Sylvie Germain

In collaboration with the Book office of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York
As part of Francophonie Month

“One writes, certainly, in complete solitude and never for a larger audience — this would be disrespectful — but one doesn’t merely write for oneself either. One writes, in fact, for the other that is within each one of us. For all these words one has heard. For those who are dead and gone but whose faces come back during the extreme denseness of concentration.”

“When I write a novel, I never depart from a precise idea, not even from an outline. At the start of it, it’s a question of a mental image, one that is often enigmatic, and which imposes itself on me and becomes endowed little by little  with my thoughts, with my emotions.”

Interview / Télérama

The Speaker

After studying philosophy at the Sorbonne under Emmanuel Levinas, among others, Sylvie Germain began researching asceticism in Christian mysticism, the subject of her Master’s, and then the human face, the subject of her doctorate.

In 1981, she began working for the ministry of culture, heading up the audiovisual programs, and also began writing stories and novels. It was upon the advice of writer Roger Grenier, to whom she had sent a collection of her work, that she started writing her first novel, Le Livre des Nuits [Book of Nights],which was published in 1984 and received six literary prizes.

During her “Czech Period,” from 1986 to 1992, she lived in Prague, where she worked in various settings as a librarian and also as a philosophy professor at the French School.  Her novel Jours de colère [Days of Anger]won the Prix Femina in 1989.  Her return to Paris in 1992 was difficult for her and lasted only two years. She left Paris and went to live in La Rochelle, then in Pau, where she devoted herself entirely to writing novels and essays. In 1994, she published Immensité [Infinite Possibilities], which explored the suffering of male dissidents jailed during the Velvet Revolution but never released.

In 1999, Sylvie Germain penned an essay on the life of Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz in November 1943 who left behind a Journal and some edifying Letters. Sylvie Germain retraces the spiritual path of this exceptional woman.

A year later, Germain further demonstrated her ability to excel equally in different genres by publishing travel writings, a book on spirituality and a photo essay. Beyond this apparent diversity of genres, Sylvie Germain creates a world of great coherence, where she mingles the spiritual and the marvelous. The Exodus, the memories of Shoah, the suffering of man and the silence of God continue again and again to inspire her words which, in her eyes, are “glistening with rain, blood, mud and imbued with light.”

In 2002, she published Chanson des Mal-aimants with Gallimard. In 2005, her novel Magnus was published, and she received the Goncourt prize awarded by high school students, proving once again the erudition and talent of the author.

Her most recent novel, L’Inaperçu, which was published in 2008 by Albin Michel,“provides passage after passage of writing that creates sparks, with strange scenes and parables dominated especially by deadly and magnificent portraits of women.”

The Lecture

In a setting that Sylvie Germain hopes to keep informal, the author will evoke the writing process and her sources of inspiration, which tend to be religious, philosophical, and artistic. She’ll read from her major works, including Le Livre des Nuits, Jours de colère, Magnus, and L’Inaperçu, among others. The idea of the coherence of the author’s literary world, the world created in her fiction and one which shines through its diversity of genres, will run throughout this talk.

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