Closing evening with Marie Darrieussecq and Dominique A

With Fabriquer une femme, Marie Darrieussecq writes a novel of apprenticeship in which two best friends from a village in the Basque country build themselves, mirroring each other, responding in diametrically opposed ways to the social and patriarchal injunctions of 1980s France. The first, Rose, follows a conventional path: from a privileged background, attached to her boyfriend Christian since childhood, she studies psychology. The second, Solange, is a rebellious young woman who became a mother at the age of fifteen, has many conquests, goes to nightclubs and pursues her dream of becoming an actress between Paris, London and Los Angeles.

Marie Darrieussecq links and unlinks the destinies of her heroines around the question of women’s emancipation, against the backdrop of the whirlwind 1980s: the Mitterrand years, the arrival of AIDS, nightclubs, Prince, the Rita Mitsouko and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Attentive readers of the author of Truismes – which made her name in 1996 – will appreciate this literary treasure hunt, as Solange and Rose are already present in her previous novels (Clèves, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes and La Mer à l’envers, all published by POL).

To recapture the pop energy of the 1980s, Marie Darrieussecq joins forces with Namoro, an electro duo made up of “two women who love each other and sing”. Namoro makes “lova song”, a music of love and dance.
This musical reading is the perfect way to kick off the festival’s closing evening, in the enchanting setting of Fort Saint-Jean!

Based on texts by Jean-François Modiano.

Jean-François Mondot, journalist and jazz critic, set himself a daring challenge: “to translate Modiano’s fog into song”. He immersed himself in the entirety of a work he knew well, and wrote texts linked together by a chronological thread. Step by step, from childhood to middle age, we follow a man who could be Modiano himself or one of his characters. We imagine him in his twenties, writing in a smoky café, or living an impossible love affair in 1960s Paris.
Jean-François Mondot decides to send his songs to Dominique A. And he’s right: the singer is himself a great reader of the Nobel Prize winner. Accompanied by the finest jazz musicians Stephan Oliva (piano), Sébastien Boisseau (double bass) and Belgian drummer Sacha Toorop, he decided to set his texts to music and perform them. The result is Memento, an album without solemnity, lively and powerfully collective – so much so that the singer chose to sign it with his full name, Dominique Ané. Thirteen chiselled songs and refined instrumentation make up the album, which avoids a literal adaptation of the Modianesque work to subtly conjure up its atmosphere, poetic and uncertain mists, memory trails, distilling a little melancholy and a few clues that readers of Dora Bruder will recognize.

It’s this unclassifiable album that the four accomplices will be bringing to the stage to close these “beaux jours de la littérature” in style. A literary concert in the form of a successful tribute to one of France’s greatest writers, celebrated for his “art of memory”.