The French author died on Tuesday December 17, leaving behind a plethoric and successful work, written on the ruins of a tragic childhood.
The writer Michel del Castillo, author of several successful novels and essays including Tanguy (1957), inspired by his own story, died Tuesday December 17 in Sens (Yonne) at the age of 91, his relatives announced to AFP.
Author of some 45 books sometimes inspired by his tragic childhood, mostly novels including his latest Expulsion published in 2018, it received the booksellers and Deux Magots prize in 1973 for The Night Windthe Renaudot in 1981 for The Night of the DecreeRTL-Read for The crime of the fathers (1993), Femina-essay for Colette, a certain France (1999) and Méditerranée for its Spain lovers dictionary (2005).
“A popular writer, he was an author of great generosity and a transmitter of culture between France and Spain,” wrote the resigning Minister of Culture Rachida Dati on X (ex-Twitter).
Abandoned by his parents
Michel Janicot del Castillo, his real name, was born on August 2, 1933 in Madrid to a Spanish mother and a French father. Abandoning his wife and child, the latter returned to France on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.
Close to the Republicans, his mother, Candida, spent a year in prison then took refuge with her son in the late 1930s in France. Her former husband, from whom she constantly asks for money, denounces her to the authorities as an “undesirable foreigner” and has her interned, with Michel, in a refugee camp in Mende (Lozère), with harsh living conditions.
Candida herself delivers the little boy to the German police in exchange for her own freedom. He was sent in 1942 to work farms in Germany until the end of World War II.
“Contrary to what so many people imagine, writing offers no consolation. The more I delve into words, the deeper my unhappiness,” said this Dostoevsky enthusiast, to whom he devoted an essay, “My Brother ‘Idiot’ (1995).
His parents, “two monsters”
The wandering seems endless. He found himself for four years in a reform center in Barcelona from where he escaped in 1949: it was “a penal colony. I was classified as a ‘son of the red’, we were beaten, we were starved”.
The teenager found respite in a Jesuit school in Andalusia where, thanks to a monk, he discovered literature. In the 1950s, he saw his father again – who seemed arrogant, racist, frankly odious – then his mother: “the child that I had been loved him, the adult that I had become did not love him “. He who thought he was an only child discovered that she had six children, from different fathers. “She abandoned us all at around the same age, 8 or 9 years old,” he will say.
“They were two monsters, he mediocre, she great. They didn’t like.”
Taken in by an uncle, he studies letters
A generous uncle and his wife take Michel in Paris. Life begins. He studied literature and psychology and began to write. His first novel, Tanguy (1957), largely autobiographical – written in French, like the rest of his work – is a success.
“I have an elephantine memory. Very early on, I must have felt in danger of death and my emotional memory worked to save me,” he told L’Express magazine.
From a French father (1998) begins as a tragic thriller: “I have a meeting with my murderer. It’s my father”. And in Meters (2010), inspired by his mother, he wrote: “Everything in this existence woven with lies and perjury inspired terror.”
In addition to fiction and a little theater, Michel del Castillo, for whom a school in Mende is named, is the author of essays such as Algeria, ecstasy and blood (2002) or The time of Franco (2008). Member of the honorary committee of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, he spent a large part of his life in Provence, near Nîmes.
