The exercise is interesting, intriguing, sometimes even surprising for the reader, as it must have been for those who took part in it. Eight writers met eight oncology researchers during sixty-minute one-on-one meetings which they then recount in a free literary form. An exercise orchestrated by the ARC Foundation for Cancer Research, to which the copyright of what became a book will be donated. The researchers were selected from among the winners of the Léopold Griffuel prizes, awarded each year by the foundation for major advances in cancerology.
Rather than painting portraits, the authors talk about what confronting these scientists and the disease they are exploring to better combat it awakens in them. Should we be surprised that the question of death and the possibility of an afterlife came up in these interviews? Timed, with the irruption of a Ringmaster at the end of the allotted time, the conversations sometimes seem to have been interrupted even before the embarrassment linked to any meeting dissipates. It’s less brutal than the prison guard putting an end to the visiting room, but the result is the same…
Olivier Delattre, from the Institut Curie, knows troubled silences and uses them to say and listen beyond words, he who sometimes has to announce the unspeakable to parents. To Joy Sorman, author of Witness (Flammarion, 288 pages, 21 euros), which also watches for the precision of the verb, the pediatrician explains that it is “to arrive at understanding what the other has understood, what he wishes to understand, what he does not wish to hear for the moment”.
The unexpected that emerges
Michael Taylor surprised his interlocutor, Denis Brogniart, the presenter of “Koh-Lanta” who was not known to be a novelist (An almost exemplary soldierFlammarion, 2021), by his optimism in the face of this protean disease. “We are smarter than cancer, that’s why the time of this disease will soon be behind us”says the Franco-Canadian researcher who nevertheless admits to sometimes crying on the way back to his home in Toronto.

But the characteristic of an impromptu meeting is the unexpectedness that springs from it. Like this exchange on literature and Proust between the Franco-Argentinian Sebastian Amigorena, specialist in immune recognition, and Véronique de Bure (A cherry tomato clafoutis, Flammarion, 2017). Like when the researcher says he takes as much pleasure in writing as the writer. This transmission of complex notions (the results of a laboratory experiment for one, feelings for another) to which the richness of words offers infinite possibilities.
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