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Prix Médicis 2013
Prix des prix
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Une femme rencontre un homme. Coup de foudre. Il se trouve
que l’homme est noir. « C’est quoi, un Noir ? Et d’abord, c’est de
quelle couleur ? » La question que pose Jean Genet dans
Les Nègres,
cette femme va y être confrontée comme par surprise. Et c’est quoi,
l’Afrique ? Elle essaie de se renseigner. Elle lit, elle pose des
questions. C’est la Solange du précédent roman de Marie Darrieussecq,
Clèves, elle a fait du chemin depuis son village natal, dans sa « tribu » à elle, où tout le monde était blanc.
L’homme qu’elle aime est habité par une grande idée : il veut tourner un film...
Pig Tales. A Novel of Lust and Transformation (1996)
“Difficult to write one’s story when one lives in a pigsty—when one
has, in fact, become a sow. Yet such is the narrator’s extraordinary
adventure in this terribly sensual fable” (Marie Darrieussecq).
Upon its publication in 1996, Pig Tales, the first of Marie
Darrieussecq’s novels, was met with immediate success. As one critic
writing for
Les Inrockuptibles (4 September 1996) observed, in
reading this novel, “One laughs, yet in terror, for the metamorphosis of
the narrator-as-pig reveals, in counterpoint, the aimless drifting of a
society in which the pig is not always the pork.”
The story of a young woman who is slowly transformed into a sow, the
novel bears strains of Kafka yet reveals, finally, an entirely original,
subtly penetrating perspective. According to
Libération (29
August 1996), “The theme of metamorphosis is not truly new in
literature... But on this theme, the author varies with audacity and a
certain raw humor, and she cultivates in her fable...a falsely innocent
realism.”
In fact, the novel is particularly interested in the question of
consciousness; as Darrieussecq explains in an interview with Jean-Marc
Terrasse, the story’s narrator “is compelled [as a result of her
transformation] to think for the first time...She becomes a person; it
is the metamorphosis of a female object into a conscious woman” (
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/fr/terrasse.pdf). In this sense the novel is, according to the author, “The story of liberation through thought” (Terrasse 258).
My Phantom Husband (1998)
“It is, from the beginning, a simple, sad, even banal story. A man
disappears. His wife anticipates his return, she does not resign herself
to his disappearance, she searches for him” (Marie Darrieussecq).
The second novel by Darrieussecq,
My Phantom Husband, evokes and examines the experience of loss and the nature of absence. According to
Le Monde
(20 February 1998), “With a surprising assurance, a certain clinical
imagination, Marie Darrieussecq tells of this inundation through
absence, this palpable density of emptiness...Nothing remains in place.”
The inexplicable disappearance of the man and the subsequent anguish
of his wife are, finally, mechanisms for a yet deeper investigation;
specifically, for a nuanced, penetrating consideration of the diverse
sensations and emotions that shape and inform human existence. Thus,
within the pages of this novel, the human world “opens out upon its
mystery, upon its inconceivable layers, upon its enigmas, the great
infinity, the small infinity, the powerfully shifting infinity rocked by
expectation” (
Le Monde).
Breathing Underwater (UK) / Undercurrents (US) (1999)
“It is the story of the ocean, of the presence of the ocean. One
ought to say of its omnipresence, so that all that is not of it appears
reduced to a quasi absence: the coast, the beach, the beings who, along
its edge, fear it, contemplate to the point of drunkenness or meditate
before its spectacle” (
Le Monde, 19 March 1999).
In her third novel, Darrieussecq tells the story of a young mother
who, with her daughter, flees suddenly and inexplicably to the Basque
coast. When the father finally recovers the child, the mother departs,
alone, for Australia, in search of a kind of elusive peace (James Estes,
Marie Darrieussecq Web Site). As one reviewer noted upon the book’s
publication, “The construction, through alternating points of
view...imposes a complexity that resembles anguish...From this point,
everything becomes possible” (
Les Inrockuptibles, 17 March 1999).
Thus, once again, Darrieussecq conjures an ambiguous universe, one
that is simultaneously surreal and irrepressibly human. Indeed
throughout this novel, there persist the eternal questions of existence,
of the textures and rhythms of memory and experience. These questions
are, ultimately, captured and rendered vivid through the ocean’s
consuming presence: “How does one remember the ocean? How does one
distinguish the separation of the ocean’s edge from that of the
earth?...The entire maritime landscape becomes this glass that must be
broken in order to live” (
Les Inrockuptibles).
Précisions sur les vagues [Clarifications on the Waves] (1999)
A kind of brief yet rich meditation on the details of the ocean, this
piece searches for the abstract essence of the marine world while
manifesting, finally, a distinct sensorial universe:
“Published on the occasion of
Breathing Underwater /
Undercurrents,
this short text is the description of minute marine phenomena, of which
one knows not whether they are proven, nor whether they reveal
something of the scientific or, rather, of the poetic... Reality
develops, swells...to the point of generating rather curious images”
(Marie Darrieussecq Web Site).
A Brief Stay With the Living (2001)
“Plunged into four human minds: it is the narrative challenge of Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel” (
Les Inrockuptibles, 21 August 2001).
