“Mesopotamia”, by Olivier Guez, Grasset, 416 p., €23, digital €16.
He is in France for a few weeks, time to support the publication of his new book, Mesopotamiabefore returning to Rome, where he has lived for four years. From there, he is very proud to announce, he will go to teach a semester at the American University of Princeton, “a transversal history of European culture”.
Like certain figures who should be at the center of your courses, such as Stefan Zweig or Joseph Roth, Olivier Guez belongs to the family of writers who cannot sit still; We hardly see, in the contemporary field, French authors as bearers of a “cosmopolitan view of the world” that this polyglot (French, German, English, Spanish, Italian) born in 1974 in Strasbourg, claims not to be “never so happy” than traveling the roads of Europe by car. In a part of the conversation unrelated to his personality or his career, he points out that his books have in common “Characters on the run »and it is difficult not to hear there a kind of echo of his own restlessness.
His first novel and only fiction, The revolutions of Jacques Koskas (Belfond, 2013), Philip Roth’s comic-hysterical tendency in the first place, saw his hero, of Sephardic Jewish origin, wander from Alsace to Paris, from Berlin to Jerusalem via New York, to escape the conventional destiny set by his parents; writing had constituted in itself, for the author, a kind of escape, a “break with [son] Original environment, very closed » – explains having been “in a Talmudic school from 6 to 11 years old”.
New flight movement, but complete change of atmosphere in The disappearance of Josef Mengele (Grasset, Renaudot Prize 2017). Olivier Guez scrupulously retraced the years spent by the former “Auschwitz doctor” in South America, escaping justice and Nazi hunters, until his death on a Brazilian beach in 1979.
Forty men and one woman.
Today, the heroine of Mesopotamia is a woman who, in the eyes of the author, “I had no choice but to flee” : Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). She was an archaeologist, diplomat, spy, and played an important role in the history of the Middle East, helping to draw its borders, while working to install the Hashemite dynasty on the throne of Iraq. Born into a wealthy family in Victorian England, single and with no prospects for marriage in her twenties, “She didn’t want to limit herself to the role of a spinster, so she had to leave. “He dedicated himself to Persian and Arabic archaeology.”details who discovered its existence in 2003, during the Iraq war, with a photo of the Cairo conference, held in March 1921 to establish the British control plan in Iraq and Transjordan. Forty men and one woman pose around Winston Churchill. At that time a journalist The tribune working with energy, she wonders who she is, what she is doing in this photo and writes her name in a notebook. Fifteen years later, he read The Kurdish wheatearby Jean Rolin (POL, 2018), where Gertrude Bell appears at the bend of a line. “I run to Grasset, show him the photo of Cairo and say that through it I am going to tell the story of the Middle East. »
You have 30% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
