When Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Literature on Thursday, 17e woman of the lot, I had a moment of amazement, so much this French writer had carried out her career discreetly, without making great progress. But here I am delighted to see his clear, clinical, intimate and fascinating work, consecrated in high places. Many readers had, from the 1970s, thanks to his prose reduced to the bone, better understood their fragile condition.
The entomologist who observed the woman in her, mirror of all the others, well deserves her crown. This now octogenarian designer has always spat on bad faith. Novels ? Yes and no. Rather a life offered as food. His childhood, his fears, his loves, his oppressions, his shame will be recorded in this constantly developing logbook. Last year, the film adaptation of the Event, by Audrey Diwan, on her clandestine abortion (Golden Lion in Venice) brought her back to the fore. As easy passion brought to the screen by Danielle Arbid, on a blind and desperate love.
French women of letters, since Colette, since Beauvoir, have accompanied their “second sex”, towards a reappropriation of themselves. We thank them for that. But how to put them all in the same basket? Their styles and their temperaments diverge, like the eras to which they bear witness.
Wait: I just finished Dear asshole, by Virginie Despentes, a bookstore phenomenon in France like here. Between Ernaux’s reserve and the shocking sentences of this furious novelist, an abyss opens up, on the tone side, on the space-time side. However, both carry the torch of women’s liberation, with the perspective of their society behind it.
She will probably never win the Nobel, the novelist of fuck me. Too rough and slippery! But Despentes understands his time well, masters his modes of communication and knows in what tone to speak. No question of measuring its effects. With Despentes, the strings of literary processes are clearly visible. She often irritates, plays provocation. I have been following it since its inception, without biting any of its hooks.
Dear asshole reflects contemporary anxieties that go beyond the divisions of generations, borders and genders. Because tomorrows are crazy. Our times are suspended. In this epistolary novel where his XXIe century is looking for itself, it unbolts the statues of secular machismo as much as the mirages of modernity, strikes on social media: “We quickly understand that the most effective way to intervene is to insult. This is our today.
Despentes does not dive into the depths of the individual psyche, but surfs the air of the day with a feline agility and an infernal nerve. This time, the shape of the cross missives dilutes its charge. Despentes knocks its wings against it a little, a blinded butterfly. The frontal sexuality that marked his earlier works is no longer at the center of his universe. His violence gropes for paths of light, finds them in this exchange of letters, builds bridges. It makes her more human. Less spicy too.
I salute in this novelist the ace of the diagnosis. Thus, when she asserts in the voice of a young man: “The emotion that is sweeping over my generation is despair. It is collective. It thunders, deep in the earth. It is the same that lifts us all. »
Despentes really has common traits with Houellebecq, for their radiography of a world on the edge of the abyss, their allergy to self-righteousness, their sexual descriptions without violins. Because they hit the crowd without sparing their backs. Even if it means being knocked over by detractors when they push things too far. Nothing moreover to displease neither one nor the other. We are far from the inner world of Ernaux.
Nevertheless! Even the Despentes de Dear asshole no longer shocks the bourgeois as it once did. Embalmed in a sarcophagus laden with incense and herbs. Her title of goddess of transgression earned her being read by both sexes. Precious advantage for those who hold the pen.
Notoriety allows him above all to generate bestsellers every time. In Dear asshole, she writes, it is true, that fame makes you stupid. Let’s not take her at her word on that. While watching its vociferous marginality being partly recovered, by exhaustion of its edge, by fashion effect. Annie Ernaux has something more timeless.
We will judge one too dry, the other too expansive. No matter ! Read, consecrated, these novelists bent over the pitfalls of the path of ladies and gentlemen possess the same gift of clairvoyance. At the antipodes hand in hand. So far, so close, as Wim Wenders would say. I see their scout beacons twinkling.