Adrien Bosc
Adrien Bosc est né en 1986 à Avignon. En 2014, il reçoit pour son premier roman, Constellation, le Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, ainsi que le prix de la Vocation ; il publie ...
CONSTELLATION PRIX ACADEMIE FRANCAISE 2014
Auteur
Parution :
20/08/2014
Collection :
La Bleue
Rights sold to Germany (Ullstein), China (People's Literature) Italy (Ugo Guanda), the Netherlands (Cossee), Romania (Humanitas), Russia (AST), Serbia (Geopoetika), the UK (Serpent's Tail) and the US (The Other Press, WEL)
On 27th October 1949, Air France’s new Lockheed Constellation, launched by Howard Hughes, took on board thirty-seven passengers, including the boxing world champion Marcel Cerdan and the virtuoso violonist Ginette Neveu. On the 28th the plane stopped communicating with the control tower. It disappeared over the Azores with no survivors.
The question Adrien Bosc addresses in this dazzling, ambitious first novel is not so much how but why? What sequence of infinitesimal causations put end to end sent that plane into a mountain? And also, who were the passengers? We may remember Marcel Cerdan, the boxer lover of Édith Piaf who never believed he had died; we may remember the violinist Ginette Neveu, a fragment of whose violin was recovered years later; but Bosc weaves together other lives around them. From the Basque shepherd to the American entrepreneur, the inventor of the Mickey Mouse watch to the cabin crew, the author – a writer and explorer – draws a precise, hyperrealist yet poetic image of them all. He restores the humanity they lost in 1949. In his own words: “Letting the dead speak, writing their minor legends and giving forty-eight men and women, like so many constellations themselves, a life and a tale to tell.”
Do we find answers? No, more questions, “you have to keep setting off, heart thundering, in pursuit of whales”, sighs the author as he tackles the mysterious island.
On 27th October 1949, Air France’s new Lockheed Constellation, launched by Howard Hughes, took on board thirty-seven passengers, including the boxing world champion Marcel Cerdan and the virtuoso violonist Ginette Neveu. On the 28th the plane stopped communicating with the control tower. It disappeared over the Azores with no survivors.
The question Adrien Bosc addresses in this dazzling, ambitious first novel is not so much how but why? What sequence of infinitesimal causations put end to end sent that plane into a mountain? And also, who were the passengers? We may remember Marcel Cerdan, the boxer lover of Édith Piaf who never believed he had died; we may remember the violinist Ginette Neveu, a fragment of whose violin was recovered years later; but Bosc weaves together other lives around them. From the Basque shepherd to the American entrepreneur, the inventor of the Mickey Mouse watch to the cabin crew, the author – a writer and explorer – draws a precise, hyperrealist yet poetic image of them all. He restores the humanity they lost in 1949. In his own words: “Letting the dead speak, writing their minor legends and giving forty-eight men and women, like so many constellations themselves, a life and a tale to tell.”
Do we find answers? No, more questions, “you have to keep setting off, heart thundering, in pursuit of whales”, sighs the author as he tackles the mysterious island.
Adrien Bosc was born in Avignon in 1986, and set up Éditions du Sous-Sol which publishes the reviews Feuilleton and Desports. Constellation is his first novel.
Le 27 octobre 1949, le nouvel avion d’Air France, le Constellation, lancé par l’extravagant M. Howard Hughes, accueille trente-sept passagers. Le 28 octobre, l’avion ne répond plus à la tour de contrôle. Il a disparu en descendant sur l’île Santa Maria, dans l’archipel des Açores. Aucun survivant. La question que pose Adrien Bosc dans cet ambitieux premier roman n’est pas tant comment, mais pourquoi ? Quel est l’enchaînement d’infimes causalités qui, mises bout à bout, ont précipité l’avion vers le mont Redondo ? Quel est le hasard objectif, notion chère aux surréalistes, qui rend « nécessaire » ce tombeau d’acier ? Et qui sont les passagers ? Si l’on connaît Marcel Cerdan, l’amant boxeur d’Édith Piaf, si l’on se souvient de cette musicienne prodige que fut Ginette Neveu, dont une partie du violon sera retrouvée des années après, l’auteur lie les destins entre eux. « Entendre les morts, écrire leur légende minuscule et offrir à quarantehuit hommes et femmes, comme autant de constellations, vie et récit. »
198 pages
Format :
135 x 215 mm
EAN :
9782234077317
Prix :
22.00 €
