APA – Dakar (Senegal) – The book, which won the 33-year-old Senegalese writer the Prix Goncourt in 2021, has been translated into 38 languages.
It is a bestseller. “La plus Secrete Memoire des Hommes” is a worldwide success. Two years after the book was published by Philippe Rey, its author draws a satisfactory conclusion: “More than 570,000 copies have been sold in France (in large format, excluding “Poche”). Eighteen countries (out of the thirty-two that awarded foreign Goncourt prizes that year) chose it as the winner of their prize. In all the countries I’ve visited – around twenty over the last two years – it has been very well received overall, and has even appeared on some of the bestseller lists,” Mohamed Mbougar Sarr explained in detail on his Facebook account.
However, Mr. Sarr added: “this does not of course mean that it has escaped negative reviews, fierce criticism, reservations, rejections, perplexity and indifference in these countries: it is obvious that no book, wherever it is published, is unanimously acclaimed. And so much the better.”
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, one of the stars of the 2021 French literary season, has skillfully deciphered the marketing figures for his work. “I don’t mention these figures out of pride, arrogance or vanity. Although I’m not totally unaware of them, figures (particularly sales figures) have never been and never will be, for me, a criterion of the literary value of a work. What interests me here, rather, is the way in which sales figures (in France and abroad) refute the preconceived ideas we may have about the fate of certain books, which we classify before, after or without having read them; preconceived ideas that I myself may have harbored, based on obscure reasoning,” he added.
The author of “De Purs Hommes,” “Terre Ceinte” and “Silence du Chœur” knows this better than anyone. The happy fate of “La plus Secrète Memoire des Hommes” was far from self-evident. “I’m not sure that in August 2021, when the book had just come out, many people would have bet on those figures. We’re still talking about it with my publishers, and we remember how, at the very beginning, simply because of its form, and the conjectures about its reception, the novel might have aroused a kind of skepticism or dubious pout among certain professional readers (not all of them, fortunately: others immediately supported and defended it, and I would be eternally grateful to them for that),” the Senegalese novelist explained.
“They’d say things like: “Maybe it’s a bit too literary;” “Maybe it’s asking a bit too much of readers;” “It’s too intellectual a novel, it’s hard to put across;’ “It’s a bit too specific a book, you know, it’s African literature;” “Do people really want to read this, after the pandemic we’re just coming out of?” We heard it. We even believed it a little. At a certain point, I resigned myself to the fact that the book would only reach a sort of ‘elite,’ and that its reception would not go beyond the limits of a simple ‘community,’ whatever its nature,’ recalls Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, who trained at the Prytanee Militaire in Saint-Louis (North of Senegal).
Ultimately, “the adventure of ‘La plus secrete Memoire des Hommes’ is an opportunity for me to remember this: we must always follow the path of our own inner demands: demands for form, language, composition, work and freedom. This is the ambition we must have: to refuse the mediocrity that would consist of trying to adjust, while writing, or even before having written, our sentences to the pattern of a presumed trend, of a commercial vein. Going to the heart of literary work and the tribute it demands, first and foremost and always. The rest, no one ever knows for sure. And so much the better. That’s not the point, ” Mr. Sarr argued.
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