The novelist Luc Lang, an unfortunate finalist of the Femina, won Friday, November 8, the Medici Prize for "The Temptation" (Stock), dark and powerful novel that tells the story of a world in human form, collapse, announced the jury.
The foreign Medici was awarded to the Icelandic Audur Ava Olafsdottir for "Miss Iceland", translated from Icelandic by Eric Boury (Zulma). The Medici test was awarded to Bulle Ogier and Anne Diatkine for "I forgot" (Threshold).
The hero of "La Tentation", François, in his fifties, is a renowned surgeon. Hunter, we discover at the beginning of the novel in Savoy holding in his line of sight a large deer with sixteen horns. François hesitates, pulls and wounds the animal.
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Is this where everything starts to change? François chose to heal the animal rather than complete it. As he prepares to join the injured animal, a car suddenly rises on the small mountain road. In the cockpit, Francis thinks he sees the frightened face of his daughter.
François is the father of two children. Mathieu, his exiled son in New York, is an international financial adept at investing at risk. Mathilde, her daughter, dropped out of medical school to follow a golden boy, a client of her brother, unscrupulous. Through his children, François is the witness of a world, his, disappearing.
What place for values that have become obsolete like humanism, compassion or charity?
Luc Lang, Goncourt high school students in 1998, tells us for years through his novels the end of illusions. In a world where money is king, what place is left for values that have become obsolete like humanism, compassion or charity? "Universal capitalism has become reality and leaves us without recourse," he lamented when he met with AFP.
In the greedy and unaffected world embodied by his children, François the hunter, François the honest man in the sense that he had in the sixteenth century, did he not fall prey like the deer he held in his line of sight?
The writer, who likes rare words, writes with the precision of the surgeon wielding his scalpel. Reading his novel, one obviously thinks of Bernanos' "temptation of despair".
The novel ends in an explosion of violence, an apocalypse where, strangely, hope remains. "I wanted a joyous apocalypse," said the writer. An apocalypse as a redemption.
With AFP