With Marie-Hélène Lafon, the Renaudot crowns a great work

Beware of the Renaudot.

Last year, the jurors had crowned at the last moment “the Snow Panther” by Sylvain Tesson, who was not even part of the list and who had largely dominated Goncourt in terms of sales.

With Marie-Hélène Lafon, 58, they once again distinguish an important writer, a work more than a single book.

"Histoire du fils" is part of a long lineage, that of a peasant girl from the highlands of Cantal, who became a professor of classical letters through the strength of studies and old-fashioned merit, but whose entire work draws on these magnificent and desolate landscapes of this part of Auvergne which seems forgotten by the SNCF network, and from the literary map.

We have never seen the Santoire, Marie-Hélène Lafon's childhood river, but we imagine it with the same power as certain rivers described by great American writers.

Rural writer, she has nothing regionalist, however, in the folk sense.

No nostalgia for the land (childhoods are so hard there).

It does not magnify the past, but tears it from oblivion.

His characters?

Silent people, country people, seasonal workers.

Like “Joseph” (2014), a whole anonymous life, in the blind spot of society, far from everything and even any coffee or business, on these farms that even children had to leave to go to high school, and which are the France of Poulidor, but without light, without any other race than that, without end, to milk, bring in or take out the animals.

Naked life

These books have a smell, that of earth, winter snows, weeds, the sound of the wind and the river and the irrevocable feeling of loneliness in those abandoned by everything who would leave their home for nothing. .

It is sometimes "Love is in the meadow", but in real life, as in "l'Annonce" (2009), an extremely meticulous account of a meeting born of a marriage agency, with a suspense linked to the one who can exist in any birth of a couple, any challenge to meet the impossible, quietly.

An almost silent and magnificent story.

The harmony of an adaptation to the silences of the other.

All this work is a whisper.

The agrégée de grammaire, who has dedicated a book to Flaubert, the hermit of Croisset in Normandy, whose monumental correspondence she admits to reading and re-reading, approaches "Un cœur simple", the short story that the author of "Madame Bovary" dedicated to a poor country girl devoted to others and whom no one has ever looked at, except her parrot ...

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But nothing so exotic about Marie-Hélène Lafon.

No parrots on a farm.

But couples, sometimes news items, a marriage that turns into a bloody stroke.

Single and childless, "up" in the Paris region to teach there (these trips, or the arrival of parents in an antique car, feed some stories), the author has remained faithful since her beginnings to a small house of edition, Buchet-Chastel, of which she became the star.

Loyalty.

Has a French language of high standard but accessible.

Has characters that she carries from book to book.

In this ocean of high mountain plateaus.

As such, this Renaudot crowns a continuity with swerves towards new territories.

“Histoire du fils” probes a family between Figeac, in Lot, Chaterelle or Aurillac, the birthplace of the novelist in Cantal, and Paris where she lives.

In "Our lives" (2017), she also continued the portrait in the capital of these tiny lives, since it was about a non-meeting between a man and the cashier of a Monoprix, an ocean of loneliness and the unspoken, yet so close to the great history dodged, to retained passion, at a high price.

News, novels, collection of autobiographical texts or interviews, you have to read everything about Marie-Hélène Lafon.

To escape.

To find a fundamental nature but not glorified, hard, alive, sometimes dangerous.

Life in the nude and as close as possible to words.