She saw writing as a kidnapping, not a profession.
When she picked up the pen, she lost her temper, she was carried away to an elsewhere.
Is that what gave her eyes that azure blue and her hair that cloudy whiteness?
There was in her this look turned towards the stars, towards the past, the photographic eye, which sought to give to memories, to the passage of time the thickness of the present.
All his work is situated in this tension, between shadows and lights, presence and absence.
Anne-Marie Garat, juror of the Femina Prize, author of twenty novels, died at the age of 75 on Tuesday July 26 from cancer.
Anne-Marie Garat was born on October 9, 1946. She was the daughter of foresters from Béarn, winegrowers from the Médoc and a peasant from Valais and had grown up in a working-class district of Chartrons, in Bordeaux.
A city with which she had complicated relations because of her slavery past.
"Nothing dispels the confusion of my relationship to this place, my anger, my aversion to its history, and to mine, which is accidentally linked to it by the fact that I [was born] there"
, she said. wrote in
Humeur noire
his last published book (Actes Sud).
The backwash of the ocean
History, the past... Anne-Marie Garat had very early on been marked by the legacy of family memory, which went through the two world wars, as we read in her biography.
She will never forget this constitutive origin of her work, whose novels often take place in the 20th century.
His childhood passes to the rhythm of the rattling of his mother's Singer sewing machine, the photos of his father and the lapping of the water.
The great waves that come and go form his thoughts.
It is on this soil, the landscapes of the Gironde and its salt islands, the Atlantic for horizon that the author builds herself little by little.
After studying Literature, she did a DEA in Cinema at the University of Paris I. She taught cinema and photography in Périgueux, then in the capital and its outskirts.
She was in charge of mission, with Jack Lang, for the teaching of cinema at school.
Her first novel,
L'Homme de Blaye
, she published at the age of 38.
About twenty followed, including
L'Insomniaque
, François Mauriac prize in 1988,
Chambre noire
, Alain Fournier prize in 1991,
Aden
, Femina prize and Renaudot Lycéens in 1992. We should also mention his incredible trilogy of serial novels, (
In the hand Devil, The Child of Darkness
and
Think About Tomorrow
), sprinkled with references and tributes to the authors who accompanied it (Eugène Sue, Zola, Rimbaud, Apollinaire), who dated back nothing less than the course of the 20th century, the Great War, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, the Glorious Thirties until 2010...
An art of worry
The author had joined the ladies of Femina in 2014 in place of Paule Constant.
In these last novels, the author mixed the waves of feelings and nature.
We think back to his writing like a sailboat, these poetic, erudite, fabulous and heady phrases in
La Nuit atlantique
, a novel of evanescence, old crimes and flayed loves, moonless evenings, storms and climatic upheavals.
She claimed fiction as "true representation" and believed that
"literature is more than ever an art of disquiet, proper to knowledge of oneself and of the world"
.
Anne Marie-Garat was keen to defend reading, she was also a committed woman and had taken a public position in favor of undocumented migrants, against police violence denouncing "inhumanity erected as a principle of government".
Anne-Marie Garat had therefore been “snatched up” by literature.
She had her passion for it, as she loved planting trees, wine, chocolate, clouds.
Clouds...passing clouds, wonderful clouds, seemed to him to define his writing and quoted Joseph Conrad:
"...obviously it had to be something very simple, the simplest and most impossible of the world;
as would, for example, the description of the exact shape of a cloud.”
A great lady of literature has gone, we commented at Actes Sud.
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