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This is the book everyone is talking about in this literary back to school in January. It comes out this Thursday, January 2 in bookstores and is called Consent . It is signed by Vanessa Springora and published by Grasset. The story of a relationship between a teenage girl and a well-known writer, in his fifties, pedophile in the 1980s.
Vanessa Springora tells her story, that of a 13/14 year old teenage girl, lacking a father, who will meet " what fairy tales teach us to fear from childhood, an ogre " she writes. This ogre is a famous writer of the 70s / 80s, attractive, in grace in the literary, political and journalistic environment, he is openly pedophile and besides his sexual relations with very young girls and boys in France or abroad. are the raw material of his books.
The trial of an era?
It is the trial of the hypocrisy of a whole time that makes Vanessa Springora in The consent , a time when under cover of the slogan of May 68 "it is forbidden to prohibit" one forgets to protect the most vulnerable.
The book is very correct in tone, it feels painfully matured. It allows the author to reclaim her story, stolen by a sexual predator. Vanessa Springora is now 47 years old and for years she has not been able to grant herself victim status. Because it is very difficult to admit that we were abused when we were consenting.
► To read also: The Matzneff affair, towards the #Metoo of the French literary milieu?
At 13, it is very easy to be seduced by a man, certainly sulfurous, his pedophile inclinations are known, but crowned with intellectual prestige. Especially when he makes you a diligent court, waits for you day after day at the end of college, sends you love letters. She bites the hook, he initiates it sexually, she lives with him at the hotel, says to herself “a trance of love ”, drops out of school, refuses to part with him, a situation that her mother will eventually accept. Just like the educational institution which knows but does not say anything, the hospital where it stays, the brigade of minors who do not take the investigation very far.
We are in the 80s, but the law prohibits sexual relations with a minor under 15 years of age. And yet Gabriel Matzneff will initiate, isolate, manipulate his prey. Vanessa Springora describes the mechanism of control over a young personality under construction, dispossession, deception, harassment and the impression of stubborn soiling. Vanessa becomes an initial V. In several books of the writer, he describes their relationship publishes his letters. From a sexual object, it becomes a literary object. Consent is her own way of " taking the hunter to his own trap to lock him in a book ".
A shock wave and the excuses of Bernard Pivot
The essential literary journalist of the 80s and 90s expresses his regrets for not having had the right words when he received Gabriel Matzneff on his set. A video that has gone viral on social networks shows him interviewing the writer in a playful tone, evoking all smiles the attraction of the writer for minors. The only one to rise up on the set is a woman, the Canadian author Denise Bombardier. "I would have needed a lot of lucidity and a great strength of character to escape the excesses of a freedom which my colleagues from the print media and the radio stations were just as accustomed to " defends Bernard Pivot.
It was the presentation of the Renaudot Prize to Gabriel Mazneff in 2013 that prompted Vanessa Springora, who became an editor, to write this chilling tale.
She says she doesn't want to be the spokesperson for anything. And she is surprised that the multiple victims of Gabriel Matzneff, now 83 years old, have never come forward. Perhaps his word will free others.
►Read also: In France, the Minister of Culture reacts to the “Matzneff affair”