“It’s the first time I feel anything when I hear the name of a Nobel Literature winner.“, reacted Thursday, October 6 on franceinfo the writer Virginie Despentes. The Nobel Prize for Literature crowned this Thursday the French Annie Ernaux and the “courage” of her autobiographical work which made her a feminist figure. The 82-year-old writer is rewarded for “the clinical acuity with which she discovers the roots, the distances and the collective constraints of personal memory“, explained the Nobel jury.
franceinfo: How do you feel after the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Annie Ernaux?
Viginie Despentes: It’s the first time I’ve experienced anything on learning the name of a Nobel literature winner. It represents something important for a long time in the French landscape. I’ve read it since I was little and it’s a very important presence. It is a surprise that she receives the Nobel Prize. It is truly a joy.
What did it bring you as a reader?
She brought us many things. It was a singular voice. Hear where she was writing from, what she was writing about, her work on the autobiography, her quest for sincerity. It was a very important presence when I became a novelist, with her positions. She is very careful to respond to people who send her their books, she is very generous, and she is a reader who really supports novelists. It’s a benevolent and intelligent presence, and there aren’t that many. She has incredible talent.
In her time, criticism was very harsh on her. Did you feel it?
We didn’t really realize it. But we realized that she published with a real interest for readers, but a relative indifference, for a long time, of reviews and awards. She had the Renaudot. It existed, but a little apart. She was not celebrated. She is the prototype of the author that we like to despise in France because she is a very humble writer, she is a leftist personality and she has always written from her point of view as a woman and from the middle class. There is a shame of her social background, but she has never denied it. She never claimed to become anything other than what she was at the start. There’s something almost reassuring about it, it’s a benchmark, Annie Ernaux.
Did she help you write?
Indirectly, most certainly. The fact that it has always existed and that I have always read it, and recognized the uniqueness of its work, that probably influenced, supported and inspired me. It is very much a search for sincerity. We feel in her the requirement to be as close as possible to what she knows of her experience and not to be as close as possible to what will have a good effect or a short sentence. It’s quite extraordinary in all his work.