Le Soleil des Scorta

Prix Goncourt 2004. A harsh and luminous chronicle of a Puglian lineage, Le Soleil des Scorta unfolds, from 1870 to the present day, the saga of a family born in wrongdoing and held together by honor, work and the crushing sun. Gaudé blends the epic and the intimate: scenes of grape harvests and storms, births, exiles and returns, stubborn poverty and fierce joy. The novel opens with a founding act of deception and is written, generation after generation, like a testament passed on in a low voice — a book of smells, dust and white stones, in which every Scorta learns to “pay with themselves” to deserve the light.

On the fourth ballot, the jury chose Gaudé, consecrating a thirty-two-year-old novelist already revealed by La Mort du roi Tsongor (Goncourt des lycéens, Prix des libraires, 2002). The award was a landmark for the publisher: it was the first time Actes Sud, the Arles-based house founded by Hubert Nyssen and located on place Nina-Berberova, had won the Goncourt. Critics praised a “pure novel” — ample, popular in the best sense — which, far from the games of autofiction, restored to narrative the self-evidence of a shared destiny.

Publisher’s wraparound band preserved.