This year, the Prix Médicis has the happy idea of rewarding a French novelist, Julia Deckwho handles black humor and irony to perfection – no doubt thanks to her British maternal ancestry. She began publishing in 2012, at the age of thirty-six, with Editions de Minuit, and has made a name for herself as a writer of fierce, hilarious social comedies. Her two previous novels, Private Property, on an eco-neighborhood for bobos, and National monument, were deliciously sarcastic, pitting the newly rich owners of a mansion against characters from working-class neighborhoods.

Ann from Englandpublished by Seuil and awarded a prize by the Médicis jury, is of a different style, even if it does reveal the author’s strong temperament. In this self-directed book, Julia Deck declares from the outset that she is going to tell the truth, the whole truth, if there is such a thing as truth, about her mother and the secret that surrounds this woman of astonishing destiny, Ann, born in 1937 into a working-class family in England.

What precipitated the writing of this story was what happened on the evening of Sunday April 24, 2022. Julia Deck found her mother collapsed on the floor of her Parisian bathroom, twenty-eight hours after having left her, scolding her as she hung out her washing. An event she’d dreaded since she was a teenager, but with a kind of curiosity mingled with a ” troubled hope “. How would she survive the disappearance of her only daughter?

This is a tale in two parts. On the one hand, it consists of the diary of Julia, 47, who is working like a lioness with the doctors to ensure that her mother is not treated like a carcass, but receives appropriate rehabilitation and can end her days in a place worthy of her. For Ann beat the emergency doctors’ prognosis of imminent death. The stroke left her hemiplegic, with a fractured memory and language, but it didn’t kill her. This combat diary, full of restrained rage and dark humor, is full of questions. Why, wonders Julia Deck, go to such lengths to ensure that her mother escaped the fate of most patients in geriatric wards, grim and sinister? “It’s a moral construct to figure that after all a person has been through, they should be given an ending that lives up to them,” she writes. And again, “It’s an unnecessarily melancholy construction to see in the present person the person they once were.”

Vital urgency

Nevertheless, against a certain utilitarianism in vogue, Julia Deck chooses morality and melancholy. This is why she undertakes – and this is the second level of narration – to write a chronicle of her mother’s life. Without appearing to do so, she underlines Ann’s intelligence, courage and tenacity in escaping her native environment, studying in Paris and settling there. Ann raised her daughter almost single-handedly, holding down four jobs, choosing to continue working until she was 80… God knows Julia is horrified by this strange mother, but God admires her! The two narratives, the one in which the author says “I” and “my mother”, and the one in which she says “Ann” and “Julia”, converge at the end.

This is a story written in the heat of the moment, with a vital urgency that raises a host of questions. About the fate of the elderly when the hospital takes them in buildings that mean : “you don’t deserve to exist, let alone receive care at society’s expense”.. On the ambivalence of the relationship between mother and daughter, its substratum of rivalry. On aging, which Ann refused to face, and her daughter even more so: “What would it have cost me to see her grow old? What would it have cost me to have been more patient?”

It’s not certain that Julia Deck will be able to solve the enigma of her “unknown mother”. On the other hand, she is certain of one thing: fiction has prophetic power: “For a long time I had observed that my novels unraveled the past and foretold the future.” This is how the author of National Monument will have the consolation of seeing his mother live out her last days in a castle… Ann of Englanda title that suits her so well.

The Prix Médicis Etranger goes to the excellent Guatemalan writer, Eduardo Halfonfor his novel Tarantula (Quai Voltaire/Table Ronde), which Eric Neuhoff praised in the Figaro littéraire of September 12, prose of “almost blinding clarity”.

And the Prix Médicis essay was awarded to Reiner Stach for Volume 3 of his immense biography of Kafka The years of youth (Cherche-Midi).

The Médicis jury, chaired this year by Anne F. Garréta, includes Marianne Alphant, Michel Braudeau, Marie Darrieussecq, Patrick Grainville, Dominique Fernandez, Andreï Makine, Pascale Roze and Alain Veinstein.