At 1 p.m. this Monday, the prestigious Goncourt Prize will be awarded to one of the four candidates still in the running. But the suspense seems limited as Kamel Daoud, for his novel Houris published by Gallimard, is an arch-favorite. In front of him, two women: Sandrine Collette and Hélène Gaudis. And a man: Gaël Faye, his most serious competitor.
Houris is a stunning book which recounts the years of lead in Algeria. A literary shock, a document for History, it stands out as much for its political content as for the lyricism of a dreamlike writing contrasting with the darkness of the subject. In 400 pages which shake up the chronology, the author looks back on the years which bloodied Algeria between 1992 and 2002. This civil war which opposed the Algerian government, with the National People's Army (ANP), and various Islamist groups, Kamel Daoud tells it, not with great bursts of theoretical ideas, but from a human perspective.
A woman, we should say, since the narrator whose name is Aube evokes here her journey made of blood and tears by addressing the child she is carrying and who she does not want to be born. Because it is the suffering of women that we are talking about here primarily through the portrait of Aube, whose throat was slit at the age of five, on December 31, 1999 in the village of Had Chekala, and who survived mute. . A landmark novel.
Gaël Faye, Daoud's most serious rival
Daoud's most serious rival is Gaël Faye. If he does not receive the Goncourt, the latter could win the Renaudot prize which, for the record, was awarded for the first time in 1926 to Armand Lunel from Aix for his novel Niccolo Peccavi. The author of Petit pays recounts in Jacaranda the massacres in Rwanda.
Magnificent and terrible, poetic and compassionate, this novel which bears the name of the favorite tree of Stella, the heroine of the book, sets its narration on the history of four to five generations of Rwandans. History of a society which is reconstructed after a genocide, history of silence in families, multigenerational chronicle of a hundred years of suffering in Rwanda, the novel gives voice to Milan, the narrator, a sort of double of the author with the same origins than him. Beauty of the language, colorful characters that he throws into the crushing machine of the violence of History, Gaël Faye draws the ways in which the wounded human soul can get up and find the light necessary to reweave links after chaos .
Olivier Norek looks at another History or when Stalin invaded Finland 1939. On Christmas Eve, the Soviet Union of 180 million inhabitants decided to invade Finland of 3 million souls. Stalin did not suspect that this conflict, which he believed would last a few days, would lead him into a harsh, interminable confrontation, where the adversary deemed so weak would prove to be a formidable fighter.
Olivier Norek looks at “a forgotten war”
Olivier Norek evokes this forgotten war in The Winter Warriors, a novel in the form of a thriller which stands out as one of the literary shocks of the fall.
The author shakes the lines and shows that the sacrifice of the seventy thousand Finns, who died as heroes in the fighting, changed the course of the Second World War. These are scenes presented like a Technicolor film with close-ups of initially ordinary characters transformed by the force of circumstances and especially their will into heroes of Greek tragedy.
With this novel which defies the laws of the genre, Olivier Norek could well obtain the Renaudot 2024. Unless a surprise guest comes to reshuffle the cards…
