Since the fall, many events have paid tribute to the Nîmes writer Jean Carrière on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Goncourt prize for “L’Epervier de Maheux”. The cycle ends on Saturday with a round table around the posterity of his work.
“The master book that is “L’Epervier de Maheux has obscured the meaning of his approach and the coherence of his work”according to Serge Velay, president of the Friends of Jean Carrière association, which is organizing a round table on Saturday January 28 to put the literary career of the writer from Nîmes into perspective.
Hosted by Jacques-Oivier Durand, writer and journalist, the meeting will bring together Olivier Boura, specialist in the history of the Goncourts, Sophie Chauveau who knew Jean Carrière at their common publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the historian Patrick Cabanel, specialist in the Cévennes and Protestantism, the pianist Raphaël Lemonnier and Philippe Chuyen who recently adapted for the stage “The Price of a Goncourt”François-Bernard Michel, passionate regarding the radio career of Jean Carrière, Alain Montcouquiol, first winner of the Jean Carrière literary prize and of course his friend Serge Velay.
After Carrière’s death, Serge Velay had received a letter from Julien Gracq telling him that he had “rarely met someone so committed to the fight for true literature”. The words remain to be defined, especially since the scope of his work remains unknown, overwhelmed by “The Sparrowhawk”. “He still wrote 15 other books”, exclaims Jacques-Olivier Durand. But the misunderstanding persists. However, recalls Serge Velay, Jean Carrière takes care in the warning which opens “The Sparrowhawk” that the Haut-Pays is the setting for a tragedy, a Shakespearean theater scene that cannot be reduced to the Cévennes.
How to define what is hidden behind this paradoxical and suffocating success? “Happiness does not exist for him”, according to Jacques-Olivier Durand. Serge Velay evokes “the search for the mother tongue, something equivalent to the magic of music”.
Serge Velay met Jean Carrière at the time of the publication of The Cave of the Plagued. “The friendship lasted until his death. He is someone I think of every day”. Jacques-Olivier Durand met him several times at the time of Calades magazine. Both remember “his humor, his irony, of a type of great tenderness as with all the desperate”. And Serge Velay to evoke Roland Barthes, an author “written to be loved, not admired. But literary glory is admiration”. What he refused and perhaps makes his singular and uncompromising work even more elusive 50 years following his award.
