The price of the magazine French studies is a rather special bug in the French-speaking literary world. Awarded in principle every two years, it highlights an exceptional contribution to reflection on literature and writing in the French language, and rewards a novel, an essay or an unpublished collection offered exclusively to the Presses de l’Université de Montréal, who fund the prize. Thus the first edition of The raped man (1970) by Gaston Miron was released, and more recently, These voices that besiege me… on the fringes of my Francophonie (1999) by Assia Djabar, The embrace of the winds (2009) by Hélène Dorion and Inside the threat (2019) by Marie-Claire Blais.
This year, the committee has chosen to highlight the work of the multiple award-winning French writer Maylis de Kerangal by rewarding the collection An archipelago. Fiction, stories, essays. The volume, which opens on Reda novella unpublished, is composed of 22 texts, stories and essays published between 2007 and 2022, first published in about twenty different reviews and newspapers.
“When the directors of the magazine, Stéphane Vachon and Marie-Pascale Huglo, approached me, I lacked the time to write an entire book, says the writer met by The duty as part of the launch of the collection in Montreal. So I composed this short story [Rouge], to which they suggested that I add an anthology of some texts written over fifteen years, with the aim of offering a point of view on a work in its entirety. »
The title An archipelago also comes from this impression of unity and composition that emanates from these a priori distinct and disparate texts, which all come from an equal investment in terms of language, literature and thought. “All bring back the same research, the same questioning, a continuity of attempts; all talk to each other. Echoes, swirls, wakes, their common vibrations therefore contribute to activating the notion of landscape, central to my work”, writes the author in the introduction.
A few revealing pages
Red, which would be the main island, brings together in some 50 pages all that is the strength of Maylis de Kerangal’s writing, detailed and analyzed in subsequent essays; the opening of a space in which bodies behave, an abundance of details teeming with politics, society and feelings, a marked interest in the world of work and that of youth, a moving phrasing that creates a new temporality.
The novella recounts a day in the life of a young woman newly arrived in Paris, who combines odd jobs and “dodging everything that hardens the contours of a place” in the world. When she accepts a position as a hostess in an agency, she finds herself at the racetrack, decked out in the red and standardized uniform of a “modern woman”, to welcome and serve the high society, who have come to bet on the horse. the fastest.
Under the pen of Maylis de Kerangal, the hippodrome becomes a microcosm, the scene of a divide between social classes and generations, a symbol of this game that is life and destiny, an example of the self-reinvention often required a space and its codes.
We find there all the importance that the author grants to places to make literature happen, to find the names that will be the essence of the musicality and the phonetics of her sentences. “As long as I don’t have the names, I have the impression that the book cannot exist. Books generate spaces, spectral maps. The anthroponyms are woven into the toponyms to properly grasp an era, a subject, and become a material that acts as a stimulus for the imagination of the book, and allows me to enter the space of the text. »
The microcosm of work
Red is also a reminder of the essential position occupied by the workers and their respective universe in the work of Maylis de Kerangal – think of the workers of Birth of a bridge (Prix Médicis, 2010), nurses from mend the living (2014) or to the artists ofA world at your fingertips (2018). For each of these environments, she investigates, searches, triturates, goes to the field to find a language, a starting point that awakens the powers of her imagination.
“I am interested in the question of gestures and rituals; what we think in front of a blank canvas, how we choose our brushes, the function of the products we use… The novel is a space that allows me to approach, even to immerse myself in worlds to which I do not I don’t have access in life — to the social, professional, linguistic, technical and symbolic worlds of which I have a fairly vague and fairly simple vision at the start. I like that the book takes me into this complexity, that it allows me to amass a language, technical lexicons that are often left on the margins of literary paths, since they are associated with ugliness, materialism and to roughness. I like the resistant and bristling side of these words. »
This attention to detail, this perfectionism of the description allow the novelist to enter into understanding with the world, to account for its dissonant and confused nature, to dig into its otherness, to tend towards knowledge and knowledge. “I am against this idea that a novel should allow escape or entertainment. On the contrary, I want him to bring me back to the world in which I live, to reveal it to me. For me, each detail is like a grip on a climbing wall, which allows me to move away from a language flattened by the laws of the market, steeped in psychological clichés, to better reflect the murky and nuanced side of the world. . I plead for a literature that resists standardization. As a result, she gives rise to an intimate questioning that raises political and social rigor through her rigor. “I don’t like politics as a discourse in literature, whether portrayed by classified characters, good or bad. I tend for it to be the form that gives birth to it, that we apprehend it through a chilled, tired or ignored body. »