(Paris) It is in homage to her husband killed in an accident more than twenty years ago that the French novelist Brigitte Giraud wrote live fastwithout imagining for a moment that it would earn him the Goncourt, the most prestigious of French-speaking literary prizes.
Posted at 12:10 p.m.
“Finally, I think it’s a love book,” she said Thursday at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where she received the most prestigious of French-language literary prizes.
This Lyonnaise native of Algeria, aged 60, had behind her some experience in literature, but little notoriety among the general public. And she got along very well.
The list is long of the professions she exercised, after studying languages (English, German, Arabic) which were to make her a translator.
It will have been briefly, for the industry, but it is towards the culture that it turned.
“I was a bit of a bookseller. I worked as a journalist, freelancer at Lyon Liberation. What else did I do? Literary advisor for festivals… I was also an editor at one time. And I have written a dozen books: novels, essays, short stories, ”she explains in an interview with AFP.
Jean-Marc Roberts, her first editor at Fayard in 1997, had commissioned her to create a collection at Stock. She called it La Forêt, in homage to a song by The Cure, At Forest.
Otherwise, she adds, “I traveled quite a bit to England, for music, in the 80s. I lived in Germany… Anything I could to get away from it”.
As she writes in live fast (published at the end of August by Flammarion), a “drama”, on June 22, 1999 in Lyon, cut his life in two. That day her husband, Claude, starts too quickly at a traffic light, with an overly powerful motorcycle that is not his, falls, and will not recover.
“Away away”
In 2001, she recounted the weeks following this death in Now. She calls it “the book of stupefaction, of the explosion, of the crash just after”.
Because she was 36 years old, a very young son, a house they had just bought, in which she moved in without him. To begin his mourning there.
“I lived, I published books. I got back on my feet, despite everything, even if, in these cases, you become someone else, ”she explains today.
She obtained the Goncourt for short stories in 2007 for the collection Love is very overrated. In 2019, she was a finalist for the Prix Médicis for brave day.
“I knew for a long time that I would have to write the book. The book that is at the height of Claude, of our love story, the one that embraces all that and that seeks the truth, all the truths, ”she says. But “I couldn’t have written it before a period of 20 years, because I had to be at a good distance”.
When it was time to sell the house in Caluire-et-Cuire, near Lyon, the writing came. And with it, the desire to elucidate certain circumstances that have remained unclear for many years.
The story, sober, was immediately well received by critics, and attracted the attention of several juries of the autumn awards. As in the accident, the result of a chain of improbable events, “there too, there was a domino effect”.
Upon receiving her award on Thursday, she spoke of two words that resonate strongly with her. “There is a word called mektoub, which means ‘it was written’. There is another word which is chance, because it is about a man who falls”, an accident.
“I think about literature and what words allow,” she said Thursday. “Maybe words help to ward off the spell. »