The 2023 Goncourt Prize rewards Veiller sur elle, by Jean-Baptiste Andrea (L’Iconoclaste, 592 p., 22.50 euros, digital 16 euros), already distinguished by the Fnac novel prize: a metaphysical fresco around sculpture, a meditation on presence and absence. Also in the running were Sad Tiger, by Neige Sinno (P.O.L), Humus, by Gaspard Koenig (L’Observatoire) and Sarah, Susanne and the Writer, by Eric Reinhardt (Gallimard). The novel succeeds Vivre vite, by Brigitte Giraud (Flammarion), whose coronation in a tense atmosphere, in 2022, was a catalyst for internal dissensions within the Goncourt jury.
Announced just after, and in the same place, the Parisian restaurant Drouant (2nd arrondissement), the Renaudot prize was awarded to Ann Scott for Les Insolents.
Le Goncourt crowns the literary work of Jean-Baptiste Andrea, born in 1971, also a director and screenwriter. Before Veiller sur elle, he is the author of three novels published by Iconoclaste, which won numerous awards. Intimate epics, which stand out for their incredible lyricism and abandoned heroes whose broken childhood, narrated with a realism à la Jules Vallès or Jules Renard, is reinvented in wandering, in artistic creation or in extreme adventure, the only true belonging .
These orphans – of parents, of love or of listening – feel the need to recount their lives in writing in order to knit, from the escapes, abandonments and dramas which have torn them, an existential fabric. They make it a garment in which to wrap their soul, a vast system of echoes which turns their life into a novel, a poetic tale within which encounters are formed and unraveled over several decades. In My Queen (2017), Shell fled to live a truant life in the mountains; One Hundred Million Years and One Day (2019) told the story of Stan’s exploration of the heart of a glacier in the Dolomites in search of his childhood dream – a dragon fossil, larger than any other. known dinosaurs; in Of Devils and Saints (2021), a 70-year-old man haunted train station halls, playing the piano for no one and everyone, remembering his childhood in the orphanage.
A conjuring trick
In Veiller sur elle, we find this wandering, which is first of all, here, a formal alternation: there is the autobiographical confession of the (fictitious) sculptor Mimo Vitaliani and a third-person narrative in the form of an unexpected biography. Not that of a being, but that of a work: a mysterious pietà, Vitaliani’s masterpiece, whose hypnotic powers are explored… Setting its plot in Italy, the country from which his family comes, Jean-Baptiste Andrea performs a magic trick: the novel about sculpture evokes at the same time something completely different: what makes up the price of a life, including its shadows and its behind the scenes.
Taken in at a young age from his uncle in the pink stone of Pietra d’Alba, the aspiring artist grapples with the thousand promises offered by marble, a stone which is everywhere in this “land of altitude and sources”, but also to the sparkling dreams of Viola, his “cosmic twin”, daughter of the neighboring marquises. From her, he learned to speak to the dead and built flying machines. Throughout the 20th century, they will cross paths, lose each other and find each other again, Vitaliani leaving for Florence, then Rome, but always returning to Pietra d’Alba, where it all began.
Like the paths of this Piedmont plateau, “which change place as we tread them”, the center of gravity of the novel never stops moving: it begins with the end – the pieta carved by Vitaliani, we are told – it immediately makes those who look at it swoon. Relegated to an abbey, it gives rise to disturbing dreams among the monks. The Vatican therefore places it out of sight…
The pages describing Vitaliani’s early sculptures, which his spectators swear “see moving”, read like a detective novel or a quest for the grail: we scrutinize each gesture, looking for a warning sign. The great beauty of the novel is drawn, so to speak, in a stencil, in the hollow of what does not take place, of what is not said – this is what gives it its crystalline depth: for Vitaliani, to sculpt is to “remove layers of history”, until we reach the one “that concerns us all”.
The irreducible gesture of creation
The art of the sculptor, here, joins that of the writer. Sculpting a sparrow does not mean making it appear out of nothing, but freeing the bird that was there. Not to create a living being from scratch, but to free up space to let the stone unfold. Researchers and the Vatican may write hundreds of pages to decipher the enigma that constitutes the “strange presence” of this pieta, they will fail to confine in a hypothesis the irreducible gesture of creation: the bringing into the presence of a an almost living being who was not there, and who suddenly mysteriously suggests itself to us – a visitation.
This maddening pieta is also a symbol of resistance, Vitaliani having carved it from the block of stone initially planned for a work commissioned by the Mussolini regime, before the sculptor understood his error and broke with fascism. Tyranny – political, social, sexist – is also at the heart of the book.
Like the novel itself, Mimo Vitaliani’s masterpiece gives substance to space and time, embodying both movement and its suspension, beauty and death: the form that pulsating life takes when you grab it raw. Rewarding her with the Goncourt Prize, isn’t that the best way to look after her?
