If you hadn’t seen him move to Grasset in 2022, it’s time to take a look at the Grand Tour. Self-portrait of Europe by its writers, published these days in Livre de Poche. On the eve of the European elections, this collective work constitutes a fascinating dive into the memory of the Old Continent. In charge of this overview of the 27 member states of a European Union that is too often disembodied, Olivier Guez, the author of Disappearance by Josef Mengele (Renaudot Prize 2017), who, having grown up in the institutions district of Brussels, defines himself as “a Frenchman born European”.
The aim of the work, he explains in substance in his introduction, is to show the richness of European culture by offering, via 27 writers often little known to French readers, a wandering into its imagination. Their roadmap? “Choose a location that symbolizes your country’s connection to European culture and history.” Mission accomplished. “In the end, writes Olivier Guez, The Grand Tour meets Milan Kundera’s definition of Europe: maximum diversity in a minimum of space.”
The main points remain: memories of Nazi and communist totalitarianism haunt many of these texts, notably those “from the East”, from the extermination of the Jews (Polish, Slovak, Romanian and Austrian contributions) to the ravages of communism ( Finnish, German and Estonian chapters). The Polish Agata Tuszynska explains with horror how long it took her to understand that beneath the Palace of Culture in her capital were hidden the foundations of the Warsaw ghetto and its thousands of victims, including her maternal grandmother. While the Slovakian Michal Hvorecky hunts down the bones of the great rabbi Hatam Sofer in Bratislava and the Romanian Norman Manea exhumes the ghost of the poet Paul Celan in his native Bukovina, today divided between Ukraine, in the north, and Romania, South. “The dismemberment of Bukovina can also be seen as a warning for today’s Europe and for the balance of forces that ensure the existence of the European Community,” warns the author of The Black Envelope.
Further, Sofi Oksanen, Foreign Femina Prize 2010 with Purge, daughter of a Finn and an Estonian, delicately remembers her multiple ferry crossings between Helsinki and Tallinn, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and the German Daniel Kehlmann evokes the terrible Berlin prison of the Stasi, Hohenschönhausen. Also drawing on the memory of the 21st century, Brina Svit, the Slovenian Francophile, tells us the edifying story of Nova Gorica, a new town built after the Second World War, which will be European Capital of Culture in 2025 jointly with its neighbor Italian Gorizia.
Scars, Wanderings, Ghosts, Flesh, Wounds, Nostalgia… the titles of the themes drawn by Olivier Guez give the measure of the dramas of our Old Continent in the 20th century. Enough to highlight the virtues of the current European Union…. However, Greek, Dutch, Austrian and Danish writers remind us of the splendor of European arts and the extraordinary human breeding ground of our European Union. Doesn’t Björn Larrson, inveterate wanderer, announce himself to be “first European and only then Swedish”? It is impossible to cite all the writers, so we will conclude with the very beautiful evocation by Maylis de Kerangal of the beach of her childhood that is most celebrated these days… Omaha Beach.