Background
Patrick was born on June 1, 1947, in Villers-sur-mer, Normandy, France. He spent his childhood in Villerville, a small town east of Deauville. He is the son of Jacques and Suzanne (Laquerre) Grainville.
André Maurois lycee, Deauville, France
Patrick attended the André Maurois lycee in Deauville.
Sorbonne University, Paris, France
Patrick studied at Sorbonne University.
Patrick Grainville
Patrick Grainville
Patrick Grainville
Patrick Grainville
Patrick Grainville
Patrick Grainville
Patrick Grainville
Patrick was born on June 1, 1947, in Villers-sur-mer, Normandy, France. He spent his childhood in Villerville, a small town east of Deauville. He is the son of Jacques and Suzanne (Laquerre) Grainville.
Patrick attended the André Maurois lycee in Deauville, then Malherbe in Caen, before winning admission to his higher education at the Lycée Henri-IV and to the Sorbonne where he prepared for his civil service competitive examination.
At the age of 19 years, Grainville wrote his first manuscript, then at age 25, he published his first novel The Fleece.
Grainville’s rich prose is the lens through which he has explored, in his fifteen novels, such weighty concerns as the interrelationship of the civilized with the primordial, played out sometimes in explorations of European/Third World relations, and sometimes in very simple contrasts such as light with dark or winter with summer. The role of art and the responsibility of the artist is another theme found repeatedly in Grainville’s novels, in the guise of visual arts or the relationship between words and the physical world.
His work Les flamboyant has as its setting an outrageously verdant country in Africa, Yali, whose mad king, Tokor, makes the real-life tyrant Idi Amin “seem dull” according to McCarthy. In his Times Literary Supplement review of Patrick Grainville’s novel Les flamboyants, Patrick McCarthy remarks on how Grainville uses the French language “with an exuberance which is exceptional among contemporary writers.”
The primordial, for Grainville, connotes mystery, darkness, a place of magic that can offer immortality. The blind narrator of La Diane rousse (1978) wanders the countryside and forests near the Seine, searching for his lost (likely dead) lover, Helianthe. He finally builds a symbolic tomb to keep her spirit near, filling it with her personal items as well as animals he sculpts to represent, as Kenneth I. Perry says in French Review, “the multiple savage and totemistic experiences of their hedonistic, now sacred, past.” In recreating the relationship through a series of rituals, the narrator “triumphs,” according to Perry, “in his blind quest to transform his dark night into an illuminated vision, a million visions, of Helianthe, and to entomb them forever in this mausoleum-novel.”
Grainville returns to the theme of African-European relations in L'orgie, la neige in which the narrator tells of two times in his life: a winter in Normandy when he was fifteen, and his life thirty years later as a writer and academic in Paris. The novel examines “the relationship between words and the physical world conceived through images of blackness and whiteness,” suggests Susan Petit in French Review.
In 2018, Patrick Grainville was elected to the Académie française.
On March 8, 1971, Patrick married Francoise Lutgen.