“At the origins of youth characters” (5/5). Long, writer Anne Goscinny has prohibited her children’s literature in which her father, René, shone. Until she crosses the designer Catel…
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At the Nice Book Fair, at the beginning of June, Anne Goscinny was metaphorically wearing a double cap. That of an adult author, having just published Romance (Grasset, 200 pages, 17.50 euros, digital 13 euros); As such, she said, signed “around forty pounds” – which is more than honorable. That of a youth novelist, “mother” of Lucrèce, the pre -adolescent in 6 e whose adventures she tells, illustrated by Catel, from six volumes (each containing ten stories).
In Nice, Anne Goscinny dedicated “more than a hundred” copies, to little girls who “had already read the whole series”. Since the launch of the first volume, in March 2018, of these stories intended for 8-12 year olds, 250,000 copies have passed – “At this stage, underlines Thierry Laroche, editorial comic book and children’s literature at Gallimard, that goes far beyond The successful launch is a success that took in playgrounds. “
” Why would we not do something for children? “
For a long time, however, Anne Goscinny was also prohibited from thinking about children’s literature, which his father, René (1926-1977), gave little Nicolas, drawn by Sempé (who has just died). She had a massage argument: “We don’t try his hand at the Opera when we are Mozart’s daughter”, or her variant: “At the game of comparisons, we are always a loser.” Yes, but. There was the meeting with the designer Catel Muller, known as Catel, who led them to design together the novel of the Goscinny (Grasset, 2019), drawn biography of the brilliant René, told by his daughter, who was 9 years old when he is dead.
For this project, the two women spent days discussing. It is in this context, by working and then going on vacation together, that Catel discovered that the one she admired “dark” for adults was “in fact hyper-rigolote in life”. The observation led him to ask, during the summer of 2016, this question to the writer: “Why would we not do something for children?” The author of the noise of the keys (Nile, 2012) returns her verse to him on Mozart. “But the idea makes its way.”
And, in the following September, one morning, Catel finds, in his mailbox, three stories that Anne Goscinny wrote in her bed by leaving her imagination “to debride”. They stage an 11 -year -old Lucretia. The illustrator is enthusiastic about what she reads, suggests the idea that the child’s family could be recomposed rather than “traditional”, and live in a house rather than an apartment. And here are the two women on board together in Le Monde by Lucrèce. The kid has a first name that Anne Goscinny’s husband had suggested when she was pregnant with their daughter, Salomé. Which Salomé gives her big eyes, her little nose and brown hair (the same as her mother) as well as his chin tap (the same as her grandfather René) to the heroine. Catel’s daughter, Line, is also entitled to her tribute, the three unwavering friends of Lucretia, Aline, Pauline and Coline, being designated as “the line”.
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