Amélie Nothomb receives the Renaudot Prize for her novel “Premier sang” – Le Monde

The Renaudot Prize was awarded to Amélie Nothomb for First blood (Albin Michel), Wednesday November 3. After an award ceremony by videoconference in 2020 (Marie-Hélène Lafon for Son’s story, published by Buchet-Chastel), it is again from the restaurant Drouant, in the 2^e arrondissement of Paris, that the jury announced the news.

It was therefore Amélie Nothomb’s turn to be celebrated, she who made literature a desire for shared joy, an art of hospitality. Not only because it maintains a solid bond with its readers, nourished by fervent encounters and daily correspondence. But also because we enter into his books as guests are welcomed to one of these receptions and other garden parties that populate his work. Rest, First blood is part of this cheerful continuity. “My mother had embarked on social affairs. (…) In the morning she would wake up thinking, “What am I going to wear tonight?” “, can we read from the first pages of this text which could have been entitled Autobiography of my father, if the title had not already been taken by the late Pierre Pachet (Belin, 1987).

Magical sensitivity

In this novel in the form of a tale, in fact, the writer makes her father, Patrick Nothomb, speak in the first person: “The present began twenty-eight years ago. In the babbling of my conscience, I see my unusual joy in existing. Unusual because insolent: around me sorrow reigned ». Page after page, she gives voice to this diplomat, who died in March 2020, so that he retraces his own destiny, from his birth in an environment of downgraded aristocrats to the birth of his daughter, and the hard days that he spent as a child with a grandfather who was both a poet and a tyrant, until the terrible hostage-taking where he almost died, in the Congo, in 1964. With magical sensitivity and humor full of tact that distinguish her, Amélie Nothomb is here faithful to her style, this quest for simplicity and above all for clarity which is anything but ease, since it is inseparable from a certain ethics of writing, as she affirmed in Comment by sinologist Simon Leys during his reception speech at the Royal Academy of Belgium, in 2015: “At Leys, she noted, this clarity was a very high moral requirement: in his eyes, an unclear writer was not only a bad writer, but a bad person. ”

From Nothomb’s pen, as proven once again First blood, this moral of clarity is one with the pleasure of the text, the ardent desire to share it: “My own work is a defense and an illustration of beauty. I must constantly convince my readers that it is not synonymous with superficiality… ”, she summarized in the columns of the “World of books” in 2016. This goes through a fidelity to the language of childhood, to its playful lucidity, and also by a mystique of literature which merges, in Amélie Nothomb today as yesterday with her father, with a love of celebration: “You, you would not have supported. You have always liked the outdoors, parties, meetings. You have always loved others. They give it back to you ”, she wrote in a letter to Patrick Nothomb, a few days after his death in Belgium, on the first day of the first confinement.