Can you become a writer when you have given up on the novel?
The question has been bothering Ivan Jablonka for a while.
Since he was awarded the Medici Prize for Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes at least.
Awarded in the “novels” category in 2016, he received praise from readers rejoicing at having read his investigation “like a novel”.
The compliment is not quite one for the trained historian, who sees it as a new sign of the polarization of writing, of the insurmountable fossilization of two categories: “
On the one hand, literature-fiction, where the novel represents the pleasure principle
;
on the other, gray literature, where scholarly research embodies the principle of truth
.”
He wants to explore a “third continent”, that of the literature of reality;
an area, “
like the slope of a valley which, weakly exposed to the sun, remains most often in the shade
”, he writes in his last essay.
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