René-Victor Pilhes

René Victor Pilhes (1 July 1934 – 6 February 2021) was a French writer and publicist.

Pilhes began working as an advertising executive at Air France then at Publicis as Creative Director and Executive Board Member, before devoting himself entirely to literature where he views society as a moralist. He was also a director of TF1. He was married on 19 December 1959 to Nicole Ingrand, with whom he has three children: Nathalie, Laurent, Maria. His best known work is The Curse.

René Jean Laurent Pilhes (pronounced "Pills") came from old families of the Ariège. His great-uncle Victor Pilhes was a deputy in the Second Republic, and he has added that name to his own since his first novel. It is in this region that he grew up, at Seix; mountains and villages of Ariège punctuate many of his novels. An illegitimate child, he was raised by his maternal grandmother. Illegitimacy is also the subject of his first novel, Rhubarb. He attended college at Saint-Girons, high school in Toulouse and then at Lycée Buffon in Paris, achieving a bachelor's degree. In June 1955 he was sent to Algeria where after his classes he became a midshipman and lieutenant. He stayed there until September 1957 and left marked by the experience.

Debut novelist: author publicity

On his return from Algeria, he began working for Air France and three-eight as a commercial agent and politically committed. He campaigned for the CGT, Mendes-France supports and adheres to the PSU. With Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, he founded the Alumni Association of Algeria.

He married, and his career evolved: in the early 1960s was still a copywriter at Air France, then at Dorland and Gray before becoming a copywriter at Publicis. He kept his distance from politics and increasingly felt his need to write, especially after the death of his maternal grandmother. His first novel, Rhubarb, appeared in 1965 and was awarded the Prix Médicis. Originally titled The Bastard, his narrator, Urban Gorenfan / Aubain Minville, relates the quest for identity of a young man not recognized by his father, who seeks to know how the child would have been if he had been legitimate. The facts are invented even though the context of history could be likened to an autobiography, Pilhes transforms it into a baroque novel with extraordinary adventures. "Take the high ground, do not fear what dictates the imagination, take care of the balance between reality and fiction, these are my constant concerns as a novelist."

In 1969, he published his second novel, The Loum, the climbing of whose phallic peak haunts the author's later writings. In this audacious novel with its salacious passages, His Excellency the Lord began climbing, with his old mother, this huge rocky spur that points to the sky in a singular struggle. This book is also presented as a psychoanalytic epic. René Victor Pilhes says of it: "The Loum is the story of a terrible battle between mother and son. [...] Is: I will, once and for all, demonstrate to you that I am much more powerful than my father and all the men you admired in your life." The book has been the subject of a public lecture in Geneva and is included in the anthology of erotic literature by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. ...

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