The jury of the Goncourt Prize finally surprised everyone with its list of works nominated for this year’s prize. This led to questions regarding whether Goncourt, which is considered the most prestigious and prestigious French literary award, will go to an Arab writer this year, especially following previous Arab writers such as Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1987, Amin Maalouf in 1993, and Leila Slimani in 2016.
Sabeel Ghassoub, 34, was born in Paris to the Lebanese poet Caesar Ghassoub, who appears in the novel as a main character alongside his wife Hanan.
His novel nominated for Goncourt is the third following “The Jewish Nose” and “Beirut in Brackets”. Ghossoub belongs to the thirtieth generation born at the end of the Lebanese civil war. In his works, Ghossoub monitors the crises of this generation, most of whose children have emigrated, and many of them are still suffering multiple crises as a result of this alienation related to identity and belonging. As a way to understand his identity and visualize his family history.
“I wasn’t expecting that at all. I was very touched. I wrote this novel to honor my father, as a kind of revenge for war and wars and a life that is often unfair,” said Ghossoub in an interview with the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour, following announcing his novel’s nomination for Goncourt’s long list.
in the novel; Arab Paris in the eighties is manifested in its artists, art galleries, newspapers and cafes, through Caesar, the poet who is fond of the Arabic language and enthusiastic leftist, and through his relationship with tenderness, the narrator depicts his political, artistic and emotional motives and contradictions. Their shattered dreams and the pain of their war experience are also highlighted, as the various assassinations and massacres that characterized the dark years of the civil war are evoked, and the unbearable wait behind “don’t break” phones for those hoping to be reassured of getting news regarding their loved ones.
But soon the curse of war haunts the Lebanese expatriates, as the war penetrates Paris: bombs explode, attacks are launched, and words like “Palestine” and “armed organization” utter the French news. Over the years, political conflict continues to interfere, and Lebanon and its capital become for the narrator another place in daily life, a family gathering point of his dreams, so they must maintain that connection at all costs. In his novel, Ghossoub reveals the difficulty of the dream of returning to the homeland following exile during the attempt to escape the war. Return entails confrontation with a homeland that has been changed by the war. It is difficult to identify and describe it as the homeland as it was before the war. This prompts everyone to make a more difficult choice, which is staying in Paris and trying to rebuild their imagined Lebanon there, so that Paris becomes for them a new Beirut on the banks of the Seine River, embodying at the same time an extended emotional narrative regarding family, immigration, and what remains of our origins.
Goncourt’s long list of 15 novels has also been criticized for excluding Virginie Depante’s “Dear Fool,” which critics have described as the queen of the current French literary season due to its sales exceeding 65,000 copies as well as the positive critical consensus of critics and readers alike. The Goncourt committee had returned Debant’s exclusion because she was a former member of the award’s jury for four consecutive years before she resigned in early 2020 to devote herself to writing, as the committee considered her selection among the nominees would be “morally unacceptable,” according to Didier Decoin, Goncourt’s president.
The award changed some of the rules for this year’s edition, banning the works of spouses, companions or close relatives of jury members, following the 2021 revelation of the relationship between jury member Camille Lorenz and author Francois Nudelman. It also prevented members of the jury who hold a literary and journalistic position in one of the media from reviewing the works that appear on the award lists in the newspapers and media in which they work. Although these rules came to preserve the impartiality and reputation of the award in the face of any criticism, the main criticism and accusation that it still faces is its clear bias to the major publishing houses that occupy a large proportion of the lists of nominations and winners in exchange for poor representation of small and independent publishing houses, and Goncourt still fails to Confronting this criticism, which prompted some in the publishing sector to describe it as a “closed club” for large publishing houses, and the award winner is scheduled to be announced on November 3.
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