Du Qing/Wen
On November 3, the Goncourt Prize, the highest honor in French literature, was held at the Drouen restaurant in the heart of Paris. Brigitte Giraud became the thirteenth female laureate since the prize was founded in 1902 with Vivre Vite.
Born in Algeria in 1960 and based in Lyon, Born Fast, her tenth full-length book, a book of mourning that looks back at the unexpected death of her partner Claude more than 20 years ago. "We reward a woman writer who has already had a considerable literary career," said Didier Decoin, chairman of Goncourt, "and a book that seems simple but raises a major question: destiny." "Perhaps words can help us rebel," Giraud said in a subsequent interview, "and private matters only have meaning when they resonate with the collective." I hope that the judges see a grander aspect than a simple private life, more than a simple destiny. ”
The lottery is constantly in turmoil
In the past two or three years, the French literary prize system has experienced a rare crisis of dishonesty.
At the end of 2019, the big scandal in the literary world "Maznev incident" broke out. A woman published a book revealing an affair with author Gabriel Matzneff, who was only 14 years old at the time. Maznev's pedophilia has long been no secret, but it has long been tacitly approved and condoned by the literary community. The wind of the event revealed the rotten roots within the French Literary Prize: The New York Times broke the news that the jury of the Renaulté Prize (one of the six most prestigious literary prizes in France, along with the Goncourt, Femina and Académie française, awarded on the same day as the Goncourt Prize), included many relatives and friends of Maznev, who insisted on awarding the essay prize to him in 2013.
Unlike the Pulitzer Prize or Booker Prize in Britain and the United States, where the jury in France is judged once a year, the power of the entire Parisian literary world has long been in the hands of a small elite group of old white men (several awards have only one black jury combined, only one woman in the 10 judges of the Lennotero Prize, and only 3 women in the 10 judges of the Gounle Prize), and their choice when voting often has nothing to do with literary taste. It is not uncommon to not shy away from interests, to promote relatives and friends, to support writers from the publishing house they work for, or to accept bribes from other publishing houses.
In 2004, when literary TV host Bernard Pivot entered Goncourt College, he was surprised to find that only two or three of the ten judges had actually read the selected work. After he became chairman in 2014, he added a number of rules to increase the transparency of the selection: anonymous voting was abolished, judges could not work for any one publisher, judges had to exchange reading notes regularly, and so on. However, immediately after the Maznev affair, Pivo and another judge, the female writer Virginie Despentes, suddenly resigned. This may just be a coincidence of time, but the departure of two of the most famous figures in the Goncourt Academy has undoubtedly dealt another blow to the stormy literary award.
The year after De Cuan took over as president (2021), there was another scandal: among the 15 people in the primaries was an obscure debut by the philosopher's boyfriend of Camille Laurens, one of the judges. So, this year, all nepotism was put to an end: the hottest novel of the fall, former judge De Bonte's "CherConnard," didn't even make the long list for the primaries. De Bonte can't take Goncourt for the rest of his life! De Cuan added. He was immediately attacked by De Bonte supporters. The controversy didn't stop there: In October, the Goncourt Academy visited the Lebanese capital for the first time to commemorate the 2020 bombing in Beirut to announce the final four-person shortlist, but Lebanon's culture minister publicly accused some Goncourt judges of supporting Zionism. In the end, most of the judges did not attend for personal or safety reasons. Then came the book "Lespresquesoeurs," which included the shortlist, in which the archetypal characters jumped out to question the author for stealing their story without permission.
In the runoff at the Drouen restaurant, "Fast Life" and another novel, "LeMagedu Kremlin", each received half support, and after 14 rounds of voting still deadlocked, De Cuan had to use the power of the chairman to add one more vote to make "Fast Life" win. In this regard, some judges publicly expressed their dissatisfaction. "The Kremlin Warlock" was originally unanimously favored, but it just recently won the Grand Prix of the French Academy. Generally, Goncourt and the Académie de France do not award the same novel (there are exceptions, such as Little's Nemesis in 2006), because the two academies have a lot of history and need to show their own taste. Of course, allocating awards to different books is also more conducive to book sales in bookstores. "Fast" is not the biggest hit, but it has also been popular since its publication in August, and in addition to Goncourt, it has also been shortlisted for the Lenaud, Femina and December Awards. Moreover, the Goncourt Prize has always been criticized for being male-centric, and great writers such as Yousenar, Sarot, and Sagan have been ignored, and only 3 women have won this award after the new century. Six years after awarding Leila Slimani, awarding it to another woman is undoubtedly a safe choice.
The prayer of "if"
In the final four-person short list, "Kremlin Warlock" is based on Russian politician Sourkov; "Sisters in Love" exposes the fate of Jewish children orphaned by their parents in concentration camps during the Vichy regime; Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel uses a woman's account to illustrate the local history. Compared to the other three, Giro writes the most private.
