In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Marie-Aude Murail, Absolutely
  • Marie Lallouet (bio)
    Translated by Michael Lavin

Click for larger view
View full resolution

It is impossible to understand French novels for young people without taking time out to examine the role Marie-Aude Murail has played in the field since early 1985. This central position, based on almost a hundred published books (nearly all of them novels, translated into twenty-two languages), could prove dangerous in the sense that such an edifice might have transformed its architect into an untouchable icon. But this is certainly not the case here. Obsessed by a constant concern with learning her trade and meeting the expectations of her readers, Marie-Aude Murail has—for the moment—avoided all forms of self-beatification, sometimes benefiting from new editions of her novels to correct mistakes (which, she says, is a great relief to her). A literary career like hers might intimidate the person tasked with summarizing it, but its extreme degree of coherence serves as an encouragement to take the risk.

After seven years at the Sorbonne and around the same amount of time writing romantic short stories for the female press—clearly, the first occupation is not incompatible with the second—Marie-Aude (born in Le Havre in 1954) settled down as a young writer in an incongruous field, that of literature for young people. It was the 1980s in France, and children's literature was a sub-sub-literary genre for which no training was required and which promised no recognition. But this hardy explorer had in her kitbag a heap of enthusiasm and many furrows to plough: enthusiasm for Charles Dickens and his "realist fairy tales"; enthusiasm for childhood, which she [End Page 34] discovered thanks to her little sister Elvire (four years younger than she is and now a writer herself) and her first son (born in 1977); and enthusiasm for her readers, who would, as she met and united them—an approach she so admires in the popular writers of the nineteenth century—furnish her with a source of stimulus, inspiration, and support. Equipped with this robust arsenal, Marie-Aude Murail took up the "trade," a word of which she is very fond.

The Precision of Language

Marie-Aude approaches literature for children and young people with a curious mixture of Sorbonne-style ambition and affinity for the humblest of her readers. It is in appropriating and working on this paradox in her modus operandi that she has ensured that her writing reflects her characters with the same kind of honesty with which she treats her readers. She says of her years at J'aime lire, a magazine for seven- to ten-year-olds where, in 1986, she published her first stories,

No one could stop me from using the past simple, or the gerund, or complicated words. My thesis on adapting traditional novels for young people and children provided me with a number of weapons, and I have put them to good use. For example, according to linguists, a text is readable if eighty percent of the words of which it is comprised are familiar to the reader. So I could use the remaining twenty percent to introduce words like "caravanserai" and "cuniculturalist"! My seven years at the Sorbonne paid off! But it's good, in the beginning, to meet people who have convictions, and all the better if you don't share those convictions. It forces you to argue your case.

She invented a new way of writing which was to impact on French literature for children and young people in the late twentieth century. Her prose calls to mind the incredible tone of Colette Vivier, the first French author to have taken the risk of writing, in the first person, from the point-of-view of a child hero (La Maison des petits bonheurs, 1939) and whose legacy was unfairly ignored. Marie-Aude's professional relationship with Geneviève Brisac—who published her at Gallimard (Mystère, 1987) then at L'École des loisirs (starting with Baby-sitter blues, 1989, the first book in the Émilien series)—was decisive. Aided and abetted by English translations (Anne Fine and Lois Lowry), it was a...

pdf

Share