A successful try! The coveted Inter Book Prize was awarded this Monday to the novelist Anne Pauly for Avant que j'oublie (Verdier), a tragicomic story full of tenderness and empathy telling of her father's illness and death. She succeeds the novelist Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam for Arcadie (POL).
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For a try, it's a master stroke! Anne Pauly is the winner of the #LivreInter 2020 Prize with her first novel, "Avant que j'oublie" (Verdier editions). She recounts her grief at the death of her father. She describes the conjugal violence, alcoholism and the shared feelings she has towards this father figure. . Anne Pauly has had this desire to write since childhood. A few years ago, when she worked as an editorial secretary in a magazine, she decided to enroll in the Paris 8 master's degree in literary creation. Anne Pauly was already writing but had never embarked on a long project short. . To integrate this master, we ask him for a project. She settles down at her work table and let go of her pen. These will be the first pages of "Before I forget". It will take four years to finish this story of mourning because it was necessary, she says, "to turn the page literally". . She also says, about this book: "I wanted to talk about the funny side of death, because life goes on when in your heart someone has just disappeared and it is a blast". After several hours of fierce debate, "Avant que j'oublie" was designated Prix du Livre Inter 2020 on the third ballot by 17 votes. To find out more 👉 bit.ly/LivreInter2020 # LivreInter2020 #ideeLecture #livre # litteraturefrançaise #litterature #editionsVerdier #lecture #lecturedumoment #passionlecture 📸 © Joël Saget / AFP
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Chosen by 17 votes by the jury chaired this year by Philipe Lançon, Anne Pauly's novel was featured in the selections of Goncourt, Femina and Médicis. He was a finalist in the Goncourt of the first novel and is one of the 10 summer reading boards established by the Goncourt academy.
The starting point of the book was "the cocasserie of mourning"
The father of the narrator (double of Anne Pauly) was a punk before the time, a "big deglingo", "misanthrope king", one-legged with no tongue in his pocket, tells us Anne Pauly. But his book is also a great tribute to people of little, these "invisible" damaged by life, ignored most often, sometimes despised.
The day of the death, the funeral of the father, are told with an accuracy which will revive memories in number of bereaved. Grief mingles with giggles. There remains the absence of the one who was and who is no longer.
The novelist recently explained that the starting point of the book was "the cocasserie of mourning (the priest who tells anything, the undertaker drunk ...)". "Mourning is so terrible that you have to laugh to get out of it," says the writer.
A scratch of the “social contempt”
Then, as the writing progressed, the book was transformed "into a funeral oration, a monument to the dead" of the deceased father.
"I also wanted to settle their accounts with the nonsense that we read in the personal development tests which summon you to hurry up by explaining to you that you must settle a mourning or a romantic breakup as quickly as possible", continues the writer. "This is completely absurd! "
By drawing a portrait of her father, the novelist also wanted to give a scratch mark "to the social contempt" that her parents suffered because "from nowhere" or simply because they appreciated popular singers like CĂ©line Dion . "I wanted to take revenge for the contempt he suffered from and which I suffered when I was a child."
The book is however "a novel" because "inspired by real facts but ironed by the wind of the unconscious, of language, of memory, of the story that one tells to oneself".
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