Letter from Catherine Cusset Dear students, dear school girls,
Thanks. A great big thank you. I can not tell you what an honor you do me in electing a bright future as the winner of the Goncourt XXI High Schoolers. I was not expecting it at all.
We just live together and separately for two months, a fantastic adventure. In mid-September, because your French teacher had volunteered, you ended up with five pounds of the new literary chosen by your elders, the jury of the Prix Goncourt. You should, of these fifteen books, read four, five, six or more, then to discuss with your classmates. Some of you have never read novels. Many were unaware of contemporary literature, the literary season, issues of race awards, which give a publisher a chance of survival and a writer the freedom to live by his pen. At first, maybe some of you were they deterred by the magnitude of the task, the size or on some books to read. But gradually you're caught in the game you realize that you had the power to act on reality, and you discovered the workings of democracy, the voting power of rhetoric and majority rule.
From my side, living in America for eighteen years, I knew almost all of the Goncourt High Schoolers. When I learned that there would be meetings with students in several regions of France, I agreed to lend me the game I must admit that at first I was taken aback. Placed on a dais alongside other writers, some of which were received by you as the stars, I sometimes felt to find myself in a kind of market where we had to sell his book as a commodity. When a hand rose in the room and that the issue was inevitably another writer, went back in me old complex buried since the high school years: those of the girl who yearns to be "nice" "cool" and popular, but remains in his corner and his comrades believe that haughty and contemptuous because she is shy and unsure of herself. I'm forty-five, you have between fourteen and eighteen. The body ages, but you will see we always fifteen years in her heart. Facing you, I was aware of that, the aging of the body, for your youth mirror us back our age.
And yet, during those two months, I too am I enjoyed taking the game to regain your youthful faces, to hear your questions became more precise and subtle as you read the books, and share with my classmates solidarity rarely given to the novelist, because writing is a solitary profession. Even without any chance of winning this award, I was happy to have lived with you on an adventure that seemed to symbolize the French cultural exception. I felt that something important had happened.
You can imagine my surprise and my delight when I received the call from Rennes on November 12. Though you have chosen a novel telling a half-century history of a Romanian who emigrated to the United States, and telling parallels the relationship of conflict, complicated, between the stepmother and her step-Romanian French girl, I still seems unbelievable and touched me deeply. Some of you have asked about the structure of this book. As I said at the meetings, I have long hesitated. I was afraid of spoiling the beautiful story of Elena and Jacob by mixing with another story, less epic and more psychological. Finally I realized that I had no choice because the book's subject was the relationship between past and present. between the dream of the future, and what had become of that dream. My novel might be too difficult to read and thus will not be successful, but too bad: there was this form that it was consistent with his project.
You, the younger, telling me today: it is precisely this form that we loved. You have not been deterred by the apparent difficulty. Reach your audience, I could not expect greater success. If I write, is above all because I love to read, because I can not imagine the day where I found the evening before bed, a novel that will be my companion falling asleep. I need a true companion: a novel that makes me feel good, which "exist"-the characters through an uncompromising writing where every word is necessary. I want to write books that my readers have wanted to get back in the evening. When you tell me that my characters have stayed with you once the book is closed, you gives me hope. This means that we are the same, there is no generation gap between us. I am afraid that as being a dinosaur in a world where no one reads and where image prevails over the word, so I can see you in small dinosaurs that will grow and populate the world of other baby dinosaurs?
I hope that this adventure has given you a taste of finding a mate in the evening of words, and your curiosity needle toward the immense spaces of the literature, where you guide your instincts. It is difficult to give advice, because two people do not like the books, what you understand by discussing in your classes for two months. But one can not help but suggest you go see the side of the Russians, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton and Salinger across the Atlantic, Balzac and Flaubert by us. Among other things, among many others. Just a beginning ...
With much love, Catherine
catherinecusset@yahoo.com us grasp this letter was published on the blog here Fnac
A quick tour of the cemetery and then: Go home! 
A quick tour of the cemetery and then: Go home! 
