the essential
Prix Médicis 2022 for “The Thirteenth Hour”, Rebecca Lighieri is on the list of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens with “The Club of Lost Children”. A novel in two voices which expresses the uneasiness of Generation Z subject to many vicissitudes… Meeting at Ombres Blanches on Thursday.
When his selection by the Goncourt Academy and for the Goncourt Prize for high school students was announced, a “controversy” arose, how do you perceive it?
In any case, there was clearly, on the part of a very very marginal fringe of the adult population, I would like to point out this, a challenge to the presence of the “Lost Children’s Club” in the Goncourt selection of high school students. And even if it remained very marginal, we know very well that it is easy to spread a rumor, to call for lynching, which is a bit what happened around this book. But I took part in five meetings as part of the Goncourt des lycéens so I have feedback from high school boys and girls. And obviously, those who come to see me are certainly those who liked the book but they all tell me that they have seen others, and that for them, it’s really little ado about not much.
Also read:
Toulouse psychiatrist JB Dethieux looks at “ordinary monsters” at the Ombres Blanches bookstore
But this necessarily raises questions…
Yes, and I still asked myself questions, knowing that I didn’t write the book for high school students, but I think that I still wrote it with them in mind and that it is made for them. I wondered to what extent or not they must be shaken by certain scenes. I think it might annoy them, disturb them a little, but it won’t hurt them. It’s not something that’s likely to send them to the psychologist. On the contrary, they may very well say to themselves “I am not alone in feeling alone”. They can identify with Miranda without necessarily adopting her tragic trajectory. And above all, the scenes with sexual content helped me build the characters, I think that they are essential and that it would be wrong to deprive themselves of reading the book.
You were a teacher, did you draw the truth of the situations, the language, the moods from your daily professional life?
A year and a half ago, in fact, I was still a high school teacher, so the discomfort, the distress that I am talking about, I still touched it with my finger. And then I have two daughters who are about Miranda’s age. And as for the ways of speaking, the familiar expressions, which I have also been criticized for in the dialogues, I stick to them in the sense that, if I get young people to talk, I get them to talk as we talk today in Miranda’s community. I force myself to have a form of verisimilitude in the dialogues. And it seems to me that there is nothing harmful about reading things that they themselves say all the time.
Also read:
At 96, Denis Brihat, pioneer of film photography, exhibits at the Galerie Ombres Blanches in Toulouse
As your heroine says in the book “I really hope it’s not burnt”, is that an expression that you would use?
So I carefully avoid, given my age, expressing myself like an 18 year old girl. I can say it, but with a lot of self-deprecation. But I avoid, as much as possible, speaking like my children and like my students.
In your novel, why is the primary source of inspiration the theater?
Theater was present from the start in fact since one of my sub-inspirations is Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” with the character of Miranda who is born on a stormy night. And I really wanted to create the story in the world of theater and to have main characters who are actors so it is very central in the novel. And I also revisit pieces that I love like “Lorenzaccio” by Musset, “La Tempête”, obviously “Phèdre” by Racine. There is always a possibility of updating them, of giving them a kind of resonance with what we are experiencing today.
The form of the novel is also atypical with two parts, two personalities, two expressed sensitivities, a father, a daughter…
Yes, I have often done it in my books published under a pseudonym or those that I publish under my real name. I often use a form of polyphony to make several subjectivities heard, several biases to revisit the same episode with a different vision. But there, it’s true that I did it in a way, which I hope is not too Manichean, but with only a father and his daughter, to really work on incommunicability, incomprehension despite love, with something of the generational order. Which means that we have parents who are on the side of life, of enjoyment, of success. And then on the other side, this child who has difficulty switching to the side of life.