In this work, Darrieussecq creates a complex web of shifting internal
monologues, which further illuminate the nature of grief and the
dimensions of communication and consciousness. As Isabelle Martin
observed in
Le Temps (1 September 2001), “Fugue, flight,
disappearance, presence-absence, somnambulism, accidents of memory: the
novel plays with all these themes in infinite variations.”
The story is, in fact, that of a family devastated by grief. The
death of one its members—a young boy of three—has left at the family’s
emotional center “a pit, a hollow, an absence, an emptiness around which
everything, in the same cruel movement, is disassembled then remade,
but badly” (Marie Darrieussecq Web Site). Darrieussecq, by evoking the
individualized yet overlapping emotions of each family member, reveals
both the implications of loss and the painful, variegated textures of
emotional experience. The novel therefore offers a nuanced, abstract
consideration of conscious existence, and the reader ultimately finds
himself “in the interior of heads, of consciences, of spirits” (
Le Monde, 31 August 2001).
Le Bébé [The Baby] (2002)
Published concurrently with the birth of her son, 2002’s
Le Bébé offers a much more intimate setting than much of Darrieussecq’s previous work.
Marie has even hinted that this is the most autobiographical of her
books; however, this cannot be confirmed as neither the mother nor the
baby is given a name in the novel. Written in part to address the lack
of babies as subjects in literature, this novel is very much focused on
reality and the study of maternal life, and it is designed to make us
ask ourselves questions typically ignored in popular writing. What are
we to make of the discourse surrounding infants? What is motherhood? Why
do women give birth instead of men? Are we assigned to our biological
body?
As always, Marie Darrieussecq seeks another language opposed to the
usual clichés, and no language is more codified by clichés than
motherhood. More specifically, Darrieussecq questions the conflict
(inherited from Simone de Beauvoir) between motherhood and the freedom
to be an intellectual.
White (2003)
Aptly named, Marie Darrieusecq’s seventh novel,
White (2003),
tells the story of Edmée and Peter, two engineers who find themselves on
an isolated European base in the South Pole. Both have demons in their
past from which they are running, and both seem to find solace in the
barren landscape which lies secluded from the rest of the world. Over
the course of their six month stay, Edmée and Peter grow more and more
close, clinging to each other as a way to escape the harsh emptiness of
their frigid world, both in the past and in the physical present.
Though drawn to the idea of nothingness, the characters must be
careful not to join the community of ghosts haunting the nearly
inhospitable landscape. In an artistic and precise execution, White
comes across as “…a sort of poem—soft and funny, mathematical and
fantastical—in which perceptions of the world—material, mathematical, as
well as sentimental—are put into words, impressions, visions and
equations.” (Nathalie Crom,
La Croix, 4 September 2003).
Both subtle and emotional, the story serves as a reminder that
“everything is white, but between that white, lays the essential”
(Pascal Gavilet,
La Tribune de Genève, August 25, 2003)
Le Pays [The Country] (2005)
Having explored the intricate realm of motherhood with 2002’s
Le Bébé,
here Darrieussecq invites the reader to join her in what is arguably a
world of equal creation: the world of writing. Combining motherhood with
authorship,
Le Pays asks us not only what happens when one gives
birth to human life or literary life, but approaches the two as
concurrent and ultimately very similar forces.
Marie Rivière, the main character, is both an author and a mother
like Darrieussecq herself. Married and with one two-year-old child,
Marie decides to leave the city of Paris in pursuit of her own roots.
She returns home to find the remains of her family: an artistic mother,
somewhat famous; her defeated father, who now lives in a trailer; and
the memories surrounding her dead brother. In the country, where a
slower way of life proves to be a great contrast to the bustle of Paris,
Marie finds herself submerged in a sensory revisit to her own history
whilst contemplating the future.
Very self-aware,
Le Pays exposes the creative process of
existing and of bringing something else into existence, whether
biologically or textually (P.O.L.).
Zoo (2006)
Like Marie Darrieussecq’s other works,
Zoo is one of humor,
suspense, and a sense of the fantastic. Written over the last 20 years,
this is a collection of fifteen short stories, each of which can truly
function independently without coming across as a mere unfinished
fragment of a novel. In these stories one can find recurring themes of
science, dreams, and animals, as well as some amazing human beings (
Literary Fiction).
The 2006 release of
Zoo puts it exactly ten years after the 1996 release of Darrieussecq’s first novel,
Pig Tales. Since then, she has enjoyed much success, and
Zoo was considered one of the year’s most eagerly awaited pieces of French literature (
Literary Fiction).
Tom est mort [Tom is Dead] (2007)
Again tackling one of the most horrifying aspects of human existence,
Marie Darrieussecq urges her readers to appreciate the complete pain of
loss in her 2007 novel
Tom est mort.
Ten years after the death of her son, the main character suffers
still. Without knowing at first exactly how Tom died, we follow the
story of the aftermath as one woman struggles with grief and possibly
insanity in the wake of her child’s death. Darrieussecq has a point:
astute readers will note that dead children have haunted Darrieussecq’s
books since the beginning, and
Tom est mort is no exception.
Whether through personal experience or sheer creativity, Darrieussecq
puts the reader in the position of an emotionally destroyed mother, is a
powerful move as we are forced to consider the silence that “descends
in [the mother’s] veins and paralyzed the muscles of [her] cheeks”
(P.O.L.).
