“In a world where everything is commerce, friendship is perhaps the only relationship whose driving force is free”

Our world is falling apart

From there, the story presents two sides. In the town where he lives incognito, “Pierre” (as he calls himself) meets a young woman who is half his age and who fascinates him with her dynamism and her interpersonal skills. He forms a bond with “Linda” which, although platonic, is no less enchanting: “Without sex, and without everything that sex implies between two beings, the days and evenings we spent together had a taste of eternity” . And to add: “In a world where everything is commerce, even laughter, even sleep, even love (what we call love and which has nothing to do with Tristan and Isolde), friendship is perhaps to be the only form of human relationship where gratuity is the driving force” .

The second side of the novel is then revealed. In Brussels, to ensure his old age, the narrator accepted a well-paid position on the board of directors of a cultural organization created to promote… European virtual art, in other words a dematerialized art, an art which cannot be embodies neither on a canvas, nor in wood or marble. At the same time, the narrator’s little world is wavering and falling apart. All kinds of bizarre incidents and encounters reveal a world that is unraveling before his eyes – even art, even love, even Linda who is not who he thought. The story ends with this vision of our society in distress, which is also in decadence, of a world – what a pretty formula! – avid non-readers!

Hemingway’s death

For his part, Gérard de Cortanze, essayist, novelist, literary critic, has occupied chair number 3 at our Royal Academy since 2005, the first occupant of which in 1922 was Gabriele d’Annunzio, the author of works with titles as flamboyant as L child of pleasure (1889) et The Fire (1900). A complicit destiny therefore caused this chair to be awarded to Gérard de Cortanze who, although born in Paris in 1948, descends from an aristocratic family from Piedmont who gave viceroys to Italy before finding themselves penniless in France. One of his grandfathers was a mason, the other a taxi driver. The young Gérard revealed very early a voracious cultural appetite, ranging from Latin American culture (Borges, Frida Kahlo) to immobile races ( The legend of the 24 hours of Le Mans 2014), novels ( Zazous 2016) to essays (Paul Auster, Jorge Semprun, Le Clézio, Hemingway, etc.).

Today, it goes to Ernest Hemingway, born in 1899, son of a doctor, journalist, who began a literary career in Paris in the 1920s, under the patronage of the effervescent Gertrude Stein and the poet Ezra Pound. Made famous by Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1952), he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Six years later, he experienced all kinds of suffering: hypertension, diabetes, bipolar disorder, the onset of Alzheimer’s. After being treated with electroshock at the prestigious Mayo Clinic (Minnesota), he returned home to his home in Idaho on June 30, 1961. On July 2, he shot himself twice in the head. What could be his sufferings, his reflections, his memories, his conversations with his fourth wife, the journalist Mary Welsch, his relationship with Fidel Castro, the hostility of the CIA, etc., inspired Gérard de Cortanze this empathetic novel .

“What I know about Linda”***Roman by Luc Dellisse, Éditions Lamiroy, 245 pp. Price €20

“He only dreamed of landscapes and lions by the sea”** Roman by Gérard de Cortanze, Albin Michel, 315 pp. Price €23, digital €16