2023-10-17 06:10:00
The regional meetings for the Goncourt prize for high school students, between writers and students, began a week ago, the last three are being held this week in Lille, Aix and Rennes, before the deliberation rounds.
Eric Reinhardt is terrified to go on stage. This Monday, October 9, he takes part in the first of the Goncourt meetings for high school students, it is his third time but he still cannot get used to it: “They can be very direct, almost immodest. It can be seen as an intrusion in the eyes of adults. Hundreds of young people leave the Edouard VII theater, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, and rush into the annexes, the authors awaiting them for signings. A student approaches the writer in the running with Sarah, Suzanne and the writer (Gallimard), and questions him. He then exults: “It’s great! She understood something that closely corresponded to what I wanted to do. An adult would never have asked me that question.”
The crowd of young people returns to their seats in front of four other writers. Fifteen authors from the first Goncourt list will take the stage today. The pace is intense, everyone has less than a quarter of an hour to respond to the students who may vote for them. The day is progressing on track: questions were concocted in advance by the high school students then chosen by the organizers. Less spontaneity but more equity of speaking time between writers, and certain questions resonated in the old theater.
“Why is your novel vulgar from the outset?” Mokhtar Amoudi is asked. “It is not a question of being vulgar but of being true, of not hiding the problems that I am precisely trying to describe,” replies the author of Ideal Conditions (Gallimard), a highly acclaimed first back-to-school novel. . The meetings follow one another and questions arise amid whispers and stifled laughter. “What is the meaning of the Caravaggio time stamp?”, “Is your character your double?”, “Do you think your book will help change society?”
Intimacy questioned
The spectrum is broad, but some trends emerge. All authors are urged to sort truth from fiction. The response of Quebecer Kevin Lambert, selected for his third novel Que notre joie remain (Le Nouvel Attila), stands out: “I don’t write about real facts, I write about reality.”
Often, shy or indiscreet, a voice hidden in the ranks seeks the privacy of the writers. “Would you have published this book when your parents were alive?” Yes, says Laure Murat. Before being able to write Proust, a family novel (Robert Laffont), she will have had to “accumulate a lot of sorrow, come out of the closet”. His entire family then cuts ties and “what saved me was telling this truth and continuing in this truth”.
A student goes on stage to read an extract from Sad Tiger. Its author, Neige Sinno (POL), will be the next to speak. Isn’t this story about the incest she suffered too hard for young readers, asks the presenter. She points out that rather than being fearful, the high school students made the courageous choice of an explicit text. In the room suddenly hanging on her lips, she is questioned about her feelings, her healing, her family. “The purpose of the book is not to bathe in the sordid,” says the woman who does not write to “heal” or “let off steam.”
“Some had never read an entire book”
At break time, the thirteen classes of high school students from all over France (Barentin, Charleville-Mézières, Gien, Montreuil, Paris, Poitiers, etc.), invade the square in front of the theater. We breathe a little before returning to the buzzing seats. High school girls say they are “impressed and admiring of writers”. One of them who had feared finding them “egocentric, full of themselves”, found them open and accessible. Here they are, moreover, continuing the exchange in the hall. Kevin Lambert, when he was a college student, says he was also a member of a similar jury, a decisive moment for the writer he became. Dorothée Janin (The Revolt of the Lost Girls, Albin Michel) appreciated the exercise: “No speeches, no automatisms. And the questions didn’t focus on history, they were really literary. The high school students were interested in writing and our approach.”
Few aspiring writers among the troupe seated under the arches, literature does not inspire dreams or seems inaccessible. “It seems super hard, I don’t know how they manage to write 300 pages,” we hear. Next to it, Xavier Fleury does not despair. The French teacher at the Jean Guéhenno vocational high school in Saint-Amand-Montrond wants to “restore the taste for reading, which opens up a richer horizon of imagination and creates dialogue with new voices.” Participation in the Goncourt of high school students will not have been too difficult to set up: “Some had never read an entire book. But I presented it as a challenge, I made surprising proposals, there was great freedom of choice. The delivery of the book boxes was a great moment of excitement.”
#character #double #Liberation