Launched in 2019 and endowed with 15,000 euros, the Khôra-Institut de France Literary Essay Prize rewards any work in which the author, based on a personal experience of creation, questions literature through the means of language literary.
« The Normandy that I know is far from the eddies of the Atlantic. Its air is less windy and its winds less brackish », writes the author.
The Normandy that Jean-François Roseau evokes is moving away from the tumults of the Atlantic. Its air is softer, its winds less impregnated with salt. This is how this singular portrait begins. The author explores Barbey d’Aurevilly in a new, surprising and poetic light.
Beyond the clichés which fix the writer as a Catholic dandy and resistant to progress, he reveals little-known facets: his love of statues, the essential role of a bookseller in the publication of his works, his ornate drafts intended for of posterity, or even its prized status with French presidents.
Far from being confined to the oblivion of school textbooks, Barbey reveals himself in his dreams, his disillusions and his contradictions, oscillating between a Saint-Simonian heritage and a modernity which announces Proust and Céline, masters of memory and excess. But this portrait also becomes a pretext for other explorations: literature, art, friendship, politics, life and death.
Jean-François Roseau invites us on an intellectual wandering, mixing Flaubert and Simenon, the auction rooms of the Hôtel Drouot and the shores of the English Channel. In this fragmented picture, each touch opens the way to a rambling that is by turns anecdotal and scholarly. Barbey’s Reveries dialogue with our own daydreams, nourish them and enchant them.
Last year, Claude Arnaud was hailed for Picasso versus Cocteau(Grasset). An extract from the two works is available at the end of the article.
Find the list of French and French-speaking literary prizes
By Dispatch
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