The Academicians of the most prestigious French literary prize have unveiled their summer reading list.
What shall we read this summer? Like every year, the Julyists and perhaps the Augustians are already packing their bags. They know of course what they must not forget, but what about their readings? Fortunately, the Goncourt Academicians have looked into the subject. Yesterday, Tuesday June 14, when they met in Drouant to award the Goncourt prize for the first novel to Etienne Kern for The flights (Gallimard), news to Antoine Wauters for The museum of contradictions (Ed. du Sous-sol), from the biography Edmonde Charles-Roux to Jean-Pierre Langellier for Leopold Sedar Senghor (Perrin) and poetry to Jean-Michel Maulpoix for all of his work, they took the opportunity to unveil their ten books “favorites”.
Of course, this is not, as the academicians have repeated, the first list of the Goncourt 2022 prize, which will fall on Tuesday September 6. These are recommendations. Just as Le Figaro littéraire was able to recommend a number of works present in this roadmap. In his edition of April 14, 2022, he had thus noticed Antipolis (Gallimard) by Nina Leger: “The author brings out all the nuances of silence. Can a city be built without foundations? Can we live on myths and legends? Through this story, sometimes technical and often poetic, Nina Leger leads the investigation. She tells us in accompaniment the origins of a world, Sophia-Antipolis, a city between past and future.
In his April 21 issue, journalist Mohammed Aïassoui had glowing words about Verdun (Grasset), by Yann Moix: “In this third volume of “In the land of immobile childhood”, we find the sense of the absurd which is the trademark of Moix, its somewhat masochistic side. But this text is different, it is a physical novel, with its haunted, stifled, devouring sentences. Finally, Frédéric Beigbeder, in Le Figaro Magazine, warmly recommended Wonder Landes (Vertical), by Alexandre Labruffe. He wrote: “Labruffe always remains stoic in the face of fraternal adversity. He picks fragments of a novel from his brother’s absurd fantasies, like a beaver building his dam. What a thriller! Among all the stories of destroyed families (that is to say almost the entirety of French literary production), that of Labruffe impresses with its fatalistic humor and its anguished suspense.
The 10 “favorite” books of the Goncourt Academicians:
-Jacques Drillon, Coda (Gallimard)
-Giuliano da Empoli, The Magus of the Kremlin (Gallimard)
-Mahir Guven, The Innocents (Grasset)
-Judith Housez, Chateaubriand in Saint-Tropez (Ecuadors)
-Alexandre Labruffe, Wonder Landes (Verticals)
-Denis Lachaud, The silence of Ingrid Bergman (Actes Sud)
-Nina Leger, Antipolis (Gallimard)
-Zineb Mekouar, The hen and its cumin (JC Lattès)
-Yann Moix, Verdun (Grasset)
-Abdellah Taïa, Living in your light (Threshold)
We would like to give thanks to the writer of this post for this remarkable web content
Discover Goncourt’s 10 favorite books