Jacaranda - Prix Renaudot 2024
Gaël Faye

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Sur quatre générations, avec sa douceur unique, Gaël Faye nous raconte l’histoire terrible d’un pays qui s’essaie malgré tout au dialogue et au pardon. Comme un arbre se dresse entre ténèbres et lumière, Jacaranda célèbre l’humanité, paradoxale, aimante, vivante.

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Winner of the Prix Renaudot 2024

Quels secrets cache l’ombre du jacaranda, l’arbre fétiche de Stella ? Il faudra à son ami Milan des années pour le découvrir. Des années pour percer les silences du Rwanda, dévasté après le génocide des Tutsi. En rendant leur parole aux disparus, les jeunes gens échapperont à la solitude. Et trouveront la paix près des rivages magnifiques du lac Kivu.

288 pages; Paperback; Grasset;

Published August 2024

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4.0

Moving Novelization of Rwandan Genocide and Reconciliation Process

In case I have gotten the stars wrong, I mean this to be a four-star review. This is a moving novel that centers around five different narratives of the genocidal pogroms in Rwanda against people identified as "Tutsi," in the early 1970s and again in 1994. In addition to using those narratives to drive home the experience of different generations of those targeted, the book also addresses the process of reconciliation over the past 30 years, both on a formal, legal plane and in the hearts and minds of the people. While the genocide narratives are brutal and horrifying -- appropriately so -- the narrative treatment of reconciliation issues is subtle and complex -- also appropriately so. Almost everything in Jacaranda is mediated through the point of view of its central character, who, like the author, is a millennial child of a white French father and a Rwandan mother, and who, unlike the author, was born and raised entirely in France with little or no consciousness of his connection to Rwanda. This choice facilitates some of the novel's pedagogical program -- as he learns about Rwanda and its history, so does the reader. But it imposes a sullen, clueless teen on the reader for the first third of the book or so, and that makes its early chapters slow going. The character deepens over time, but never actually becomes very sympathetic. His alienation and ignorance provides an implicit sixth narrative of coming to terms with the genocide of someone who is entirely unaware until middle age of how his life had been shaped by it. For non-native French readers (like me), Jacaranda is reasonably short and its grammar and vocabulary are not over-elaborate. It is not hard to read, at least once it gets going. I would have recommended it with enthusiasm to my daughter when she was in high school and could read in French. The narratives are tough to take, brutal and explicit, but not at all pornographic. This is Marcel Ophuls, not Quentin Tarantino.

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Reviewed by: John Schapiro from Philadelphia on 11/19/2024