The reward was awarded, Wednesday, to the Belgian writer for “first blood” (Albin Michel), fictitious autobiography of his father, dead in 2020. A sensitive narrative, the first person.
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The Renaudot Award was awarded to Amelie Nothomb for First Blood (Albin Michel), Wednesday, November 3rd. After awarded awards videoconferencing in 2020 (Marie-Hélène Lafon for History of the Son, published at Bouchet-Chastel), it is again from the Drouant restaurant, in the 2 e Arrondissement de Paris , that the jury announced the news.
So it was the turn of Amelie Nothomb to be celebrated, she who made literature a desire for shared joy, an art of hospitality. Not only because it maintains with its readers a solid link, fed by fervent meetings and daily correspondence. But also because we enter his books as guests are welcomed to one of these receptions and other Garden-Parties who populate his work. From the rest, first blood is part of this worker continuity. “My mother had launched in the worldly. (…) In the morning, she woke up thinking:” What am I going to wear tonight? “”, Can we read from the first pages of this text that could have ‘Title autobiography of my father, if the title had not already been taken by the late Pierre Pachet (Belin, 1987).
Magic sensitivity
In this novel in the form of a tale, indeed, the writer makes his father speak, Patrick Nothomb, to the first person: “The present started twenty-eight years ago. The balbulti of my conscience, I See my unusual joy of existing. Unusual because Insolete: around me reigned the sorrow “. Page after page, it gives voice to this diplomat, died in March 2020, so that it has traced its own destiny, since its birth in a middle of aristocrats decommissioned until the birth of his daughter, and harsh days. He passed, child, with a grandfather of both poet and tyrant, until the terrible taking of hostages where he almost died, in Congo, in 1964. With the magical sensitivity and the humor full of Tact that distinguish it, Amelie Nothomb is here faithful to his style, this quest for simplicity and especially clarity that is anything but an ease, since it is inseparable from a certain ethics of writing, as it affirmed to Sinologist Simon Leys During his reception speech at the Royal Academy of Belgium, in 2015: “At Leys, she noted, this clarity was a very high moral requirement: in his eyes, a writer not clear n was not just a bad writer, but a bad person. “
Under the pen of Nothomb, as evidenced by once again blood, this morality of clarity is one with the pleasure of the text, the ardent desire to share it: “My work to me is a Defense and an illustration of beauty. I must constantly convince my readers that it is not synonymous with superficiality … “She summarized in the columns of the” world of books “in 2016. It goes through loyalty to language From childhood, to his cheerful lucidity, and also by a mystical literature that is confused, at Amelie Nothomb today as yesterday at his father, with a love of the party: “You, you would not have supported . You have always loved the outside, the holidays, the meetings. You have always loved others. They make it well, “she wrote in a letter addressed to Patrick Nothomb, a few days after his death in Belgium, first Day of the first confinement.