The rewards of the Goncourt Prize hourisby Kamel Daoud (Gallimard, 416 pages, 23 euros, digital 15 euros), announced, on Monday, November 4, from the Parisian restaurant Drouant, the Academy recently chaired by Philippe Claudel. They were also in the race Madelaine before dawnby Sandrine Collette (JC Lattès), jacarandaby Gaël Faye (Grasset) and Archipelagosby Hélène Gaudy (L’Olivier).
Announced in the same place after the Goncourt, the Renaudot prize rewards Gaël Faye for jacaranda.
An important figure in public debate in France
Announced for weeks as a favorite, houris so he is successful take care of herby Jean-Baptiste Andrea (The Iconoclast). With this novel, Kamel Daoud appeared for the second time in the Goncourt final four, eleven years later. Meursault counter-investigation (Actes Sud, 2014), finally winner of the Goncourt for her first novel. The following decade brought the writer, born in 1970 in Algeria, to Mostaganem, a veteran journalist of Oran Diarycolumnist of Spotas an important figure in public debate in France. He settled there in 2023, three years after receiving French nationality.
houris It made its author the first Algerian to win the Goncourt, although the book was banned in his country and undoubtedly caused Gallimard to be excluded from the Algiers Book Fair. In fact, the novel transgresses an article of the “Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation,” which prohibits the evocation of “wounds of national tragedy”expression that designates the civil war that pitted Islamist groups against the Algerian army from 1992 to 2002, and which left between 60,000 and 200,000 dead and thousands missing.
From silence to confrontation
Gold houris place this in your heart “black decade”. Twenty years after the end of the fighting, the story unfolds today in two parts: from shadow to light, from silence to confrontation. First, the dark, lyrical monologue of Aube, 26, with a smile-shaped scar around her neck, speaking to the child in her womb. She won’t give birth to him in this country that took everything from her, she says. Then, the soliloquy of a driver-bookseller who makes her get into his car when she wanted to leave Oran on foot. On a memorial trip, he will take Aube to this village where, one night, Islamists killed and beheaded.
He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the civil war, to the point of being considered a madman; She bears the scars of it, but she no longer has the vocal cords to talk about it. Embracing the disorder of its memories, the novel evokes buried images, repeating denied horrors in the hope of bearing witness to them. More than a true work, Kamel Daoud lays the foundations for a liberation of the word.
