The DJ and singer’s first novel is the story of a love story, impossible grief and a spiritual quest that saves.
The Flore Prize was awarded on Wednesday to singer and DJ Rebeka Warrior for her first novel, All lives (Stock), on the death of his partner from cancer at the age of 36, announced the jury. The winner obtained it in the first round with seven votes to two against Anthony Passeron and two to Fabrice Pliskin, during the deliberations at the Café de Flore, a famous brasserie in the Parisian district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
All lives is not a novel, but a song. Rebeka Warrior is a singer and DJ before being an author. And we immediately feel this impulse, this rhythm in his text. The tongue is jerky, chopped up with stichomythia and parataxes. So, if at first we are shaken, even shocked by this mixture of words, we finally immerse ourselves in it, carried away by the violence of our emotions. Because Rebeka Warrior tells us a love story, “the story of an impossible mourning and a spiritual quest that saves”as its publisher Stock explains.
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Despite love and death
In this autofiction, Rebeka Warrior is disarmingly sincere. She can use harsh and cruel words, especially when she shows the ravages of chemotherapy on her wife’s beautiful body. But what the narrator tells us is above all her fear, her fatigue, her anger. If his words are sometimes awful, it’s because death is awful. Is this its limit? When her language fails to express sadness, the unbearable, the loss, Rebeka Warrior drowns in lists of words. “Health, thinking, sleeping, eating, cooking, making love, meditating, reading, writing, discussing, drawing, composing, friends, exhibitions, party, sauna, nap…” An enumeration that stretches over fifteen pages… Each first text suffers from a weakness. This is his.
Faced with this death of language, Rebeka nevertheless maintains a form of confidence, citing the authors she reads: Marc Aurèle, Sartre, Beauvoir… Unlike the enumeration, where she sought to get rid of her words, here, she tries to cling to the words of others, with other words. Despite love and death, she manages to turn mud into gold. She regains faith in existence through the grace of a spiritual experience and singing. Music, creation… We’ll come back to it. So, the singer switches to another language, German, to express an emotion that clashes with French. She will make of her pain, not only a very beautiful text, but a magnificent album with Vitalic. When we’ve finished reading Rebeka Warrior, we can go listen to it.
Rebeka Warrior, real name Julia Lanoë, 47, is known as a musician in several groups, such as Sexy Sushi, Mansfield.TYA and Kompromat, in the electronic scene. The Flore Prize was created in 1994 by the writer Frédéric Beigbeder and a café manager, Carole Chrétiennot, who have both remained members of the jury since. He distinguishes “promising young authors, with insolent and original talent”. Endowed with 6,150 euros, it has the originality of offering its winner a glass of Pouilly-Fumé every day for a year at the famous Parisian café-restaurant.