Antoine Wauters, splendid Inter Book Prize, in Toulouse
Inter Book Prize 2022, Antoine Wauters will be tomorrow Wednesday at the Ombres Blanches bookstore to talk about “Mahmoud and the rising waters”.
“Mahmoud and the rising waters”, published by Verdier, is the new novel by the Belgian writer and poet Antoine Wauters, (“Our mothers”, “Think of the stones under your steps”…). Numerous prizes (Livre Inter, Wepler, Marguerite-Duras, Teachers of the Créteil Academy, Libraires Payot, etc.) have already highlighted the splendor of this powerfully poetic novel that the author will present this Wednesday at the Ombres Blanches bookstore.
We are in Syria. An old man, Mahmoud Elmachi, Syrian poet and teacher, is alone aboard a boat, in the middle of a huge expanse of water. Under him, his childhood home was swallowed up by al-Assad, this artificial lake which is 50 kilometers long and covers an area of 630 km², in the north of the country, following the construction of the dam of Tabqa, between 1968 and 1973. As war threatened and approached irremediably, Mahmoud, only equipped with a mask and a snorkel, dived, “and it is his whole life that he sees again, his children when they had not yet left to fight, Sarah, his mad wife in love with poetry, prison, his first love, his thirst for freedom”.
The astonishing form, between prose and poetry, of this sublime story (are we in an epic novel? a long-term poem?) makes us plunge, like Mahmoud, with delight into this extraordinary language, this intelligence of words and memories, because the horror of war can do nothing against such literature. Mahmoud knows it, who continues despite his great age to dive and row, as if relying on the writing of Wauters to reverse his destiny and soothe his infinite pains.. Wonderful.