She was 68 years old. Ysabelle Lacamp died on June 26, in Paris. Carried away by a cancer against which she had been fighting for almost three years. It is a great novelist who is leaving, and one of the most beautiful smiles in the republic of letters. A smile that never left him, whatever the circumstances.
As an irony of fate, one of his last books was capped with the title Shadow among the shadows (Bruno Doucey editions), it evoked a luminous figure of poetry: Raymond Desnos. The approach with which she undertook this work is so similar to her. In May 1945, when the Terezin camp was liberated, Léo Radek was the last surviving child. The poet Robert Desnos, who has just completed a long walk, fails in this camp. His meeting with this child upsets him. It was this story that was close to her heart that she wanted to tell.
It was Les Editions Bruno Doucey, his latest publishing house, founded by Bruno Doucey and Murielle Szac, who announced the sad news. Of her, notably on the occasion of the publication of Shadow among the shadows, but also when George Sand appeared: non to prejudices (at Actes sud Jeunesse), Doucey said: “When Ysabelle Lacamp writes, it’s a telluric vibration that runs through it, transcends it and burns it. When this fever seizes her, she celebrates the verb, powerfully dreams of her characters, and takes us with them. This is why his meeting with Robert Desnos, the volcanic poet who made words and the dead dance until his last breath, is an evidence of life. »
Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, to a French father and a mother of Korean origin, the one who graduated in Chinese and Korean first had a fine career in cinema, she played with the most great French directors: Yves Boisset, Claude Berri, Francis Perrin, Jacques Deray, Tony Gatlif, Roger Hanin, his acting with finesse and his Eurasian beauty won over. She also dabbled in singing.
In literature, it began with enormous best-sellers, a dozen titles at Lattès (Le Baiser du dragon), or at Albin Michel (La Fille du ciel, L’Éléphant bleu), its golden age was between the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 1990s. Afterwards, she wanted to write texts that were more like her, but which, unfortunately, sold less well than her great successes. One thinks of The Man Without a Gun (at Seuil, 2002) or Cloud Juggler (Flammarion, 2008). She was never bitter about this welcome, and invested herself in the organization of literary festivals where she put her energy at the service of the book. She was very happy to talk about Shadow Among the Shadows because it featured a great poet. Bruno Doucey, her editor, wrote: “In this Terezin camp [Desnos died in this concentration camp in Czechoslovakia] where she takes us, the emotion is always on edge with laughter. »
