This is the number of the Beast of the editorial Apocalypse. 321… Hear: the number of new French-language novels that will be waiting for you in bookstores from mid-August. But the literary tsunami has already swept through the homes and resorts of the members of the “Gang of Six” as the jurors of the six autumn grand prizes should be called: Goncourt, Renaudot, Femina, Médicis, Interallié and French Academy.
The juror is never safe from revelation
We open the packages. The piles are rising day by day. We are dizzy because no one will read the 321, except to claim to have read “but not personally”. How to choose from the crowd? There are the writers that we have read since their debut and towards whom we feel a recurring curiosity; a natural reflex guides them first. There are recent writers whose evolution is appealing. There are eye-catching cover illustrations, disturbing titles, intriguing back-cover texts. There are the first novels (74 counted this time), whose authors are necessarily unknown, and whose dazzlings we always watch for, we expect them to surprise us, amaze us, upset us. It’s the salt of the season. The juror is never safe from revelation. If the nuggets are rare, their discovery is a grace that compensates for so many hours wasted elsewhere with works preceded by their legend (fantastic auctions abroad, unprecedented enthusiasm of booksellers, etc.).
But some books fall from your eyes
Do you have to be twisted to take the trouble to read books that sometimes authors have barely bothered to write. For them, the important thing is to appear and to perform. The first pages are enough to realize this. Writing is not essential to them. It is based on an idea, a theme, a subject, in short a shot to try, whereas a desire, deep, irrepressible, should be at the origin. These books fall from your eyes. One searches in vain for the voice of the author, the particular sound released by his text. If, despite everything, you push your professional conscience to the point of reading them to the end, you will want the author to death for having made you lose two days of your life.
One would think that the literary re-entry was invented to illustrate the notion of arduousness, whether in the form of a book just printed, PDF or proofs – it is the case to say it. But let’s put things into perspective, so as not to suffer the wrath of the poetic police: for those who say they are passionate about literature, there is worse than being chained to books. We have never forced a critic or a writer to be a member of a jury; if it is experienced as a bondage, never forget that it is voluntary and benevolent. The table must be good since most often work meetings take place in a pleasant restaurant (it happens in France) where it is recommended to vote before the appearance of the sommelier. Thus one preserves one’s critical spirit more or less intact. What’s the point of having spent your summer on the floor if it’s to lose your judgment at the moment of the vote?
To be or not to be, that is the question
To choose is to exclude, therefore to reject. This is how the absentees of a selection live it. Even if it is a collective list, a preselection of a dozen titles, the jury thus gives it decisive visibility for its immediate future. To be or not to be, that is the question. To be part of it is to have the feeling of participating in the great literary comedy of the new school year; not to be part of it is to experience it as a tragedy. Because many novelists beg their publishers, when they do not require them, to be published at the start of the school year, at their own risk and peril, under the threat of being swallowed up by the mass of suitors.
At the time of closing this column, a large package of well-crafted books knocks against my door again, like every day now. When one escapes to come to you, take it as a sign. The case of hard at work by Franck Courtès, 182 well-chiseled pages from Gallimard. The authentic story of a successful photographer who gives up everything to devote himself to writing. A choice of life that makes him discover poverty. At the end of the book, he draws up an inventory of all the tasks that the handyman that he has become by force of circumstances accomplishes on a daily basis, and all the functions he can fulfill. The last: “Writer”. It’s not a novel.
* Pierre Assouline is a writer and journalist, member of the Goncourt Academy