The Nancy-“Le Point” booksellers’ prize awarded to Dominique Barbéris | EUROtoday
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Awarded every year in Nancy by the tradition division of “Le Point” and the affiliation Lire à Nancy, this prize rewards the novel “A way of loving”.
By Elise Lepine
Published on
En fifteen years of existence, the Nancy Booksellers Prize-Point topped some nice names in French literature: Pierre Lemaître, Alice Zeniter, Lydie Salvayre, Mathias Énard, Santiago Amigorena, Marie-Hélène Lafon and Yves Ravey… This 12 months, the winner of this prize awarded by the tradition division of Point and the Lire à Nancy affiliation, represented by the Nancy booksellers Emma Navarro, Frédéric Jaffrennou, Marc Didier, Astrid Canada and Géraldine Pétry, is the novelist Dominique Barbéris, who has simply printed A approach of loving printed by Gallimard. The prize was awarded on the Place du Livre competition, a serious occasion for the literary season, together with Point is a companion.
A approach of loving, eleventh novel by Dominique Barbéris, tells the story of Madeleine, discreet and melancholic magnificence from the Fifties, possessing the blondeness, bearing and distinction of Michèle Morgan. Leaving Nantes, the place she grew up in a modest setting, she adopted her husband, transferred to Cameroon – the nation of delivery of the novelist Dominique Barbéris. This overseas, violent and luxurious world, clearly the antipodes of her French province, subjugates her.
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In Douala, throughout a Delegation ball in 1958, she met Yves Prigent, civil administrator in Yaoundé. ” You dance ? She apologized: No, I dance very little, I don’t dance well…” Here she was, nevertheless, a number of moments later, waltzing on the arm of this considerably adventurous man, breaking with this “micro-society where people go around in circles and observe each other. And she agrees to long walks through the city streets. But decolonization is underway, and revolt is brewing.
Madeleine, the provincial, the well-bred, the very correct, will she have had the braveness for a clandestine fever? Dominique Barbéris presents us, in small, delicate, impressionistic touches, the magnificent portrait of an period, that of the Fifties, of the French bourgeois province of the post-war interval and of colonial Africa, of a small group of Europeans who withdraw into themselves, conscious that they’re solely on borrowed time on this nation. Beyond this fascinating journey via locations and occasions, A approach of loving captures and interprets, with immense subtlety, the eloquent silences that generally shatter the hearts of girls.
A approach of loving by Dominique Barbéris (Gallimard, 208 p., €19.50)
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