June 2022

Carried away at the beginning of the year by a dazzling illness, the author Laurence Boissier leaves behind her a singular work that will have marked the literary creation of our country. Winner of the Swiss literature prize, the Pittard de l’Andelyn prize and the readers’ prize from the city of Lausanne, she was also part of the Bern ist überall collective, which brings together writers from all of Switzerland’s linguistic regions. They pay homage to him this evening with a musical reading of different texts, some created for the occasion, some from the pen of Laurence Boissier herself. Among the writers present are the Romands Noëlle Revaz, Daniel de Roulet and Antoine Jaccoud, who worked for many years with Laurence Boissier.

“What I remember from her is that look that was both mocking and gentle, that admission of vulnerability that ended up being a strength, he recalls. It was not someone who was in the ‘assurance or in certainty. She had a presence in the world that was smiling and full of doubts, which always left room for others.”

Together, they will have traveled the German-speaking regions – among others! – for these literary performances. Faced with a non-French-speaking audience, they formed a sort of itinerant French-speaking embassy: “this forced us to be even closer and more united, analyzes Antoine Jaccoud. Our texts had to have a kind of musicality, a kind of orality. We didn’t know if we were going to be understood or, failing to be understood, if we were going to charm.”

A unique literary work

Beyond her activity in the collective, Laurence Boissier bequeaths us a unique literary work, which the Maison Rousseau et Littérature in Geneva wants to celebrate. After short texts, she wrote the novel “Rentrée des classes” in 2017 which illustrates all the singularity of her writing, according to Sylviane Dupuis, specialist in French-speaking literature and member of the foundation board of the Maison Rousseau et Littérature: “she a look at reality that is really hers; a way of bringing, by small touches and by small fragments, offbeat relationships with reality, very moving, but without any sentimentality. There is a great elegance in Laurence Boissier, but in at the same time something quite sharp in the social observation of human behavior.”

An elegance that had already been noticed when Laurence Boissier was only a teenager. Then a professor at Calvin College, Sylviane Dupuis had been struck by this young girl who stood out from the crowd from all points of view, by her painful journey, her presence and her discretion: “she was already very taken by literature, with her big eyes , who were waiting for something.”

A literary café for French-speaking authors

As of today, the Maison Rousseau et Littérature is launching a new concept, the “Stammtisch”, a kind of literary café which will take place once a month. Swiss authors will be able to meet there and spontaneously discuss their writing practice and current events, far from the institutions. A living space, looking to the future, that Laurence Boissier would have liked to see exist.

Charlotte Frossard

_{The tribute evening takes place on Wednesday June 1 at the Maison Rousseau et Littérature in Geneva, from 5 p.m. for the Stammtisch and from 6.30 p.m. for the musical reading of the collective Bern ist überall. The collective will also be at the Tounô festival in St-Luc on August 11, 2022.}