“Mesopotamia”, by Olivier Guez, Grasset, 416 p., €23, digital €16.
He is in France for a few weeks, time to support the publication of his new book, Mesopotamiabefore returning to Rome, where he has lived for four years. From there, he is very proud to announce, he will then go to teach a semester at the American University of Princeton, “a transversal history of European culture”.
In line with certain figures who should be at the center of his courses, such as Stefan Zweig or Joseph Roth, Olivier Guez belongs to the family of writers who cannot sit still; we hardly see, in the contemporary field, French authors as bearers of a “cosmopolitan vision of the world” that this polyglot (French, German, English, Spanish, Italian) born in 1974 in Strasbourg, claiming not to be “never so happy” than to travel the roads of Europe by car. In a part of the conversation unrelated to his personality or his trajectory, he notes that his books have in common “characters on the run »and it is difficult not to hear there a form of echo to his own fidgeting.
His first novel and only fiction, The Revolutions of Jacques Koskas (Belfond, 2013), funny-hysterical tendency Philip Roth first way, saw his hero, of Sephardic Jewish origin, wander from Alsace to Paris, from Berlin to Jerusalem via New York, to escape the conventional destiny traced by his parents; writing it had constituted in itself, for the author, a sort of escape, a “break with [son] original environment, very closed » – he explains having been “in a Talmudic school from 6 to 11 years old”.
New movement of flight, but complete change of atmosphere in The Disappearance of Josef Mengele (Grasset, Renaudot Prize 2017). Olivier Guez provided a scrupulous restitution of the years spent by the former “Auschwitz doctor” in South America, escaping justice and Nazi hunters, until he died on a Brazilian beach in 1979.
Forty men and one woman
Today, the heroine of Mesopotamia is a woman who, in the eyes of the author, “had no choice but to run away” : Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). She was an archaeologist, diplomat, spy, and played a major role in the history of the Middle East, helping to draw its borders, while working to install the Hashemite dynasty on the throne of Iraq. . Born into a wealthy family in Victorian England, single with no prospect of marriage in her twenties, “she didn’t want to limit herself to the role of old maid, so she had to leave. She took up Persian, Arabic, archeology”details the one who discovered its existence in 2003, at the time of the Iraq War, with a photo of the Cairo conference, held in March 1921 to establish the plan for British control in Iraq and Transjordan. Around Winston Churchill pose forty men and one woman. At the time a journalist The Tribune working on energy, he wonders who she is, what she is doing in this photo, and writes her name in a notebook. Fifteen years later, he read The Kurdish Wheatearby Jean Rolin (POL, 2018), where Gertrude Bell appears at the bend of a line. “I run to Grasset, I show the photo of Cairo and I say that through it I am going to tell the story of the Middle East. »
You have 30% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
