The French novelist died on Monday December 30, 2024 at the age of 82 after devoting his life to writing, notably winning the prestigious Médicis prizes (The Irrevolution1971) and Goncourt (1974).
The writer Pascal Lainé, Prix Médicis (1971) and Goncourt (1974), who devoted his life to writing but also to photography, died Monday in Paris at the age of 82, it was announced. learned Tuesday from his wife. « Author of around thirty novels and around ten essays, fifty years later The Lacemakerhe leaves us on tiptoe, with the elegance that characterizes him », Sophie Lainé told AFP.
A professor after studying philosophy, Pascal Lainé was crowned with two prestigious literary prizes: in 1971, he was the winner of the Médicis prize for The Irrevolutionthen three years later, from Goncourt for The Lacemakerboth published by Gallimard. The first tells the story of the meeting of two youths, that of a rebellious young philosophy professor appointed to a provincial technical high school and that of his students. The second addresses the condition of Pomme, a young girl working in a hair salon.
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Pascal Lainé, in the shadow of Goncourt
The Lacemakera novel translated into several languages, was brought to the screen by Claude Goretta in 1977, launching the career of Isabelle Huppert, in the role of Pomme. In 2000, Pascal Lainé, however, denounced in Holy Goncourt! the media circus around the literary return to school, believing that The Lacemaker had obscured the rest of his work. He continued to write until the end, his wife emphasized, adding that he had started a book in recent months.
« We only live fragments of our life (…) We don’t live enough. And if you fail on the first try, there’s no question of trying your luck again », he declares there, according to an extract from these latest works revealed to Agence France Presse by Sophie Lainé. We also discover these few thoughts on life and death…: « At a hundred years old, if by chance I held out until then, I too would still only be in my first falters and, darn, the wrong note! My existence is worth another and, if it only represents a relatively serious matter for me, it is still not nothing. In any case, how many men, on the day of their death, can affirm without laughing that they will have really lived? »
The Lacemaker by Goretta, inspired by the novel by Pascal Lainé, with Isabelle Huppert, Yves Beneyton, Florence Giorgetti…
