Jean-Baptiste Andrea wins Goncourt Prize with extensive novel

Jean-Baptiste Andrea received the Goncourt Prize, France’s most prestigious literary prize, on Tuesday for his novel ‘Watching Over Her’ or ‘Veiller Sur Elle’.

The novel, published by L’Iconoclaste, a small, independent publisher, is a sprawling fresco and star-crossed love story that follows Michelangelo “Mimo” Vitaliani, a dwarf and skilled sculptor who, at the end of his life, “watches over” his masterpiece, a mysterious powerful sculpture.

Andrea, 52, a former screenwriter and film director, is set in the nearly 600-page novel spanning several tumultuous decades in 20th century Italy, including the years of the rise of fascism, when Mimo, young and poor, faced an intense forged a bond with Viola Orsini. the adventurous and ambitious daughter of an aristocratic family.

The 10 members of the Goncourt Academythe French literary association that awards the prize announced this during lunch at the Parisian restaurant Drouant, where the winners have been declared since 1914.

“It’s an extraordinary moment,” Andrea said in surprise after the announcement. “It rewards a child who 43 years ago dreamed of becoming a writer,” he added.

In literature-dominated France, the Goncourt is the most coveted book prize, one that can crown a distinguished career or suddenly launch a new one. Past winners include Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir and Patrick Modiano, who later received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Dozens of journalists poured into the restaurant on Tuesday to hear the winner. For the second year in a row, the laureate was chosen after 14 rounds of voting in a process that culminated in Didier Lecoin, the jury president, breaking a 5-5 deadlock.

Lecoin said the jury was split between Andrea’s book and “Sarah, Susanne and the Writer” (“Sarah, Susanne and l’Écrivain“), by Éric Reinhardt, which some critics considered the favorite to win the prize, and which was published by Gallimard, one of France’s most powerful and influential publishing houses.

Reinhardt’s novel tells the complex, intertwined stories of women who fight to free themselves from mediocre, domineering husbands: Sarah, a disgruntled housewife who temporarily leaves her husband, and Susanne, her fictional doppelgänger, created by a writer Sarah confides in takes.

“It’s the fault of authors who have too much talent,” Lecoin said of the judges’ division. “Two excellent books, very different from each other.”

Philippe Claudel, another jury member, said Andrea’s book would appeal to a wide audience. “It is popular literature of high quality,” Claudel said. ‘And that is also what the Goncourt is about.’

Lecoin called the book “extremely refreshing,” like a “hyacinth popping up in the undergrowth on a spring morning” and offering readers a reprieve from a gloomy news cycle.

The four-book shortlist also included “Humus” by Gaspard Koenig, which tells the story of two student agronomists beset by climate anxiety and who both try to use earthworms to heal the planet, but end up on radically different paths; And “Sad Tigre‘(‘Sad Tiger’) by Neige Sinno, a little-known French author living in Mexico, is a harrowing account and analysis of her rape by her stepfather while living in the French Alps as a child.

The Goncourt comes with a symbolic reward of 10 euros (approximately $10). It also immediately puts the winner in the spotlight and often leads to a sharp spike in sales in the run-up to Christmas. The 2019 winner, “The Anomaly,” a sci-fi thriller about the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight, has sold more than a million copies in France, an unusually high figure even for a Goncourt winner.

Last year’s prize went to Brigitte Giraud for ‘Vivre Vite’, or ‘Living Fast’, which explores the causes of an accident that killed her partner, and the small twists of fate that could have prevented it. She was only the 13th woman in 120 years to receive the award.

Andrea began writing in his forties, after a decades-long career in cinema – one of his films, the 2006 black comedy ‘Big Nothing’ with David Schwimmer and Simon Pegg. Some of his novels have already been translated into English and well received, including ‘One hundred million years and a day” And “Devils and saints.”

Andrea said fiction allowed him to reconnect with the joy of writing that he had lost in his film work. He said he was inspired by Italian, French and American writers, including John Fante.

On Tuesday morning, the rush to catch a taxi from his publisher’s office to Drouant had been so rapid that the writer had not even had time to put on his contact lenses, leaving him “completely nearsighted,” he joked as he stared. stunned, to jurors and journalists.

The story of Watching Over Her came to him because of a desire to reconnect with Italy, “the land of my ancestors,” Andrea said, and because he believed strongly in the power of compelling fiction.

“A great love story,” he said. “That’s what makes the world go round, isn’t it?”