The Medici Prize crowns Julia Deck for Ann of England

The Prix Médicis has the happy idea this year of rewarding a French novelist, Julia Deck, who handles dark humor and irony to perfection – no doubt thanks to her British maternal ancestry. She began publishing in 2012, at thirty-six years old, with Editions de Minuit, and became known as the author of fierce and hilarious social comedies. His two previous novels, Private property, in an eco-district of bobos, and Monument national, where new rich owners of a mansion and characters from working-class neighborhoods confront each other, were deliciously sarcastic.

Ann of Englandpublished in Le Seuil, which the Medici jury distinguished, is of a different style, even if we clearly recognize the strong temperament of the author. In this book in which she portrays herself, Julia Deck proclaims from the outset that she is going to tell the truth, the whole truth, if there is a truth, about her mother and the secrecy surrounding this woman with an astonishing destiny, Ann, born in 1937 in a working-class environment in England.

What precipitated the writing of this story was what happened on the evening of Sunday April 24, 2022. Julia Deck found her mother collapsed on the tiles of her Parisian bathroom, twenty-eight hours after leaving her. scolding her while she was hanging out her laundry. An event that since her adolescence she had feared, but with a sort of curiosity mixed with a ” troubled hope ». How would she survive the disappearance of the one of whom – until proven otherwise – she was the only daughter?

It’s a two-part story. It is composed on the one hand of the logbook of Julia, 47 years old, who struggles like a lioness with the doctors so that her mother is not treated like a carcass but receives appropriate rehabilitation and can end her days in a place worthy of her. Because Ann has defied the predictions of emergency doctors who doomed her to imminent death. The stroke left her hemiplegic, with impaired and disjointed memory and speech, but did not kill her. This combat diary, full of suppressed rage and dark humor, is strewn with questions. Why, Julia Deck asks, go to such lengths to ensure that her mother escapes the fate of most patients in geriatric wards, devastated and disastrous? “It is a moral construction to imagine that after everything a person has gone through, we must offer them an end worthy of them,” she writes. And again: “It is a needlessly melancholy construction to see in the present person the person he was. »

Vital emergency

Nevertheless, against a certain fashionable utilitarianism, Julia Deck chooses morality and melancholy. This is why she undertakes, and this is the second level of narration, to write a chronicle which relates the life of her mother. Without appearing to do so, it underlines the intelligence, the courage, the tenacity that Ann demonstrated to escape her original environment, study in Paris, and settle there. Ann who raised her daughter almost alone, working four jobs, choosing to continue working until she was 80… God knows if Julia is horrified by this strange mother, but God she admires her! The two stories, the one where the author says “I” and “my mother”, and the one where she says “Ann” and “Julia” will of course converge in the end.

It is a story written lively, in a vital emergency, which raises a host of questions. On the fate reserved for the elderly when the hospital welcomes them in buildings which mean: “you do not deserve to exist, let alone receive care at society’s expense”. On the ambivalence of the relationships between a mother and her daughter, their basis for rivalry. On aging, which Ann refused to face, and her daughter even more so: “What would it have cost me to see her grow old?” What would it have cost me to have been more patient? »

Not sure that Julia Deck will manage to unravel the enigma of her “unknown mother”. On the other hand, she is certain of one thing, fiction has a prophetic power: “For a long time I had observed that my novels unraveled the past and predicted the future. » This is how the author of Monument national will have the consolation of seeing his mother live out her last days in a castle… Ann of Englanda title that suits him so well.

The Foreign Medici Prize goes to the excellent Guatemalan writer, Eduardo Halfon, for his novel Tarantula (Quai Voltaire/Table Ronde), which Eric Neuhoff greeted in the Literary Figaro of September 12 the prose “of almost blinding clarity”.

And the Medici Prize essay was attributed to Reiner Stach for volume 3 of the immense biography he devoted to Kafka The years of youth (Cherche-Midi).

The Medici jury, chaired this year by Anne F. Garréta, is made up of Marianne Alphant, Michel Braudeau, Marie Darrieussecq, Patrick Grainville, Dominique Fernandez, Andreï Makine, Pascale Roze and Alain Veinstein.