She is the one who gives Guillaume Musso nightmares. For a decade, the latter dominated the reference ranking of best-selling books in France, established by our colleagues at Figaro. It recently gave up its first place to Mélissa Da Costa, who sold 1.3 million copies in 2023 (large formats and paperbacks combined).
To celebrate this, she is publishing her new novel on August 14, at the first office of the literary rentrée. One might find this programming strange. The rentrée is the time for so-called demanding literature, and it is hard to see Mélissa Da Costa appearing on the cover of Inrockuptibles or be retained by the snobbish jurors of the Prix Médicis. But precisely: this cheeky choice, which exposes the novelist to scrutiny, is an opportunity to defuse easy mockery.
He will remain paraplegic
Stand up* tells the story of a forty-something man, François, who is finally going to leave his legal wife to move in with his mistress when fate decides otherwise. While he is returning home on his scooter, he is hit by a bus. At the hospital, the verdict strikes him down: he will remain paraplegic. Will his mistress leave him, not feeling up to facing this ordeal? Or will they manage to face it together? Here we go for 600 pages. Let’s drop the keyword: it is a novel of resilience, like many things that are published these days – we remember that in 2020, Agnès Martin-Lugand dared to call a book Our resilienceadding an inclusive “our” to this totem of the times.
Thank goodness, Mélissa Da Costa does not do disguised personal development, unlike the useless Raphaëlle Giordano. When Virginie Grimaldi takes her readers for idiots, she builds a less cheesy work. If Stendhal’s admirers will struggle to be carried away by her style, she is more honest and darker than her successful colleagues. In 2022, she was not afraid to shock her readership with Lininga descent into hell that had disconcerted many of her fans. Despite her detractors who will tear her down without reading it, Mélissa Da Costa is better than many pseudo-chic impostures of this new season.
*Stand up, by Mélissa Da Costa. Albin Michel, 600 p., €22.90.