Paris (AFP)
The coveted Inter Book Prize was awarded Monday to the novelist Anne Pauly for "Avant que j'oublie" (Verdier), a tragicomic tale full of tenderness and empathy telling of her father's illness and death.
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 father of the narrator (perfect double of Anne Pauly) was a punk before the time, a "big deglingo", "misanthrope king", one-legged without having his 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 to AFP 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.
Then, as the writing progressed, the book turned "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 tests of personal development which summon you to hurry by explaining to you that it is necessary to settle a mourning or a romantic breakup as quickly as possible", continues the writer. "It 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 Céline Dion . "I wanted to take revenge for the contempt he suffered from and which I suffered when I was a child."
The novelist went through the Master of Literary Creation at the University of Paris 8 (notably led by Vincent Message - who was also in the running for the Prix du Livre Inter - and Olivia Rosenthal). "From childhood I was sure I wanted to write but I didn't know when and how to do it," she says. "The Master was a + bookmaker + writing".
"I waited a very long time before embarking on writing and once launched (...) I assumed to say + I +", she insists.
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".
Last year the Inter Book Prize was awarded to the novelist Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam for "Arcadie" (POL).
© 2020 AFP