Her partner, Claude, a white citizen of French Algeria like her, grew up in a large low-cost house on the outskirts of Lyon, a record store manager and music critic, and a rock generation who treated music as life. In June 1999, he was in a car accident while riding a motorcycle to pick up his son from work, and the rescue was ineffective. At that time, they were just preparing to move to a new home. In 2001, Giraud wrote about the pain of losing his husband in his book "The Now". Twenty years later, at the beginning of "Fast Birth", we see a typical image of a woman who cannot get out of the trauma: she and her son live in a house without Claude, which is a symbol of his absence. Her renovation of the house is more like "breaking through, looting, declaring war on what resists her," her "tiny revenge" against reality. How many years passed, she slowly reconciled with the house, but she could not forget it, she kept looking back, back to the day of the accident, wandering on the edge of the cliff. "When there is no catastrophe, we move forward without looking back, we determine the horizon and go straight forward. When a tragedy strikes, we turn around, we go back and wander in those locations, we do on-site restoration."
Trauma is such a compulsive repetition. In contemporary literature, where self-writing flourishes, such depressed female images are not uncommon, and even a little widespread.
(We can think of Christian Ango, who just won the Medici Award, and she never walked out of the shadow of childhood incest in her life.) She constantly goes back in time and reconstructs in her writing) However, "Fast Life" jumps out of the traditional framework of mourning literature.
"Fast Life" adopts a form of investigation that is very popular in contemporary literature. In such investigations, private memories are often closely linked to historical events. For example, in LaVieclandestine, another hit novel that shortlisted for this year's Goncourt's long list, the author investigates ActionDirecte, a far-left terrorist group in France in the '80s, which evokes her quest for a family past: her suddenly disappearing father. "Rapid Birth" borrows the same form, but is characterized by a gap between form and content: Claude did not die of war, terrorism, or social violence, nor did he die of murder. He just died in an "ordinary" traffic accident. Not even colliding with other vehicles: for some unknown reason, he fell on the sidewalk. A kind of accident. A trick of fate.
What Giraud wants to investigate is "destiny" itself: "For so long, I wanted to find out whether the word 'destiny' I heard everywhere had any meaning". She is unwilling to accept the impermanence of fate. She wants to extract a logical chain from this impermanence. "We want to understand the origin of every pose, every decision. We poured the tape hundreds of times. We become experts in cause and effect. We hunt, we analyze, we dissect. We want to know everything about human nature, about the private and collective dynamics that make what happens. Sociologists, policemen or writers, we no longer know who we are, we are delirious and we want to understand how we can be a number in statistics, a comma in a great whole. We thought we were unique and immortal. ”
Perhaps the main cause of the crash was the motorcycle: this Honda 900CBR "Flame Blade" motorcycle, which was banned from sale in Japan because it was too powerful, can be exported abroad. But the motorcycle was not Claude's, but was placed at their home by Giraud's brother. Claude once said that this motorcycle was too dangerous, why did he change his mind to ride it out? These small events interact with each other: they just bought a new house in the suburbs, and that new house happens to have a garage. She happened to talk to her mother about the new house, and her mother happened to tell her brother. Her brother is on vacation and needs to store his motorcycle. Claude didn't have to pick up his son, who went to a friend's house for his birthday that day. She had the opportunity to remind Claude, but she went to Paris, at a friend's house, she didn't make that phone ... Giraud constantly collects these "clusters of micro-causes", which weave a constantly tightening web that leads Claude to an inevitable fate.
Trauma is generally considered to be an unspeakable, unrepresented experience, and the opposite is true in Giraud. She kept talking, couldn't stop talking, showing an infinite number of details, asking in every tiny gap: If this thing does not happen, can the final car accident be avoided? Thus, "Rapid Life" consists of a series of "prayers of if": if I do not buy a house, if I do not get the keys to the new house in advance, if I do not agree to my brother's request to borrow a motorcycle, if I interrupt a conversation with a friend at a friend's house and call him, if Claude does not forget to take out the 300 francs from the ATM, if, if, if... The narrative impetus throughout the book comes from asking questions in the "conditioned past tense."
The parallel world theory has become common in popular culture such as Marvel, and has infiltrated serious literature in recent years (if not back to Borges or Rob Grillet): French literary critic Pierre Bayard's new book this year is called If The Beatles Were Not Born? 》（EtsilesBeatlesn'étaientpasnés?）； Paul Oster's latest novel, 4321, offers four different versions of a character's biography in one go. In non-fiction texts like Rapid Birth, the "operability" of ifs opens up the dimension of infinite fiction.
The hypothesis offered by Giro is sometimes out of time (what if I had a cell phone?). ), sometimes so small that it is almost ridiculous: if the green light at the intersection does not turn red, if it rains, if Claude listens to a shorter song before leaving the record store... She even rummaged through the newspapers at the time and found a piece of news she hadn't noticed before: A few days earlier, Stephen King had almost died in a car accident. If Stephen King really died, maybe Claude would have been more vigilant and wouldn't have ridden that motorcycle? She resented Stephen King for this because he survived and did nothing for her.
