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The Grand Prix of the novel of the French Academy, one of the most prestigious literary prizes, was awarded Thursday, October 31 to Laurent Binet for "Civilizations". This prize, created in 1914, traditionally opens the season of French literary awards. The winner receives 10,000 euros and the insurance of very good sales in bookstores.
In Laurent Binet's Civilizations nothing is true, but everything is realistic. The 47-year-old author, who won the Goncourt prize for the first novel in 2010, loves uchronies, that is to say, he likes to rewrite history by modifying an element of the past.
He is an author of the "et si". And if the philosopher Roland Barthes had finally been murdered. This was the starting point of his previous novel The Seventh Function of Language . This time, with Civilizations , the project is even more ambitious. And if the Incas had invaded Europe in the sixteenth century? If Atahualpa had crossed the Atlantic and overthrown Charles V in a Europe weakened by political divisions, misery and wars, the face of the world would have been changed.
The French Academy awards its Grand Prize to a scholarly novel, excavated, richly documented. Laurent Binet imagines resistance during the landing of Christopher Columbus in America, the Indians already know the iron, imported through a Viking expedition, conducted in the year one thousand. Civilizations is a novel built in four parts, a meditation on history quite stimulating.