
Le Prix
Antoinette Rychner
A man goes home to his wife and child. In the mailbox, he finds the dreaded letter that sets off an explosion in his head that makes him go deaf: yet again, he has NOT won The Prize! The Sculpture Prize that he has been working towards unceasingly, the one that gives meaning to his life... The goal that makes of the rest of his life a permanent obstacle course, opposing its trivial necessities against the artist’s loftier ambitions...
Antoinette Rychner draws us deep into the anguished mind of a sculptor who makes 'Ropf' – strange half-natural, half-crafted creatures that pop out of his navel. Our hero is torn between his quest for the absolute and the perpetual pitfalls posed by Nipper, his son, and S, his wife – their demands for love and attention are unbearable to an artist who needs solitude to concentrate. So you can imagine how he feels about the upcoming birth of Renipper, which is going to disrupt everything and lead to a crisis...
In a totally original style, that reads like the tail end of an interior monologue tipping towards madness, the author invites us on a tragi-comic domestic saga in which reality is constantly demolishing the narrator’s ambitions. Under cover of comedy, it asks serious questions: where is the line between artistic creativity and pure egoism? What would we really do without our nearest and dearest, whose demands on our time can be annoying?
A literary UFO intertwining Topor-like cruelty, Kafka-esque black humor, and the tenderness of Savitzkaya... An oral style that makes the book is perfect for reading out loud; a stage adaptation seems likely, because the author is first and foremost a playwright and stage designer.