A literary investigation in the true crime genre (documentary prose about real crimes), intended to shed light on a 77-year-old case but instead restoring the good name of the victim—a model—has won France’s most prestigious literary prize, UNN reports, citing The Guardian.
Details
On Tuesday afternoon, it was announced that Philippe Jaenada had won the Prix Goncourt. He received the award for his book "The Unknown Woman from the Quai de Javel" (L’Inconnue du quai de Javel), a reconstruction of the murder of a 29-year-old native of Brittany named Louise Cancé.
Louise Cancé, who was called the "woman with a hundred portraits" because of her immense popularity among Montparnasse artists, was found dead on September 7, 1949. The police never managed to establish the identity of the killer.
This year’s Prix Goncourt ceremony was overshadowed by a scandal: claims emerged that one of the books that made the longlist—"It Was This or Die" (C’était ça ou mourir) by Canadian-Haitian author Télésion Orélien—had been written "almost entirely" by artificial intelligence.
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The Académie Goncourt—a literary organization based in Paris—removed Orélien’s book from the longlist, while his Canadian publisher, Boréal, ended its collaboration with him after conducting an internal investigation. Orélien himself denies using artificial intelligence while writing the novel.
In addition
Philippe Jaenada, who had previously been shortlisted for this prize four times, finally won with his thirteenth novel.
The writer, a native of the Île-de-France region, has made investigating old criminal cases his trademark. It began with the book "Sulak" (Sulak), published in 2013—the story of a famous and charismatic robber and escape artist who carried out jewelry-store raids in the 1980s.
The heroine of "The Unknown Woman from the Quai de Javel," Louise Cancé, left Brittany at the age of 16 to work as a maid, but later began posing for the artist Jean-Louis Boussengot. He introduced her to other Parisian painters and sculptors. In the original 300-page police report on Cancé’s murder, she was characterized as a woman of "dubious reputation," while the press of the time speculated that she might have been a sex worker or drug addict.
In his 530-page book, Jaenada makes considerable efforts to correct the erroneous conclusions of the initial investigation: he not only names the likely killer but also portrays the victim with compassion. "The author spares no effort in trying to understand his heroine," the newspaper Le Monde writes, also noting the work’s humor and its characteristic "touch of gruff tenderness."
The author drew inspiration for his book by rereading 74 of Georges Simenon’s 75 novels about Commissioner Maigret—the head of the criminal police department in 1940s Paris.