Annie Ernaux and Eric Vuillard share their passion for a writer who is too often forgotten: “Louis Guilloux is not even in “Lagarde & Michard”…”
Interview: The 2022 Nobel Prize winner and the 2017 Prix Goncourt winner have never met. But they share the same passion for an unjustly forgotten writer, for whom they both wrote the preface. Exclusive conversation
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It's never too late to make great discoveries. When Annie Ernaux, on the good advice of Eric Vuillard, read Louis Guilloux (1899-1980), she was "dazzled." She found a kind of literary cousin in this son of a Breton shoemaker who was applauded by Gide, Aragon, and Malraux; in this great friend of Albert Camus who always remained faithful to the people from whom he came; in this humanist maverick who preferred to rescue Spanish refugees rather than chase glory in Parisian salons. The author of "La Place" decided, she who wrote so few, to write a remarkable preface to the final book by this unjustly overlooked novelist: the moving "Coco perdu" (1978), a soliloquy of an old man who gradually realizes that his wife may have left him. Eric Vuillard wrote the preface to another late masterpiece by Guilloux, whom he had long admired: the gripping "OK, Joe!" (1976) recounts his experience as an interpreter at the Liberation.
How, why could literary history have neglected such a writer? The 2022 Nobel Prize winner and the 2017 Prix Goncourt winner have not yet finished pondering this mystery. But while they had read, written, and called each other extensively in recent years, they didn't know each other. It was time to bring them together around their shared passion, one spring Friday, in the peaceful house in Cergy where Annie Ernaux lives. It's never too late to make a…
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