The Interallié Prize for Tout, tout de suite (Fayard)

On 16 November, Morgan Sportès received the Interallié Prize for his novel Tout, tout de suite, published by Fayard.

Sportès previously received the Renaudot des Lycéens Prize in 2006 for Maos (Grasset).

Ye who enter here, abandon all hope. This book is an autopsy of our society, which has fallen prey to barbarism. In 2006, after months of twisted plots and aborted plans, a small suburban gang kidnaps a young man. The ransom demanded is out of proportion to his rather modest background: knowing that he is a Jew, his attackers have assumed that he is also rich. Locked away for 24 days and subjected to brutality, he is finally killed.

The perpetrators of this crime are jobless people, pizza deliverymen, high school kids and delinquents. Some of them have children, while others are still minors themselves, but the gang is united by one morbid obsession: everything, right now.

Piece by piece, Sportès puts together the puzzle of their madness. Without judgment, he reconstitutes their confusing unconscious dialogue and retraces their steps between fast-food joints, cyber cafés, the icy basement where they hold their hostage prisoner and the telephone booths from which they make their threats in a psychological war with the victim’s despairing family and the police officers who are frustrated by this case, which becomes highly “political.”

Intellectual and moral poverty in the midst of architectural and cultural poverty: there are no words to describe the appalling vacuum that society has allowed to develop and which threatens to engulf it entirely. No mere words can do it justice; a novel was necessary.

Some 20 years ago, Sportès wrote L’appât, a novel whose film adaptation by Bertrand Tavernier won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. A few months ago, filmmaker Richard Berry and producer Alain Goldman bought the rights to Tout, tout de suite.