CHRONICLE – The author of the novel crowned with the Goncourt Prize in 2020 abandons the imagination to tell a true story.
This article comes from “Figaro Magazine”
In his country house, Hervé Le Tellier discovers a name engraved on a wall: “André Chaix”. Another might have erased this graffiti with a trowel and plaster, but when you preside over the Oulipo, you are attentive to the signals of destiny; chance becomes a literary constraint. Le Tellier started snooping like Modiano in 1997 when he found the name of Dora Bruder in an old issue of Paris-Soir. This name, André Chaix, was that of a resistance fighter killed at the age of 20 by a column of German tanks, on August 23, 1944, in Grignan. Who was this young man? A handsome boy involved in the FFI, a lover whose letters and photos Le Tellier found, an adventurer ready to sacrifice his life to liberate his homeland.
When a novelist has just had massive success with a work of wild imagination (The Anomaly sold a million and a half copies, before and after the award of the Goncourt in 2020), it could have been tempted to exploit…
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