He was due to win a big laurel in France. After the December prize and the Page III prize awarded in Paris, the prestigious Médicis fell on Thursday to Quebecer Kevin Lambert for his novel That our joy remains. Well done ! A brilliant and rich testimony to our crazy era of polarization, the author returns back to back the well-off, the woke, the right-thinking, the leading artists, the young, the old, everyone. With high-flying pirouettes, this tightrope walker straight on his rope at the top of the canyon avoids chasms to the left and right. He denounces the upper bourgeoisie and capital so skillfully that everyone is reminded of their own conscience and the range of their many prejudices.
The controversy in France surrounding the author’s consultation of a sensitive reader for a racialized character in his book has finally run out of steam. The quality and complexity of his work overcame reluctance across the Atlantic. For Quebec, what an honor! Marie-Claire Blais had already won the Médicis in 1966 for A season in the life of Emmanuel. And Dany Laferrière in 2009. It’s the next generation’s turn! This young writer native of Chicoutimi (we already owed him the impactful Whaterelle de Roberval) stands out in a country where novelists are still celebrated like kings. After having collected the Ringuet prize in Quebec, prophet also in his country.
Some readers admit to finding May our joy remain difficult to access. It is true that the first pages seem forbidding, but the more we penetrate into its dense forest, the more the lights shine and the more we sink into it with happiness. The story of its renowned Montreal architect, taken to the pinnacle then sent to the pit of the outlaws, ready for all kinds of satire. His is fierce, jubilant and highly cinematic to boot. When will it be adapted for the big screen?
A corrosive Femina
At the antipodes of That our joy ofdie but also the goncouriséWatch over her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, ample, fertile, full of meaning and history, a lean work, with the coldness of embers, awarded at the Femina, moved me from head to toe. sad tiger by the Frenchwoman Neige Sinno, between interiority and analysis, cuts her subject like a blade penetrates the flesh.
Half story, half essay on the incest experienced in one’s childhood and adolescence, here dismembered, turned over like a pancake but never digested, how can we summarize this work? sad tiger approaches sexual violence with a terrifying perspective, dissecting it. When receiving her prize, the Femina winner specified that the subject of her work was “neither a woman, nor a man, nor any other”. But then what? It’s up to readers to discover it. Steeped in humanity and monstrosity, two worlds collide for the worse in this hell resulting from the shared “little secret”.
I have read and seen on screen many poignant testimonies from victims of incest over the years. But Neige Sinno’s book lies elsewhere. Out of boxes. Exceptional. The acuity of the gaze appears unprecedented to me. This woman, with her exceptional intelligence and her high level of conscience, can provide both a crude description of the outrages suffered at the hands of her father-in-law and an analysis of the phenomenon.
We are talking here about a work of precise, concise style, of determination to say, of powerlessness to truly transmit, of the desperate desire to grasp the psyche of its attacker. Yes, but how to achieve this? “Even I, who have seen this very closely, as closely as anyone can see it, and who have wondered about it for years, I still don’t understand,” she writes.
We already knew it was forever shattered. On the back cover of sad tiger, the tone was set: “I wanted to believe it. I wanted to dream that the kingdom of literature would welcome me like any of the orphans who find refuge there, but even through art, we cannot escape from abjection. Literature didn’t save me. I am not saved. » This book seals the defeat of writing as well as its victory. Opening gaps to the reader’s imagination, while keeping him at the limits of buried wounds.
Neige Sinno sees rape as more of a story of power than of sex and ventures into less frequented existential zones. We see her embrace the point of view of those who have suffered evil head-on, like that of the executioners in a common room to which they alone have the key. Together hostages to the worst. Neige Sinno brandishes her broken life, received by us like a brand that burns fingers and eyes.
The literature is rich and varied. We bless her for sometimes making us tremble.