A lawyer for six years, Jean-Michel Guenassia lived from his pen by writing screenplays for television. He published a detective novel in 1986, Pour cent millions at Éditions Liana Levi [fr] (prix Michel-Lebrun), then had some theatre plays performed,[1] including Grand, beau, fort, avec des yeux noirs brûlants..., in 2008 at festival d'Avignon.
His publisher Albin Michel nonetheless presented Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes issued in 2009 as the first novel of a 59-year-old unknown.[2]
In 2012, he published a second novel, La Vie rêvée d'Ernesto G.
Works
Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes
Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes was published in 2009 by Éditions Albin Michel.[3]
In this almost 800-page book, Jean-Michel Guenassia had the ambition to write both the "novel of a generation" by carefully reconstructing the 1960s (the Cold War), the Algerian question, the appearance of rock and roll etc.) and the "melancholic chronicle of an adolescence". The title is justified by the decisive location of the novel, the back room of a Parisian bistro frequented by Joseph Kessel and Jean-Paul Sartre, where there are men who fled Communism of Eastern countries (Igor, former Russian doctor threatened by the Stalinist purges, Pavel former Czech diplomat ...) but who are all "incorrigible optimists".[4]
