“Wahid, ithnan, thalatha…” On the watch face of Joris Giovannetti, the numbers are written in Arabic. And, by the way, the time is not right. A detail. Probably the only one through which we can glimpse, at first glance, the singularity of this young 32-year-old philosophy professor, who is about to burst onto the national literary scene.
Next January 2 appears Those whom the night chooseshis first novel, published by Denoël. The pitch? Not easy. The novel opens with a prologue: the story of a woman who arrives on horseback in a village of Castagniccia one day in 1889.
She founded a family there which we saw live for a quarter of a century until the outbreak of the Great War. Then the reader finds himself projected a hundred years later, into the Corsica of the 2010 decade. The one in which two brothers, Raphaël and Gabriel, evolve, whom we follow through the vicissitudes of their intimate lives and their commitments.
“I tried to make a novel that could have two reading levels, confides the author. A level accessible to all, where the reader will read a story with twists and turns. And another level, in which people who know philosophy, can find a roman à clef.”
“It’s not the most cheerful novel”
Story, roman à clef… with its 470 pages, Those whom the night chooses combines literary exercises, from the philosophical novel to the love story, including the social fresco.
It is also and above all an unvarnished portrait of island society and the student world in which the author evolved. “It’s not the most cheerful novel of the literary season, he concedes. There are a lot of disillusioned characters. People who no longer have beliefs but who act as if, to continue to hope. People attached to the emancipatory project carried by nationalism but who, deep down, no longer believe in it.”
