At Goncourt Brigitte Giraud’s intimate novel beats (our beloved) Da Empoli

Paris. To understand how much the Goncourt 2022, the most important French literary prize awarded yesterday as per tradition to the Drouant restaurant in Parisjust think that the ten jurors needed fourteen rounds of scrutiny to decide who between the Italian writer and intellectual Giuliano from Empoliin the final with “Le Mage du Kremlin” (Gallimard), and the Lyonnais novelist Brigitte Giraudin competition with “Living lives” (Flammarion), deserved the maximum reward.

The second won thanks to the vote of the president of the Académie Goncourt, Didier Decoin, which is worth double (the fourteenth tour de table ended with 5 votes each, but Decoin’s preference for Giraud’s novel made it a winner). “Intimacy only makes sense if it resonates in the community. I want to think that (the jurors, ed) have seen this dimension, much broader than a simple intimate life, a simple destiny ”, declared Brigitte Giraud immediately after the announcement. “Vivre vite” (title inspired by the song “Live fast” by Lou Reed) is the memory of the last days of her husband Claude, who died in June 1999 in a motorcycle accident, but also the story of life after the tragedy, of the difficulties of mourning and continuing to live without your loved one. “I’ve known for a long time that I should write the book. The book that lives up to Claude, of our love story, the one that embraces all this and that seeks the truth, all truths “, she explained. Lyonnaise writer, born in 1956 in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, and author of a dozen novels for Fayard, Stock and Flammarion (his novel “Pas d’quiètude” was adapted for television, on France 2, by director Thierry Binisti).

Prompted on the reasons for his choice, the president of the Académie Goncourt, Didier Decoin, defined “Le Mage du Kremlin” by Giuliano da Empoli an “excellent” book, but “more immediate, in direct contact with current events and less novel” than “Vivre vite”. Giraud, Decoin said, “poses the question of destiny with great simplicity and authenticity (…), it started from a cruel mourning that he lived and which is poignant. His book has something tragic about it ”. Readers of this newspaper know that we consider “Le Mage du Kremlin” the great Kremlin novel about the end of the USSR, the rise of the oligarchs and the triumph of a mediocre former KGB official named Vladimir Putin. Da Empoli’s novel is “a mysterious and fantastic true and literary, literary and realistic story (…) a long nocturnal confession to the narrator by Putin’s wizard, Vadim Baranov in magical fiction, Vladislav Surkov in historical reality”, but above all “That Russian tale and of all the Russias that I have been waiting for thirty years, forty years, incredulous that the passage from communism to another, and back, had not found its singer”, wrote Giuliano Ferrara. Even in Paris, in the cultural-mundane world, he was the favorite.

But as with all literary prizes, there are also some unwritten laws for Goncourt that are respected and which, according to many observers, would have “damaged” Giuliano da Empoli. First of all, the idea that two literary prizes cannot be won in the same autumn: an idea strongly supported by the president of the Académie Goncourt himself. Before delivering the Goncourt 2021 to Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Decoin said that we should not “forget our friends and allies who are the booksellers. If we give two prizes to a single book, there will be only one book in the window ”. The Obs asked himself: Did the fact that Giuliano da Empoli “have already received (last October 28, ed) the Grand prix du roman de l’Académie française played against him?”. Some even insinuate that he won “the pink quota” (Giraud is only the thirteenth woman to be awarded the prize since 1903) to respond to the increasingly insistent pressures of a certain progressive world that accuses the Académie of being “misogynist”. But Decoin assured that he would give his vote to “Vivre vite” even if it was written by a man.