The vote was close: 4 votes to Sorj Chalandon for “L’Enragé” (Grasset), and 4 votes in favor of Caroline Hinault who finally won, thanks to Philippe Le Guillou, president of the jury for the Prix Bretagne, whose the voice counts double. Caroline Hinault’s novel, remember this name, does not speak of Brittany, but she is Briochine and lives
Rennes. More than its membership, it is the originality of its story and the maturity of its style that made the difference.
Her students from the Bréquigny high school in Rennes, where she is a French teacher, came to congratulate her without having read it. At 42, she will have to get used to the paradoxes of success. Caroline Hinault has only published two novels, but “literature will now have to reckon with the ardor of her voice,” assures Télérama.
“A precipitate of contemporary issues”
His first title, “Solak” (Black Rouergue), takes place north of the polar circle. “It’s a dark and atmospheric novel, constructed like a classic tragedy,” she confides, blinking her clear eyes. His second novel, “Crossing the Forests” (Rouergue), takes place in Poland in the Bialowieza forest, straddling Belarus. “This primary forest is a sanctuary of biodiversity,” she enthuses, “but this natural paradise became a geopolitical trap when the Belarusians pushed migrants towards the Polish border to destabilize Europe.” This forest, both threatened by loggers and insects, and also used as a Trojan horse by Putin’s allies, is a “precipitate of contemporary issues”.
Caroline Hinault, however, was careful not to go there, any more than she set foot in the Arctic for her polar thriller. The migrants’ tents in Square de la Touche or Parc de Saint-Cyr, in Rennes, were enough to touch her heart and activate the author’s imagination. “This forest came to me with the image of wanderers, these refugees in search of a paradise that does not want them, but I feel freer with places that I do not know,” she adds. . I don’t want to be accountable to reality.” The young author, she likes this word better, prefers to explore places through language, after having seriously documented herself.
Threesome of women
And unlike the Polish Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2018, who declared at the Étonnants Voyageurs festival in Saint-Malo “when starting to write, I never know how it will end”, Caroline Hinault knows where she wants to go. come. “I always have a skeleton, a scenario in mind, a scaffolding that will have to be consolidated throughout the story.”
Hers is fundamentally feminine, through the acuity of her gaze, and feminist, through the choice of her characters. Here, three women, including a refugee who is not a victim, Alma, full of admirable vitality and strength of soul. A
trio of women crossed by the desire of men, for whom she reserves very beautiful pages, modest and raw.
The forest, a melting pot of tales and legends, nevertheless retains the leading role, with its Dantesque dimension of a labyrinth where the bison-minotaur becomes the king of animals.
However, no badger runs in Caroline Hinault’s forest, without a relation to a former cycling champion.
“I am the child of the municipal library of Trégueux (22) where I quickly felt that I wanted to live in books,” smiles the lecturer. And if I hadn’t become a teacher, I would have been a bookseller or a librarian.” Duras, Ernaux, and
Nancy Huston nourished her young years, just like Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Camus and Romain Gary, whose “humor and ferocity, breath and singularity” she appreciates.
Her partner, Jeff Sourdin, is also a teacher and writer, author of five novels published in La Part commune, but is not the first reader of his partner’s manuscripts, who reserves the first for his publisher.
Determined to “push back the walls of time”, she does not intend to let herself be devoured by the affection of their three daughters, in order to carve out precious clearings devoted to writing. This woman is definitely, like her heroines, at the helm of her existence.
* Created in 1961, the Brittany Prize – Priz Breizh – crowns a novelist of Breton origin or a story concerning Brittany.
“Crossing the forests”, by Caroline Hinault, éditions du Rouergue, 191 p. €20. Signatures on Friday May 31 at La Gacilly (56), La Grande évasion bookstore. June 7 at the Saint-Grégoire Media Library (35). June 19 at the Mordelles bookstore (35), and June 26 in Rennes, Rue des livres.
