Houris by Kamel Daoud, Jacarandaby Gail Faye, Madelaine before dawnby Sandrine Collette and Archipelagos by Hélène Gaudy: there are only four left in the Goncourt 2024 race. While the winner will be chosen Monday November 4, 2024, the columnists of West France give you their opinions on the four books in the running.
Matthieu Marin : « Hourisby Kamel Daoud, is a novel that is both dry and terrifying”
As much as historians, writers help us to better understand Algeria's painful past. In Houris Kamel Daoud, Goncourt prize for the first novel for Meursault, counter-investigation in 2015, evokes the black decade, the civil war between the government and Islamist groups in the 1990s.
Aube, the narrator, had her throat slit by terrorists during a bloody night. In a few hours, a thousand people were killed in this massacre. His father, mother and sister died. Miraculously survived but became mute, she recounts this tragedy to the baby growing in her belly. “I hide the history of an entire war, written on my skin since I was a child. » She does not want to keep the child. Too afraid for him after the horror of what she experienced and facing the very uncertain future of her country.
A great silence
After several chapters, another character appears. Aïssa, traveling bookseller whose father was a printer. Very talkative. Another facet of the same struggle for freedom.
On the romantic level, Houris is quite dry, not always easy to follow. Historically speaking, it’s terrifying. Already, the “events” of the War of Independence had only very slowly surfaced here in France, as research and languages unfolded. What then can we say about this much more recent period, just as painful, almost passed over in silence on both sides of the Mediterranean?
Kamel Daoud is well known for his positions against Islamists. What should we give in the face of radical Islamism? The heroine, who fights against the preacher from her hairdressing salon facing the mosque, has her answer. Like the writer, target of a fatwa and threatened with death.
There would be a political significance in awarding him. Especially since in Algeria, where it is forbidden to discuss the civil war, his book is illegal. The Gallimard house is even banned from the Algiers Book Fair in November.
HourisGallimard, 412 pages, 23 €.
Claude Maine: “In JacarandaGaël Faye poses as an attentive observer of Rwanda”
One day in 1994, Milan, a Franco-Rwandan, a schoolboy in Versailles, saw Claude, a young Rwandan, arrive at his home. He arrives without baggage and with terrible fear. He suffers from a wound on his head caused by a machete blow. He suffered and saw the horrors of the genocide committed by the Hutu which decimated the Tutsi, the country's other ethnic group.
Venancia, Milan's mother, Rwandan, never says a word about what she experienced in her country before arriving in France and her father puts up with this stubborn silence. Later, Milan will go to Rwanda against the advice of his mother, will find Claude and members of his family. There, the one his friends describe as “white” and Claude will mobilize to restore dignity to the victims and survivors.
Gael Faye (Small countryGoncourt des lycéens 2016), singer-songwriter now lives in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. He returns to Rwanda, subject of Small country and details with infinite care, through four generations, the oppression exercised by the Hutu on the Tutsi in 1959, 1961 and 1963 and the exoduses which were imposed on the latter.
He also analyzes the consequences, today, of the genocide, “sacrifices and bloodshed” through his mother's stubborn silence. Through, also, the strength of Eusébie, another Rwandan who remained in the country, a hard worker, whose desire for social ascension turns into tyranny over Stella, her teenage daughter who, despite herself, “comes from a story that taught him to swallow his emotions, to make his tears flow into his stomach”. This young woman finds comfort with Rosalie, her grandmother who lived in exile in Burundi, and by isolating herself in a jacaranda tree, a magnificent tree with purple flowers.
Thinking about the killers
Nights of partying and alcohol allow a young generation called upon to embody the renewal of the country to free themselves for a few moments “from this burden, just as the generation before drank to forget the years of exile, the humiliations, the smell of death and mass graves.” Gaël Faye describes the survivors who testify in front of the crowd and the President of the Republic in stadiums, the trials of the genocidaires, the love affairs hindered because of an ancestor condemned for having killed Tutsi…
Claude, who fled Rwanda “and the ghosts of the past” returned to the country and became, according to Milan, mockingly, “a real advertisement for Reconciliation”. At 37, he had the immense courage to think “about the killers”.
An attentive observer, author of a mastered and touching text, Gaël Faye excels in describing this country where the genocidaires “have created, and for a long time to come, a society of mistrust”.
JacarandaGrasset, 288 pages, 20,88 €.
Michel Troadec : « Madelaine before dawnby Sandrine Collette, a very dark novel with great truth”
In Animal (2019), we are in the forest for a bear hunt… And always the forests (2020, multi-award winning), takes place in the hollow of a valley, where, in a burning world, Corentin searches for the woman who raised him. We were wolves (2022) is set in the mountains where Liam, who lost his partner to a bear, lives with his young son…
Where does Sandrine Collette take us this time, with Madelaine before dawn ? In the Back Country, where men cultivate the lands of other men who have all the rights to them. They have nothing except their labor force.
Dead people but no murderers
Work is their daily life, solidarity their asset. In this hamlet, there are three households sticking together around Ambre and Aelis, twin sisters and wives of Léon and Eugène.
There are children, but childhood here is quickly left behind. That's when Madelaine arrives, out of nowhere, a kid with a damn temper. Through it, this life of injustices will explode, because if living can be a permanent struggle, there are limits.
Madelaine before dawn is a very dark novel, with deaths but no murderers, just self-defense. And the writing of Sandrine Collette, simple, lively, embodying these existences as closely as possible, passing from one being to another with great truth, in the harsh setting of a merciless nature.
This Monday, November 4, we will know if Madelaine before dawn is the Goncourt prize. It would be deserved.
Madelaine before dawnJC Lattès, 247 pages, €20.90
Florence Pitard: “In ArchipelagosHélène Gaudy paints a sensitive and lucid portrait of her father”
Hélène Gaudy's father has this strange habit that strikes many of us, to varying degrees: he hoards. In his painter's studio, he collects African fetishes, tubes of sand, metro tickets, strings, anvils… These form hills, mountains threatening to collapse at any moment.
One day, the novelist hears about an island that bears her father's first name, Isle de Jean-Charles, which, in Louisiana, threatens to be swallowed up by the Mississippi. She asks her father for the keys to the workshop and goes looking for him before he himself disappears, deciphering the piles of objects, the letters, the poems, opening the private notebooks. She wants to understand this man who has kept no memory of his childhood, this gentle, shy man sometimes capable of outbursts. What void can this need for accumulation fill?
Her inner quest leads Hélène Gaudy from Dreux to Menton, from the Beauce plain to the curious fictional town of Muzainville… Each discovery opens up other horizons for her, taking her from archipelago to archipelago of memory. She thus meets other members of her family, her mother, her grandmother and especially her incredible grandfather, the other striking figure of the book, this former resistance fighter so embittered, strangely also suffering from acute collector'sitis…
With great love, modesty and delicacy, she paints portraits, digging into characters with lucidity, exploring the trajectories of lives caught in the torments of History, the Second World War, the Algerian War… Archipelagos is a magnificent tribute that the 2024 Goncourt Prize jurors were right to carry through to their final selection.
Archipelagoséditions de l'Olivier, 286 pages, €21, E-Book €14.99.
