First choices, first disappointments: the novel by Virginie Despentes, Dear assholethe biggest success of the literary season, will not win the Goncourt prize, the most prestigious of French literary prizes, dismissed from the outset because she is a former juror.
The author of Vernon Subutexback to the novel after five years, received almost unanimous criticism for this epistolary exchange on addictions and the #MeToo movement.
But Dear asshole was out of the race.
“It was not mentioned because, for us, it is obvious: Virginie Despentes cannot compete”, explained to AFP the president of the Goncourt Academy, Didier Decoin.
“Ethically, it was inadmissible. And that doesn’t mean at all that we didn’t like Virginie’s book, on the contrary…”, he added.
Virginie Despentes is the star of this French literary season, with sales reaching some 65,000 copies, according to figures put forward by her publisher at the end of August.
Winner of the Renaudot prize in 2010, for apocalypse baby, Virginie Despentes was herself a juror of Goncourt for four years. She quit in January 2020 to focus on writing.
The deliberations remain very opaque, but Pierre Assouline, critic, journalist and author, has already indicated on his website that he loved two titles from the first selection. They appear at this stage among the favorites: The Clandestine Life by Monica Sabolo, which mixes personal history and investigation of the far-left group Direct Action, and The heart does not give in by Grégoire Bouillier, a 900-page return to a terrible news item from the 1990s, the voluntary agony of a lonely old lady.
happy surprise
Other titles are perceived as serious contenders by their quality of writing: Taormina by Yves Ravey, a noir novel set in Sicily, live fast by Brigitte Giraud, the story of the last days of a husband who killed himself on a motorbike, or Almost sisters by Cloé Korman, an investigation into the Holocaust.
Muriel Barbery, who seemed very far from the tastes of Goncourt with her first success in 2007 (The elegance of the Hedgehog), is 15 years later in the race with An hour of fervor.
Goncourt’s first list is always a happy surprise for a few low-key novels so far. This is the case this year for Beirut-sur-Seine Franco-Lebanese Sabyl Ghoussoub, A human sum from the Haitian Makenzy Orcel, or Our dear old lady author by Anne Serre.
A fiction about an adviser to the Russian presidency was included despite being published in April: The Mage of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli, recommended among the summer readings of the Renaudot prize.
The winner must be designated on November 3.
Inclination for the “big ones”
The selection proved Goncourt’s penchant for “big” publishing houses, with three authors from Gallimard, two from Flammarion or Stock, one from Seuil, Albin Michel, Actes Sud and even Minuit.
“Average” houses occupy a smaller place: Rivages, L’Iconoclaste and Sabine Wespieser.
The editor of Dear asshole, Grasset, does not place any title in this first selection, but will be able to make up for it with other autumn prizes. Renaudot follows on Wednesday, disclosing its first selection.
The Inrocks literary prize published on Tuesday a first selection of twenty “French novels or stories” including that of Virginie Despentes. There are other titles not retained by the Goncourt, although noticed by the critics, such as The Thirteenth Hour by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, Towards violence by Blandine Rinkel, or The Exported by Sonia Devillers.
The Goncourt des lycéens, awarded on November 24, will work on the same titles as its eldest, with 55 associated establishments from Lens (northern France) to New York, via the island of Martinique, in the Caribbean.