Paris (AFP)

The young writer Emma Becker, 30 years old, received on Wednesday the prize for the France Culture / Télérama student novel for "La maison" (Flammarion), which recounts her experience as a prostitute for two years in a brothel in Berlin.

When asked about this radical choice, she invariably answers that it is "the curiosity" that pushed her to enter, under the pseudonym of Justine (we notice the nod to Sade), the Manège, a rather murky brothel, then at Maison, another brothel which, she writes, had "a soul".

"I was fine, if the house had not closed, maybe I would be there again," says the novelist author of two other books, "Mr" (2011, Denoël) and "Alice" (2015, Denoël ), an unfortunate finalist of the Renaudot Prize and the Prix de Flore.

Novels dealing with prostitution are legion. From Maupassant to Louis Calaferte via Zola, literature has exploited this subject from every angle, but almost always from the masculine point of view.

Emma Becker gives us to see and hear that of women. The book is full of sensitive portraits, never mischievous, always upsetting, prostitutes, "my colleagues" says Emma Becker. We are "a family", she says.

We find in the writer a journalist approach when she makes her "colleagues" talk. "The problem with this job is that after a while, your body does not know when you pretend and when you really feel something," says Hildie, one of the writer's "colleagues" .

Prostitution is legal in Germany.

The story of Emma Becker (384 pages, 21 euros) is written in a language often raw but one is struck by the delicacy of the style. We will look in vain (alas) for a critique of the relations of domination. Emma Becker prefers to talk about the sexual misery of men, the extreme loneliness of customers brothel.

And women, these "sex workers"? "With their flesh and their infinite patience" they work "for the good of the individuals who make up this society," writes Emma Becker.

"There is no nobility in this, but there are poignant truths such as we do not find anywhere else, testimonies of happiness and promises of happiness ... and it must be that someone one speaks of it ".

The jury for the student novel prize was composed this year of 1,100 students with the support of 18 independent bookstores and the collaboration of 24 academic institutions.

The prize will be awarded to the novelist in mid-January in Paris.

Last year, the prize was awarded to Pauline Delabroy-Allard for "It tells Sarah" (Midnight).

© 2019 AFP