A day after the high school students 'Goncourt, the high school students' Renaudot delivered its verdict.
While there were still six authors in the running, including three journalists from
Le Figaro
, Étienne de Montety, winner last week of the Grand Prize for the novel from the Académie française for
The Great Test
(Stock), Mohammed Aïssaoui for
Les Funambules
(Gallimard) and Jean-René Van der Plaetsen for
The Job of Dying
(Grasset).
It was the latter who won over high school students brought together by the Friends of Théophraste Renaudot association and the rectorate of the Poitiers academy.
Read also:
Irène Frain receives the Interallie Prize
Published last August,
Le Métier de Die
is the second book by Jean-René Van der Plaetsen after
La Nostalgie
deonneur
, which in 2017 received no less than four awards including the Interallié and the Jean Giono award.
Van der Plaetsen, who was peacekeeper in Lebanon in 1985, drew from this strong experience the story, somewhere near Tire, of a decisive meeting between a young idealistic French officer and Belleface, a survivor of the Treblinka camp. , former legionnaire in Indochina, legendary officer of the Israeli army and finally officer of the SLA, Christian militia close to the Hebrew state.
In his article in
Le Figaro littéraire
(September 10), Emmanuel de Waresquiel spoke of this book as
“a follow-up to his admirable first story:
La Nostalgie deonneur
.
Perhaps this book is moving that it is not so much a novel about war as a story about men.
The Blue Hussar of Nimier is not far away, and François Sanders and the young Saint-Anne.
It's the job of living, not the job of dying that Van der Plaetsen tells us about.
If you like mercenaries, don't. ”
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