Tradition obliges, the ten eminent members of the Goncourt Prize jury have once again reserved a nice surprise for us this year. That is to say that the surprise – and it is great – is that there was ultimately none… At the time, towards the end of spring or the beginning of summer, where The first rumors began to spread about who could win the prize a few months later on the staircase of the Drouant restaurant; it was the name of Kamel Daoud with his new novel “Houris” which already seemed to be taking over. However, generally, the favorite of June is the “cuckold” of November… However yesterday, “Houris” won in the first round of voting, which, in the memory of a “goncourologist”, is still quite rare and seems to indicate that the chips were down even before the start of the jurors' feast.
For Daoud, Algeria is above all a sad song, a throbbing pain
Literature, the real one
So what about this Roman or more precisely, Algerian triumph? If no one will be naive enough not to recognize the mark of the proverbial “strike force” of the Gallimard house, which Daoud joined with this novel, literature, the real literature, still has something to do with it. For the most part. “Houris” (which in the Muslim faith designates young girls promised to paradise) is indeed a large and beautiful book, tremendously ambitious, serious, humanist, deeply political and in direct touch with its time. It is like a vade mecum of its author's obsessions, first and foremost the Algerian wound that never healed and in particular the civil war which bloodied his native country during the 1990s and the condition of women in the Muslim world.
For Daoud, a model Arab intellectual who cannot accept that these two words constitute an oxymoron, Algeria is above all a sad song, a throbbing pain. The choice of the Goncourt jury is therefore highly estimable (and even courageous when we know the anger that it will not fail to provoke within the Algerian government, which has long considered Daoud as a renegade…).
A clever choice
This choice is also commercially clever since “Houris”, which has already sold more than 70,000 copies, could soon be sold to nearly half a million and save the day for booksellers very affected by the fall. dramatic sales in the so-called general literature sector…
From this point of view, the only book that seemed to be able to really compete with “Houris” was “Jacaranda” (Grasset), the second novel by the Franco-Rwandan Gaël Faye. He finally won the Renaudot prize, which is much better than a consolation prize. It is also not impossible to think that a sort of “Yalta Agreement” of publishing presided over this particularly welcome distribution of rewards… It really does not matter, since these choices cannot be contested in literary matters. Which is undoubtedly the case this year at least.
