“Get your facts first, then twist them as much as you want.” The writer Gérard de Cortanze carries this sentence from Rudyard Kipling across his shoulder. Believing that in literature, truth and lies complement each other, he fictionalized the story of his Franco-Italian family in a cycle of novels entitled The Viceroys. Paternal first, with an aristocratic Piedmontese family exiled in France from which he inherited the name in default of the castle – Roero di Cortanze – which he took fifty years to take over and live in. Then the maternal story, which tells of the Neapolitan working class and the ancestry of Michele Pezza, bandit and insurgent leader against the Napoleonic army.
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There is also literature, like a host family when his own refuses to enlighten him about his origins. With companions whose lives he recounts: Paul Auster, Jorge Semprún, then the fascinating destiny of Ernest Hemingway to whom he returns a third time in He only dreamed of landscapes and lions by the sea (Albin Michel, 2024).
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Bibliography of Gérard de Cortanze:
- Children are bored on SundayHachette, 1985 (his very first novel)
- The ViceroysActes Sud, 1998 (Novel Prize from the Rendez-Vous de l’Histoire de Blois)
- AssameseAlbin Michel, 2002 (Renaudot Prize)
- De Gaulle in a swimsuitPlon, 2007
- The Legend of the 24 Hours of Le MansAlbin Michel, 2014
- Running woman, Violette Morris the scandalousAlbin Michel, 2019
- The King who wanted to see the seaAlbin Michel, 2021
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