On 12 March, I made up an excuse and left work early – my Parisian greentech startup fashion SaaS internship, a place of persistent corporate mystery – to get the Eurostar and a train to Oxford. I arrived at All Souls a scant five minutes before myself and a number of other students were supposed to meet, to discuss four books, as part of the annual Choix Goncourt UK.
Madelaine avant l’aube by Sandrine Collette, Jacaranda by Gaël Faye, Archipels by Hélène Gaudy, and Houris by Kamel Daoud were shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, a prize Daoud ultimately won. On my train into Oxford, I had my mind firmly made up that Madelaine was the best of the four and I would defend it to the death; that Jacaranda was refreshing and important and should be taught in all French classes going forward; that Archipels was basically unreadable; and that Houris was a technical marvel but an ideological minefield.
The discussion that followed changed my mind on a few of these points. What all of us did agree on – both within this Oxford discussion group and later, at the Institut Français in London where the final jury met – was that the books felt like a collection of three apples and one orange. While Jacaranda, Archipels, and Houris are explorations of subjective memory, return, trauma, and parenthood, Madelaine feels more like a dense stylistic exercise in sustained misery. Sandrine Collette wrote a fairy-tale where oppression is the dominant force and the first-person voice that opens the novel is revealed halfway through to be a red herring, then suddenly disappears.
Towards the end of March was the judging proper, which two of the students who’d met at All Souls could volunteer to travel to London to attend. My internship would be over by then, so I took the chance.
The Institut Français reminded me of a particularly grand Oxford college. My fellow Oxford judge, Miriam, and I joined a crowd of academics, Institut members, and twenty-eight other French students.
Most people were there with their professors, and there was a lot of comfortable bantering in the trios around us. Oxford’s division between the collegiate system for tutorials and the Department for teaching meant Miriam and I were travelling with Jess Goodman (St Catz), an academic I’d never met in person, but who had delivered some of my lectures for Prelims two years before. Because the last time I’d seen her had been on the Taylorian Main Hall stage, Jess was something of a celebrity to me. For most of the allotted small-talk time I alternated between chatting excitedly to her, and practising my French on one patient member of the French Institute, who had a bob and a passion for rock climbing.
The judging process took place in the same room in which we’d just been served canapés. Our discussion was led by the historian and president of the jury Professor Olivette Otele, who did an excellent job, I think, of drawing out everyone’s opinions without presenting any of her own. At first, we were all a little nervous and spoke in stilted French. Once people’s aesthetic value judgements had been challenged, though, in fear of saying something genuinely insulting, most of us defaulted to English, which we were perhaps more comfortable arguing in. The discussion felt like an especially charged tutorial with no tutor. I had a great time.
In the end, the group decided on Jacaranda; this was the same book our Oxford group had decided upon, so I felt satisfied with our representing.
We were taken in a bus to the Ambassadress’ residence, which was on a tree-lined, gated street in Kensington Palace Gardens, and turned out to be a compact mansion. The cloakroom made me think of a movie set, with an infinity of mirrors spinning out in both directions. The butlers in the hallway were the first butlers I’d seen in my life.
The main hall of the residence was where the announcement of the winner was to take place: a thickly-carpeted room with neat rows of chairs and walls hung with tapestries. These tapestries were the most striking feature of the whole place – more so, I thought, than the Grecian busts or oil paintings that had lined the hallway. They were enormous – they looked like ones I’d seen in the Louvre under several layers of glass. I think they presented pastoral scenes. I remember the lean blue shapes of greyhounds.
After the intimacy of an hour-long deliberation process, Olivette felt like our friend, and there was a welcoming rustle of recognition as she stood up to speak. Miriam had volunteered to introduce Houris, in French, an act I found all the more impressive after six months of hearing my own heavily accented French skip like a rough stone over smooth streams of the Parisian dialect, in conversations that were either tense with the constant possibility of a grave misunderstanding, or had already collapsed into a happy mess of mutual confusion. Miriam did an amazing job.
The Ambassadress herself, Hélène Duchêne, was quiet and cordial. As we arranged ourselves into rows for photographs, she brushed past me with a soft, “Excusez-moi” (very thrilling).
A few students, when asked, said their favourite thing about ‘doing’ the Choix Goncourt was that it gave them a kind of permission to read books that were not on their syllabus. This was a new idea to me. My reading list felt at that point like it may well include every book written in the French language, at least between 1800 and 2000. Completing this reading list felt like the collapse of a Jenga tower in reverse. I thought of a neat page listing ten books that I could slowly read, mull over with my hands folded beside my dorm room window, and calmly and peacefully internalise and integrate into coherent streams of literary development. When one of these students asked if any of the books had been on my reading list, I said, “Yes”, because they might as well have been. I’ve found the division between reading for pleasure and reading for my degree – by necessity – can become blurry.
I left the party a little early to get the last train home. I would recommend Madelaine avant l’aube to anyone who likes dogs. I think there are still a few copies floating around Oxford.