Philippe Jaenada received the Goncourt Prize this Tuesday for his novel L’inconnue du quai de Javel (Flammarion). A consecration for the 62-year-old author who already had in his bag a Flore prize for Le chameau sauvage, his first novel published in 1997, and a Femina prize for La Serpe in 2017. Through this distinction, the Goncourt jury also rewards a particular writing method and a singular, immediately identifiable style. 20 Minutes invites you to take a closer look at what constitutes the Jaenada touch.
It all starts with a news item
Since Sulak in 2013, Philippe Jaenada has made a specialty of dissecting a news item. The unknown woman from the Quai de Javel sets out to elucidate the death of Louise Cansot, a popular model for Montparnasse painters, at the age of 29, in September 1949. In the Spring of Monsters, in 2021, looked at the kidnapping and assassination of little Luc Taron in 1964... The Little Female, in 2015, looked back on the conviction of Pauline Dubuisson for the murder from her ex-boyfriend in the early 1950s.
“I see myself as the bard in Asterix. A guy who stands to the side, in the margins, far in time, who observes, who looks, who listens, who thinks, and then, who will tell it,” explains Philippe Jaenada to 20 Minutes. The author, who says he likes to watch true crime documentaries “even when they are bad”, does not choose a news item by chance. “My priority is to find the themes to explore all around, the markers of the era,” he summarizes. His works tell the story of France between the wars and after the Second World War, bohemian lives, systemic misogyny, illegal abortions, media bias, injustices...
“I see news stories as a door that we can open to enter people’s lives, to approach their humanity. This allows us to achieve intimacy, drama, wickedness, violence, avarice, passion, pain, joys…”, lists the writer.
Investigative work
Philippe Jaenada has gotten into the habit of rummaging through the shelves of the archives, examining press articles on a case, reopening yellowed police files. He looks for the detail that could make sense, the unnoticed element that could shed light on part of the mystery... The writer relates this long and meticulous investigative work throughout his novels. He discusses his questions, shares his doubts, his feeling of being at an impasse, but also his epiphanies.
“I don’t consider myself an investigator of the future, nor an amateur detective, nor a vigilante, I just want to write books,” he assures. “In all my books, I “reproach” society, the justice system or the cops for investigating the case, for forming an idea from the start. I don’t want to do that, I’m not asserting anything,” the author continues. On the subject of The Unknown Girl on the Quai de Javel, he says:
“If someone asks me, as Philippe Jaenada, who I think is the culprit, I will say that I am sure it is the one I talk about in the book. But if I were a police officer or a judge, I wouldn't come forward so much. Chief Inspector Ferrière worked, all the same. With his colleagues, he interviewed everyone possible around Louise Cansot. But he didn't dig much. Reading the police reports, I wanted to say to him: “But ask him this or that!” »
Humor
Philippe Jaenada's books can also be read like his logbooks. Even more so when his editorial work is accompanied by a sort of challenge, such as reading the complete investigations of Commissioner Maigret in his latest book, or the tour of France undertaken for La déinvolture est une bien belle chose published in 2024.
When he does not address a specific point of the case he is examining, he recounts his more or less major misadventures or shares his observations on the errors of justice and the media, on the banality of everyday life or on the customers of bistros, these places so comforting in his eyes.
If Philippe Jaenada's novels approach a drama seriously, they also reflect the singularity and humor of their author. Thus, a red light illuminating on the dashboard of his rental car in La Serpe stands out as a curious motif of suspense... In L'inconnue du quai de Javel, the disappearance of the yellow grapefruits becomes the subject of an essay in several paragraphs and the story of his battle with a shower curtain proves to be both epic and conducive to provoking fits of laughter in the reader.
Parentheses (in parentheses)
Philippe Jaenada's detractors are accustomed to reproaching him for his immoderate use of parentheses. He opens them to provide clarification, relate an anecdote or express an opinion. “It’s my natural way of expressing myself in writing: when I send a postcard to my mother, an email to my son, it’s peppered with parentheses and parentheses within parentheses. This is the very principle of all art: finding the best way, for yourself, to say what you want to say, to make you feel what you want to make people feel,” defends the writer. He adds:
“If I try to slow down on parentheses simply because some people don’t like them, it’s stupid, it’s no longer me expressing myself: what’s the point of me writing then? In the same way, if I am criticized for always writing the same book, with the same kind of characters, dramas, at the same times, should I change? Of course not, there are enough authors for us to have a choice. I just tell myself: “Write what you want the way you want, no more and no less.” »
Time passing and forgetting
“What moves me, fascinates me, are human beings, and also time. I like to notice its passage, that is to say, I like things or places that have remained more or less intact as much as those that have disappeared. I try to do a sort of inventory, very modestly, I am not a historian,” Philippe Jaenada tells us.
Also, he never hesitates to digress to provide biographical elements on very peripheral protagonists of the affair he is dissecting. In L'inconnue du quai de Javel, he briefly recounts the life of a young man who committed suicide by drowning in the Seine, not far from where the body of Lise Cansot was found. “Such an ancient drama, such a little forgotten life,” writes the author.
“I always mention the names in my books. If I learn in the police report the name of the history teacher of one of my characters, say Hélène Dupuis, I write it down. It's absolutely useless, he told 20 Minutes. But one day, for example, I received an email from a woman who was reading La Serpe and wrote to me: “It’s my grandmother you’re talking about, she was a teacher near Angers!” I mention the names to leave traces, like the commemorative plaques. »
