Following Saideh Pakravan’s “Azadi” in 2015, this year's 2016 Marie Claire Literary Award for the best feminist novel was conferred to Emmanuelle Richard in presence of the former Azardee as well as Paris journalistic and literary critics community.
The glittering event was held at Paris’ prestigious Hotel Montalembert Set on the Left Bank, this upscale hotel is a 3-minute walk from Rue du Bac metro station and an 8-minute walk from the Musée d'Orsay.
Amongst the books in competition this year:
“Bellevue” by Claire Berest (éd. Stock)
“Brillante” by Stéphanie Dupays (éd. Mercure de France)
“Celle que vous croyez” by Camille Laurens (éd. Gallimard)
“Je ne suis pas un homme qui pleure” by Fabienne Kanor (éd. JC Lattès)
“Mémoire de fille” by Annie Ernaux (éd. Gallimard)
“Moro-sphinx” by JulieEstève (éd. Stock),
“Pour la peau” by Emmanuelle Richard (éd. de L'Olivier)
“Ravie” by Sylvie Ohayon (éd. Fayard).
The Marie Claire Award Jury members included Head of Jury Fabrice Gaignault, editor in chief Marianne Mairesse, and literary chronicler Gilles Chenaille, as well as Véronique Cardi ( Livre de Poche) , novelist Justine Lévy, and Librarian Nathalie Iris (Mots en marge, à La Garenne-Colombes).
Original […] courageous, masterful writing, with the author’s voice intensely present from start to finish. —Le Monde des livres
A beautiful read. This love story is to be devoured. It’s beautiful, intense, and sad. —Femina
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Pour la peau is the autobiographical story of the passion of “Emma” for “E,” a man whose thoughts are never revealed. After their breakup, Emma puts their brief love into writing, to better preserve it, while also exorcising it by rendering it in fictional form. In mostly chronological order, Emma focuses on the man she loves, painting in careful strokes and minute detail a portrait of the man, and of the evolution of her feelings for him, from an initial repulsion, to a gradual appreciation, to the sudden moments when she falls in love.
Love, as the author relates in an interview, is at the same time a destruction and a construction of the individual. In Pour la peau, the narrator discovers she can love someone more than she ever thought possible despite his not fitting any of her preconceived ideas of a loved one; a flawed man, and much older than her. The love is destructive because she accepts things that are outside the limits of behavior she has always deemed important, all to melt into the other, to give up the self entirely, to think only of the well-being of the other. Indeed, E’s appearance first repulses her. His elbows are covered in scabs, which he picks. The lines on his face say he is a man who has self-destructed, fallen. He drinks too much, smokes too much, does drugs, and is also addicted to the woman who left him, though she will be the end of him. But E and Emma’s love has constructive elements, too: He is tender in a way she has never experienced, he is educated and traveled—he speaks of David Foster Wallace, and he lived in London for fifteen years—and he has a collection of music that adds, gradually, to what she sees in him. Their deepest love lasts only four weeks out of an endless summer; the rest is an unraveling. Emma describes in sensual and erotic prose how their bodies met, from the first time to the last, with every detail she can recall of how they made love, where, and when.
As one reviewer put it, the novel “helps us to overcome.” Pour la peau is the beautiful, seamless rendering of one woman’s survival, through writing, of a love gone.
Emmanuelle Richard is the author of one other critically acclaimed novel, La légèreté, published by Éditions de l’Olivier in 2014.