Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, an unconventional Goncourt in Toulouse
Very noticed by the critics at the beginning of September, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr won the Prix Goncourt at the beginning of November with “The most secret memory of men”. He will be at Ombres Blanches on Tuesday 14 December.
As every year, the miracle has reached: a book much appreciated by a few has become the novel that everyone wants to devour (including in the metro, which we saw recently). Regardless of the subject or the author, the Goncourt label is enough to boost sales. This sometimes allows for sacred discoveries. Last year, Hervé Le Tellier was an already well-known writer. And his novel “The Anomaly” has become the best-selling Goncourt since “The Lover”, by Marguerite Duras, with more than a million copies sold. The same is not true of the Senegalese Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, a young author whose three previous books, appreciated by critics, were by no means bestsellers. “The most secret memory of men” is therefore now boxing in this category and that is excellent news.
This novel about a novelist of today obsessed with a novelist of yesterday (the man had published only one book, which had become untraceable, in 1938) avoids all the pitfalls of self-esteem. The author is certainly a fine scholar, who manipulates words and formulas with visible gluttony, but he is also a dynamite of conformism. Whether it is the literary world, colonialism, artistic creation … or the essentials of sexuality, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr goes all out.
We cannot resist the pleasure of quoting a few passages, full of self-mockery, from “The most secret memory of men”, which alone validate the choice of the jurors of Goncourt. Regarding the narrator’s desire to write, who presents himself as a “lazy doctoral student”: “I was warned: perhaps you will never succeed in literature; maybe you will end up bitter! disappointed ! marginalized! rate ! […] Yes, possible, I said. Yes maybe ; but life, I added, is nothing other than the hyphen of the word perhaps. I try to walk on this thin dash. Too bad if it gives way under my weight: I will then see what lives or is punctured below. “
Or again, on a devilishly controversial subject: “came the Western readers (os the word: white), among whom many read (African authors) as one does charity, loving that they entertain them or talk to them about the wide world with this famous natural earthiness of Africans, Africans who have the rhythm in their pen, Africans who have the art of moonlighting […] ah, the wonderful Africans whose works and colorful personalities we love, and their laughter filled with big teeth and hope… ”
“Writers? Bad lovers”
And also the frank words of the necklace of a writer in her sixties, whose breasts, seen, send our young writer to death. And the lady with the scandalous reputation of telling him: You know why? When they have sex, they are already thinking about the scene that this experience will become. Each of their caresses is marred by what their imagination does or will do with it, each of their thrusts, weakened by a sentence. “
It’s hard to blame Mohamed Mbougar Sarr: his book is taken to hell, with such energy that we throw ourselves headlong into it, delighted to live such an experience, as physical and sensory as it is intellectual. .