Pareils à des enfants…
Signed presentation inscription: “Ces souvenirs ne sont absolument pas romancés. Je me suis laissé aller à la joie de retrouver des images que je croyais perdues et au ravissement de les redécouvrir, Marc Bernard.”
On 20 December, in an occupied and starving Paris, the Académie Goncourt awarded its prize to Marc Bernard by 7 votes to 1 for Germaine Beaumont and 1 for Lucien Rebatet. The author learned the news on the radio from the provinces: for security reasons, he did not travel to Paris, but the prize money allowed him to save his family from destitution. The novel, printed in a small first edition, sold out within days.
Through the story of Léonard, known as Nanay, a child of the working-class districts of Nîmes at the beginning of the twentieth century, Marc Bernard delivers an autobiographical and initiatory fresco: the separation of his parents, poverty, an apprenticeship with a cobbler, sensual discoveries and private tragedies. A harsh childhood, crowned by an excellent 38th Prix Goncourt, awarded in a context marked by censorship and war, and which remains a singular Goncourt: with no direct allusion to the ongoing conflict, it is deeply steeped in popular memory and the fellowship of the humble.
From the “Goncourt” libraries of Hubert Person and Gérard Pouguet, with bookplate.