Horses do not play races and writers are hardly disturbed by the names of potential winners proposed by
British
bookmakers
on the eve of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Their divinatory art is about as reliable as that of the Roman omens who read the future in the bowels of a turtledove.
This year, the London betting company Ladbrokes had taken bets on the name of Annie Ernaux, some of whom whispered that she figured prominently in the list kept secret by members of the Swedish Academy.
Read alsoNobel Prize for Literature: Annie Ernaux after Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano?
Childish joy
Finally, it is not at the Royal Palace in Stockholm but at the Monte-Carlo Opera that the author of
La Place
was consecrated by receiving, on Tuesday, October 12, the literary prize of the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation. hands of the Princess of Hanover. Hearing Caroline of Monaco pronounce the name of the laureate with unfeigned joy, one could well know, with certainty, that she had been able to be convincing with the other voters of a jury composed in particular of members of the French Academy and of the Académie Goncourt. Annie Ernaux took the stage of the Salle Garnier of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo with a childish manner of joy, evoking "
something immense and overwhelming
" before recalling the "
dazzling
memory"
»From the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III, on April 18, 1956, the year of her sixteenth birthday, when she lived with her parents, rue du Clos-des-Parts, in Yvetot, in Normandy. A discreet way of signifying that the nightlife from which she so violently wanted to leave could henceforth resemble for her a strange country in which she happened to come back to remember.
Appeased, reconciled: at the end of a long journey of writing that began in 1974 with
Les Armoires vides
, this is the image that Annie Ernaux has given since
The Years
(Gallimard, 2008), a novel that has impressed until its older detractors. The
fairer ones
among them know that one should not look for the name of the novelist at the bottom of the petitions, but on the covers of her books.
The Other Girl
(Nil, 2011) and
Mémoire de fille
(Gallimard, 2016) were poignant texts.
"What counts for her is (...) to grasp this duration which constitutes her passage on earth at a given time, this time that she has lived through, this world that she has recorded just by living" ,
she wrote in
The Years
as a poetic art.
In a resolutely cosmopolitan and feminist atmosphere, the Discovery Exchange rewarded the Franco-Moroccan novelist Abigail Assor for
As rich as the king
(Gallimard) and the Coup de cœur of young high school students the Burkinabe humorist Roukiata Ouedraogo for
Honey under the pancakes
(Slatkine & Cie).
For her part, Julia Kristeva, French-speaking philologist and psychoanalyst born in Bulgaria in 1941, received from Charlotte Casiraghi the Principality Prize awarded by the Prince Pierre Foundation and by the Philosophical Meetings of Monaco.