Horses do not succeed in lessons and writers are not confused by the names of the laureates can suggest the bookmakers British people on the eve of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Their divinatory art is about as reliable as that of the Roman omens who read the future in the bowels of a turtledove. This year, the London-based betting company Ladbrokes had taken bets on the name of Annie Ernaux, some of whom whispered that she figured prominently in the list kept secret by members of the Swedish Academy.

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Childish joy

Finally, it is not at the Royal Palace in Stockholm but at the Monte-Carlo Opera that the author of The place was consecrated by receiving, on Tuesday, October 12, the literary prize of the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation from the hands of the Princess of Hanover. Waiting for Caroline of Monaco pronounced the name of the laureate with unfeigned joy, one could well know, with certainty, that she had been able to be convincing with the other voters of a jury composed in particular of members of the French Academy and of the Academy Goncourt. Annie Ernaux took the stage of the Salle Garnier of the Opéra de Monte-Carlo with a manner of childish joy, evoking “something immense and overwhelming“Before recalling the memory”dazzling»From the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III, on April 18, 1956, the year of her sixteenth birthday, when she lived with her parents, rue du Clos-des-Parts, in Yvetot, in Normandy. A discreet way to signify that the Cauchoise adolescence did not so violently want to leave henceforth to be similar for her to a strange country in which it happened to come back in memory.

Appeased, reconciled: at the end of a long journey of writing, beginning in 1974 with Video Cabinets, this is the image that Annie Ernaux has given since Years (Gallimard, 2008), a novel that has impressed even its oldest detractors. Most Fair play of them know that one should not look for the name of the novelist at the bottom of the petitions, but on the covers of her books. The other girl (Nil, 2011) and Girl memory (Gallimard, 2016) were poignant texts. “What counts for her is (…) to grasp this duration which constitutes her passage on earth at a given time, this time that she has lived through, this world that she has recorded just by living” , she wrote in Years as a poetic art.

In a resolutely cosmopolitan and feminist atmosphere, the Discovery Exchange rewarded the Franco-Moroccan novelist Abigail Assor for As rich as the king (Gallimard) and the Coup de cœur of young high school students the Burkinabe humorist Roukiata Ouedraogo for Honey under the pancakes (Slatkine & Cie). For her part, Julia Kristeva, French-speaking philologist and psychoanalyst born in Bulgaria in 1941, received from Charlotte Casiraghi the Principality Prize awarded by the Prince Pierre Foundation and by the Philosophical Meetings of Monaco.