Jean-Claude Mourlevat – laureate 2021 1
Jean-Claude Mourlevat, author famous of the Icela
ndic sagas. Set in the present day is the remarkable novel Terrienne (2011), a highly original work of science fiction. Its seventeen-year-old protagonist, Anne Collodi, is searching for her older sister who has been abducted to a parallel world: a frightening place devoid of life, movement, laughter, and joy. Life in this world is efficient, silent, structured, and prescribed in every detail. Oxygen itself has been abolished and the people have been forbidden to breathe. This infinitely fascinating and surprising story celebrates the physicality of life, including plain ordinary life with all its smells, sounds, visual impressions, dirt, and noise. The school School, especially boarding school, is a setting to which Jean-Claude Mourlevat has frequently returned. Usually, he portrays schools as almost prison-like institutions. So it is in the award-winning Le combat d’hiver (2000). At the centre of the story are four parentless teenagers, two boys and two girls, who attend a boarding school with extremely punitive and repressive rules. They run away from the school to take up their parents’ fight against tyranny and cruelty in a dictatorial society. More humorous is La troisième vengeance de Robert Poutifard (2004), a Dahlesque tale of a 19 teacher who has always hated his job and his troublesome students. When he retires, he decides to exact revenge for all the humiliations he has suffered over the years. His revenge campaign is described with wit and extremely dark humour in this brutal look at teaching conditions. From youth to adulthood The journey or pilgrimage is a common feature of his stories, and usually carries a symbolic meaning. A young person’s journey might be one of initiation, a passage into adult life. In Mourlevat’s books, where young people face merciless reality, suffering, separation, and death, a happy or harmonious ending is never guaranteed. Humanism In Jean-Claude Mourlevat’s fictional worlds, music and art form powerful counterpoles to the brutality and barbarism of the world. His work displays a profound and life-affirming humanism, often made manifest in the actions of his characters. His books express an exceptional longing for goodness that makes his stories truly affecting. Time and space hang suspended in his literary universe, a space he makes big enough for both the hardest and the most beautiful parts of our lives.