[ad_1]
The French writer Pascal Quignard (Verneuil-sur-Avre, 74 years old) has won the 2023 Formentor Prize for Letters this Wednesday. The jury, which met in Canfranc, in the Aragon Pyrenees, considers the cult French author one of European writers that he has renewed the expressive power of language and lists his reasons for awarding him the prize: “For the mastery with which he has rescued the genealogy of literary thought, for the dexterity with which he evades textual banality, for having resolved the most unexpected dimensions of writing, for the composition of his great treatise on the literary enigmas of the human soul”.
Quignard is the author of more than fifty works, among which stand out The Württemberg Hall (1986), Every morning in the world (1991, adapted to the cinema by Alain Courneau and starring Gérard Depardieu), A terrace in Rome (2000, Grand Prize for Novels from the Académie française), Villa Amalia (2006, Jean Giono Grand Prize), the wandering shadows (2002, Goncourt Prize) and love the sea (2022). The jury emphasized his respect for the tradition of the classics and universal literature: “In his numerous books, a dazzling erudition renews the creative energy of the first sources. It is the Greco-Latin, medieval and baroque legacy, Eastern thought and Western philosophy, which alienates the astonishment for the monumental invention of universal literature.
However, the author fades from the classic image of a French intellectual. Although in the nineties he worked for the publishing giant Gallimard, where he held various positions that positioned him as a powerful man in literary Paris – he held the position of general secretary of the publishing house, the number one after the owners -, and day He decided to leave everything and retire to write. For this, he is installed in the province of Sens, 130 kilometers from Paris, in the Yonne department.
Since then, he has been away from the bustle of Paris for three decades. Something like the antonym of a French literary specimen par excellence who is the writer engage, committed to a political or social cause. He avoids demonstrations, lacks the vocation of the undersigned. He prefers to live with his books, his music, his animals. “I try not to speech, not to do anything that belongs to the world or politics, a somewhat wilder language. It is what I am looking for in the darkness of the theater: something a little more authentic”, he told the EL PAÍS journalist Marc Bassets just a month ago.
In addition to being a writer, Quignard is a musician and plays the piano (no longer the violin, due to arthritis). The award statement praises “the musical flow of an inexhaustible and effervescent prose.” “The musical keys, so present in his work, allow us to read Pascal Quignard’s books as an open score to be interpreted and consummated. From here proceeds the singular complicity, so demanding and radical, that the writer proposes to his readers”, highlights the jury.
His style, which he himself describes as “baroque”, is unclassifiable, since it combines story, essay, aphorism, history, philosophy and poetry. “I am a baroque. I seek the intensity of emotion by any means. I’m not a classic, I’m not looking for perfection. The baroques look for the intense, not the beauty. If we can make people cry, we are happy, ”he said last month. The fusion of these genres is something that the jury also appreciates: “The distinction between philosophy and literature, reflection and contemplation, inspiration and experience, is necessary in a work that has masterfully braided the conceptual nerve, the poetic illusion and the musical flow of an inexhaustible and effervescent prose”.
The jury for this year’s Formentor Prize for Literature was made up of Ramón Andrés, Anna Caballé, Juan Luis Cebrián, Victor Gómez Pin and its president Basilio Baltasar.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
subscribe
babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by the best critics in our weekly bulletin
RECEIVE IT
[ad_2]