Giro is dedicated to elaborate detective investigations, or elaborate parodies of detective investigations. Her attitude is serious, her writing is restrained, but this seriousness and restraint is based on a kind of banter, and behind this banter are deep wounds. This desire to exhaust all possible, this desire to seek reason in the midst of disorderly reality, is naturally madness, and it is this madness that moves people. The more she pursues reason, the more she brings out the absurdity of reality: "In vain I searched for a symbol in these grotesque combinations, and I bumped into the absurdity that disappointed me." No, nothing to understand, nothing to look at, it's like wringing a dry towel". There are no ifs at all.
The poles of the small and the grand
"Tiny" seems to be one of the key words in Giro's creation. Her novels usually do not have a huge multi-voice structure and macro-narrative, but only fill a small, delicate, fragile single voice with daily details. Since his 1997 debut novel, La Chambredes parents, Giraud has made adolescent growth, broken family relationships and interpersonal relationships the biggest motif. The protagonist of "Parents' Room" is a murderous boy; L'amouresttrèssurestimé, which won the 2007 Goncourt Prize for Short Stories, is the story of 11 women who have lost love; 2009's Uneannéeétrangère (A Strange Year) features a young girl who escapes the shackles of her family to live in Germany...
Tinty is also reflected in Giro's language style. Many contemporary French women writers have tried to break away from stylized, emotionally charged (consistent with prejudices against women writers) writing – as was the case with the Nobel Prize-winning Annie Ernaux, Ango, and Giraud. When expressing their pain, they often choose a modest, objective and even minimalist way. Giraud said in The Now: "Learn to write simply, write very simply. No need to write beautifully, no foresight, no whitewashing, no ambition. No literature, no golden phrases. Find a tone that can say: Yes, that's it, achieve such clarity. But compared to Elno's coldness, Giro is more gentle and sensual. Having studied dance and gymnastics since she was a child, she has also collaborated with musicians and dancers to complete works, and her language always has a dynamic rhythm.
Of course, being tiny doesn't mean that Giraud is indifferent to social issues. On the contrary, like Elno, she wrote with strong political intentions. Many of her works are linked to specific historical contexts: in A Strange Year, she tells about the rise of fascism; Nousserons de shéros (We Will Be Heroes) in 2015 is Salazar's Portugal; In 2017's Unlouppourl'homme, she recounted the Algerian war in the 1950s, based on her father's experience, and in 2019's Unjourdecourage, a middle school student facing a gender crisis introduced Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish doctor who fought to decriminalize homosexuality in the 1920s.
" Rapid Life " does not have the political dimension as in previous parts, but Giraud still seeks to discover the psychosocial motivations behind seemingly random personal choices: "hidden motives, more or less distorted, fantastical motives, psychoanalytic, and sociological or political motives." After moving out of their parents' low-cost apartment, she and Claude moved into a small apartment left over from 19th-century textile workers downtown. But she was not satisfied, she still dreamed of a big independent house. She is ambivalent: due to her childhood displacement, she can't stop her desire to keep moving, climbing the social ladder, until she really owns her own property; But as a rock generation, she is driven by a "cool" drive, and she is full of doubts about her future middle-class life. She didn't call home at a friend's house in Paris because, out of feminist concerns, she didn't want to give her friend the impression of a "married woman who couldn't do without her family" and wanted Claude to be able to manage the affairs of the family independently. Like Camus, Claude inherited Algeria's free roam, he could not bear the constraints of waiting for the bus, and only loved to ride motorcycles. That Honda motorcycle may have given him the illusion of returning to youth. Finally, he overturned in front of the residence of the Belgian Empress Asrid (who also died in a car accident) and fell on the sidewalk named after a banker: "Fell at the feet of the queen and entered the palm of the banker." "Belgium, Japan and Algeria tragically met on the asphalt roads of the city of Lyon." Isn't this Japanese motorcycle exported to France the evidence of global capitalism? The kid from the slums ended up dying in an upscale neighborhood.
The title of "Fast Life" comes from the lyrics of Lou Reed: "Live fast, die young". An earlier source may have been the predeceased star James Dean: "Live young, die fast, be a beautiful corpse". In his book, Giraud meticulously reconstructs a whole rapidly passing era, bringing out silhouettes of the urban changes in Lyon in the 1990s in his small personal life, old photographs in his mind. "Rapid Life" provokes collective nostalgia among French readers, as well as a broader resonance of life and death. The house where Giro has lived for more than 20 years is about to be demolished. The chirping of birds will be replaced by the roar of bulldozers. It's time to take a closer look at the past. "A whole crazy journey, your fall triggers a fall all the way. All ways to get up. Reunion by all means. There have been so many signs, so many coincidences, so many secret dates. An ulterior life. I feel you melting inside me. I became a man and a woman at the same time. "Cities are still changing. Life goes on. "Turn your back, something happened."
(The author holds a Master of Arts degree from the Sorbonne University in Paris)