It's finally the season of literary prizes!
The most prestigious literary award was awarded today to Eric Vuillard for his novel entitled L'ordre du jour and published last May by Actes Sud.
It is rare that a novel published so long before the start of the literary season is among the finalists of the Goncourt. Eric Vuillard was in the running against Alice Zeniter (L'Art de perdre, Flammarion), Véronique Olmi (Bakhita, Albin Michel) and Yannick Haenel (Tiens ferme ta couronne, Gallimard).
According to Didier Decoin, a member of the Académie Goncourt, Eric Vuillard, aged 49, was rewarded in the third round of voting by 6 votes to 4. He is also the author of Conquistadors in 2009, which describes the conquest of Peru, Congo in 2012, or the partition of Africa according to Europeans and more recently (in 2016), July 14, which as its title suggests, deals with the French Revolution.
Agenda
Eric Vuillard has already won the Vialatte Prize for this book, L'ordre du jour, in which he recounts the backstage of the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938 – in just a hundred pages, with precision and irony. It is actually a very incisive story, in which Eric Vuillard traces in every detail the psychological state or morality of the characters.He dismantles the mechanism that Hitler put in place to bring his Austrian neighbor to its knees. As in the theatre, we see the most important officials of the time entering or leaving a game whose outcome we know will be fatal to Europe.
There are many ways for literature to probe the wounds of history.This short and dazzling story is urgently to be discovered!
