceals another error — and discusses it on France Culture with three fellow writers.
Pierre Bayard has a new book out from Minuit, 'Le Mystère Vertigo', in which he argues that Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film conceals a further mistake beyond the ones already debated by critics, according to France Culture, which devoted an episode of its podcast 'Comme un samedi' to the book on October 3.
Bayard, known for a string of essays that treat literary and cinematic works as cold cases to be reinvestigated, was joined on the program by writers Olivia Rosenthal, Hervé Le Tellier and Clémentine Beauvais, who worked through the argument with him, per the same source.
The episode's title plays on Bayard's established method, blending detective fiction with questions of narrative logic — France Culture's billing nods to both the 'polar' genre and, more playfully, quantum physics, though no further detail on that framing is given in the source material.
No release date beyond the October 3 broadcast, length or further plot detail of 'Le Mystère Vertigo' was provided by France Culture.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
