Claire Etcherelli

Claire Etcherelli was born in Bordeaux on January 11, 1931. Her docker father, who was drafted, was then detained in a prison camp. She then went to live with her grandfather in the Basque Country. She became an orphan at the age of 11. Having become a ward of the Nation, and therefore a scholarship holder, she entered a chic Catholic boarding school in Bordeaux, where she said she was uncomfortable because of the difference in social classes. To stand out, she refuses to take her baccalaureate and abandons her studies. She married in 1951. She began writing at 19, without finding a favorable reception from publishers. Her first son was born in 1955. In 1957, she moved to Paris, where, out of necessity, she worked first as a controller on a production line at Citroën, then as a worker in another factory. She was hospitalized following health problems, survived thanks to a few households, then found a less grueling job in a travel agency in 1960, which allowed her to start writing again. She began writing “Élise ou la Vraie Vie”, which highlights assembly line work, conflicting human relationships and especially the racism particular to this period of the Algerian War. In 1959, she gave birth to her second son, and completed her novel in 1963, searching in vain for a publisher.

The following year, “Élise ou la Vraie Vie” was accepted by Maurice Nadeau, who published it with Denoël editions. The novel quickly received a favorable reception, with a first review from Claude Lanzmann in Elle in November 1967, followed the following week by a second from Simone de Beauvoir in Le Nouvel Observateur. This first novel won the Femina Prize in 1967, in a controversial climate both within the jury and in the far-right press. It was adapted for the cinema by Michel Drach in 1970. In 1968, she temporarily stopped working as an employee, and in 1971 completed her second novel, About Clémence, which deals with the heroism of men and violence against the women. The literary framework of the novel is significantly more complex than that of the previous one, with a triple level of narration. The book received a less favorable reception from critics. In 1973, she became editorial secretary of the magazine Les Temps Modernes. In 1978 she published “Un Arbre Voyageur”. Qualified by some, like his previous novels, as a Bildungsroman, the book is again a social critique. It describes the way in which a woman, Millie, realizes herself in the meager choices left to her in a constrained environment within the working class, by claiming her political rights, against the backdrop of the Algerian war.

She died on March 5, 2023 in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, at the age of 92. Her funeral was held in the strictest privacy on March 9 at the Pantin municipal cemetery where she rested next to her grandmother.