Revelation literary of the season, the Franco-Rwanda Gaël Faye has been crowned the 29 e Goncourt des lycéens ” for “Small Countries” (Grasset), novel inspired by his childhood telling the daily careless of a boy of ten years in Burundi upset by the rise of the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis. The jury praised “the fluidity, the sensitivity of the words “but also” the themes, including the war in Rwanda, the discovery of identity and the evolution in adult life “. “Small Country” has been elected on the first ballot with nine votes in front of the novel “Continue” by Laurent Mauvignier (Midnight). Already the winner of the prix du roman Fnac, Gaël Faye receives, at 34 years of age, his first prestigious award. The first set of the novel immerses us in a happy time in Burundi. It follows Gabriel to the four hundred blows with his merry band of buddies. However, there are cracks in paradise. In the city, under the seeming calm, a “lava venomous, the flow thick in the blood” shed in the massacres following independence between the Hutus and the Tutsis is ” again ready to rise to the surface “. The euphoria of the presidential election of 1993, the first democratic election in the history of burundian, succeeding the ominous noise of boots, and then the fateful coup that precipitated the country into the abyss. Six months later in neighbouring Rwanda, the genocide carries the tutsi minority.
” This is a fabulous book, by the words, each sentence is a quotation. The pace of the book is exceptional, one sees that it is a rapper. It seems like a song continued “, says Margaux Earl, 17, who is president of the jury composed of thirteen students representing 56 schools. Gaël Faye has left Bujumbura in 1995 in the paris region, leaving behind him a part of his family and his friends. He now lives in Ki gali.
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