The novelist Claire Etcherelli, revealed with Elise ou la Vraie Vie, is dead, we learned Thursday from her last publisher, Le Bord de l’eau. She was 89 years old. “She will have given us her last novel Take great care to forget me (2021), we will make sure not to follow her advice”, testified the publisher, who pays tribute to him on his website.
Elise ou la Vraie Vie (Denoël editions), an autobiographical novel, received the 1967 Femina Prize and was adapted for the cinema in 1970, with Marie-José Nat. The Femina jury was very divided that year, never finding an absolute majority, and waiting for the tenth round, where a simple majority was enough.
Claire Etcherelli has always explored the vast territory of the poor. In Elise ou la Vraie Vie, she drew her romantic material from her experience on the factory line, not as a volunteer like Simone Weil, but to earn a living. She had done so at a time when the tension was at its height between the French people and the Algerian workers. Elise or the True Life brings on this a lived testimony. “No doubt I would not have sought to meet Algerians, but the fact of working with them, of rubbing shoulders with them allowed me to know them at a time when very few had this experience. It was this experience that I wanted to translate…”, she explained to Le Monde in 1967.
“Everything in my book about racism and the problems of Algerians is real, and I just had to choose between all the facts I knew. As early as 1947, chance had made me aware of the Algerian fact. I believed then that racism was the prerogative of certain classes, that it did not exist in the factory. I had illusions. The workers are also racist, most often out of a spirit of competition or because the existence of pariahs allows them to assert themselves, and the workers are even more so, because for them the Arab is an aggressor of women. At the time of the novel, the Algerian war made “Noraf” the enemy. The French, men or women, were afraid, the Algerians even more so.
I felt sorry for this hunted game, these people caught between the brutal surveillance of the French police and the obligations imposed on them by the leaders of the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front): no longer the right to smoke, drink wine, pour ‘tax.
A vacuum was created around me because I was interested in “raccoons”. »
A certain distance from the literary world
The book recounted the clandestine love in Paris between two workers, a French woman of very modest origin and an Algerian immigrant militant for independence. It exposed the taboo of racism in French society in the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the bullying suffered by immigrants from the Maghreb. Elise ou la Vraie Vie, a realistic novel, was also praised for having accurately depicted the condition of young women in factories. Simone de Beauvoir, who had appreciated it, had Claire Etcherelli hired in 1973 as sub-editor in the review Les Temps Modernes.
The author published five other novels between 1971 and 2021, including the first two with Editions Gallimard, which did not enjoy the same success. Originally from Bordeaux, orphaned after the death in deportation of her resistant father, she had abandoned her studies and had become a single mother at a very young age.
Despite the acclaim for her first novel, Claire Etcherelli always kept a certain distance from the literary world, claiming to be an “office worker”.
His funeral takes place Thursday in Paris.
