Reading

Maylis de Kerangal

Surf day

15.11.2024

Artist
Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal offers a special reading at the Villa Medici to mark the publication of her latest novel, Jour de ressac, published by Verticales.

“Finally, does our man look familiar? As we approached Gonfreville-l’Orcher, the refinery was emerging from the ground, indecipherable and nebulous, like Gotham City, another city behind the city, I rolled down my window and took a long, deep breath, my nose turned towards the distillation towers, towards this demented Meccano. The strange stench wafted into the car, a mixture of hydrocarbons, salt and powder. He told me to close the door, and then asked me again, why had I finally asked to see the body? You must have thought about it, something must have come back to you. Yes, I had thought about it. What was he thinking? I’d done practically nothing but think about it since this morning, but thinking about it had ended up taking the shape of a city, a first love, the shape of a container ship.” Maylis de Kerangal, Jour de ressac, ed.Verticales, 2024.

This reading follows the day-long international colloquium “Ecrivain.e.s – sociologues“ organized by Sapienza Università di Roma and held at Villa Medici on Friday November 15.

Practical information

Friday, November 15
6:30 pm
Grand salon de la Villa Médicis Free: reservation required

Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of some fifteen novels and short stories, mostly published by Éditions Verticales/Gallimard and translated into many languages. These include Corniche Kennedy (2008), Naissance d’un pont (2010), a fictional account of a major construction site in an imaginary city, and Tangente vers l’Est (2012), a fictional account of a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway. In 2014, Réparer les vivants, a novel about a heart transplant, won a dozen literary prizes, including the Prix des Étudiants France-Culture Télérama and the Grand Prix RTL-Lire, and was adapted for film and theater. Published the same year, À ce stade de la nuit, a nocturne about shipwrecks in the Mediterranean received the Prix Boccace in 2016. In 2018, she published Un monde à portée de...