Emmanuel Carrère crowned with the Médicis Prize for “Kolkhoze”

Funny epilogue for the prize favorite. Placed on the list of the Grand Prix du Novel of the French Academy then withdrawn after one round. In the running for Goncourt with favorite status who finds himself without any votes in the final vote. Emmanuel Carrère finally won the Medici Prize. The prize jurors did not miss the opportunity to include in their list the of letters, already crowned by two of the biggest literary prizes, the Femina in 1995 for Snow Class and Renaudot, in 2011 for Limonov.

With this award, a career spanning four decades is recognized, including 17 books and 21 screenplays for cinema or the small screen. Without forgetting journalism which takes up a large part of Carrère’s time. He started in the press towards the end of the 80s by covering small trials in the provinces and has not stopped. The foreign press often calls on him and he Guardianin particular, commissioned a report from him on the footsteps of Emmanuel Macron at the G7 last June.

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Carrère said that his desire to write novels was long thwarted by a psychological blockage and parasitized by reading giants like Dostoyevsky or Nabokov. Even if weighty writers like Michel Déon praised his first novels, the turning point only came in 2000, when he published The Adversary. The Romand affair fascinates him and, to be able to write about this atrocious news item, the massacre of his entire family by a mythomaniac, he rereads The sang-froid de Truman Capote. «I think it is impossible to write a book about a news item without it being a little in the shadow of In cold blood, he confided to us recently. I have the impression that I managed to get rid of it or, let’s say, to get out of there, because deep down, at one point, I understood that I had to go about things differently than Capote. But I remain incredibly impressed by the strength of the book. > The success of the book is important, even apart from reviews and sales, because it marks an important date for French literature of the moment. Carrère is the one who imposes in France what is called “narrative non-fiction”, an American school where great journalists use the resources of fiction to tell the story of reality, whether it concerns news items or not.

Carrère has found his way. He won’t come out again. “< This raises the question of the novel versus non-fiction. I wrote five novels, and then I didn’t do any more. It’s not an ideological choice, like, “I think the novel is dead “. No way. I’m a reader of novels, I love that, but, deep down, I have the impression, by doing journalism, that I write in exactly the same way. It is perhaps, also, because I have this sort of privilege or luxury of being able to give articles written like novels. After Philip K. Dick, a pure biography, published in 1993, Carrère portraiture Romand, therefore, but also Edouard Limonov and Saint Luc.

Son of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, historian and then academician, Emmanuel Carrère could not fail to also investigate his Georgian and Russian roots. He will do it in 2007 in A Russian novelin which he reveals the dark past of his maternal grandfather during the war, which will earn him the wrath of his mother. She had asked him, expressly, not to write anything about this story. He will ignore it by answering: It’s not just your story, it’s mine too. You have no right to forbid me from doing that.” This work is also an opportunity for the writer to settle some scores with this admired but not always easy mother. We remember in particular this muscular tirade: “You didn’t like the kind of writer I became, the kind of book I wrote. (…) I had no choice, I inherited horror, madness, and the prohibition to say them…”

The publication in 2023 of a volume from the “Quarto” collection directed by Aude Cirier, containing her first novels and numerous journalistic texts, triggered the idea of Kolkhoze : «After the first Quarto (the second was released this summer, Editor’s note), I thought I would write a book that was quite outward-looking, around the war in Ukraine, my relationship with Russia, my family history with Russia, a kind of emotional transfer to Georgia. This is done through reporting, used as a kind of fuel. I told myself that these reports tended to say something more complex. But I didn’t have the front door. And the front door was my mother’s death.»

SO Kolkhozefamily therapy book? Carrère refutes the term even though he insisted on having his sisters and his uncle Nicolas, whom he adores, read the book. The family past, the story of the White Russians who took refuge in Paris, the rise of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse to the top of the French Academy, the cousin who became president of Georgia, but also the hidden sentimental life of her parents: Carrère tells it all, without veil. A form of immodesty that some close to his mother reproached him for: “That’s how life was. What’s the point of hiding things? There is no crime in this. There is something that is sad. Undeniably. But I couldn’t ignore that. If you like, I think it’s a book that is really quite loving towards its main character, my mother. Nor is it a hagiographic book. I wouldn’t have known how to do that.”

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Carrère excels in his role as storyteller, which he undoubtedly inherited from his mother, playing with the reader, ensuring a sort of friendly complicity. What he confirms: “My form is not, or very secondarily, the essay, the development of ideas, but writing in the form of a story. I like that, the story. I like the way of supporting, of reviving interest. I like the fact that I convey a lot of information. To do a little pedagogy. Because in books like Limonov or The Kingdomthere is a considerable amount of information. And so, managing this information, digesting it, preparing it for the reader, is something that always amuses me a lot.”

Readers loved this strong, fast-paced volume, judging by the number 1 sales position that the author has held for weeks. The Medici Prize, which crowns sometimes difficult works, will be able, with Kolkhozereach a much wider audience as the holidays approach!