I had made five versions-my laborious side-the gradual discovery of a book being made, which short-circuits the idea that we had, which decides for you, which takes you where you did not think of going.
This is where the editor comes in, standing on the brakes, arms in the cross, four years already I had to stop, she was worried, it will kill you this thing.
I was dumped I was written by my novel.
More.
Another effort, a few months-well, my children grew up-I scratched in the side, roasted the pure human, what we normally silenced: I delivered the animal-boule and its 500 black and dense pages to the editor, delighted that I did not listen to it.
We were there.
More.
Perhaps it was necessary-the general management leaves his office-before publishing this one, which is very good that is not the question, a sweeter book, a more solar, something that does not end up nailing you on the Table des Dingues: he writes follies, darkness, what fatigue.
I slept two days and then I agreed that management was right.
I had written a text during a residence at Villa Marguerite Yourcenar (Gracq has a house, Yourcenar, a villa, that’s how it is).
I did it like Dubois, eight pages a day – someone has news from Dubois – over a month to ward off the anxiety of sitting against a sublime park, ten hours a day, with the sole mission to produce something.
Come on, create brothel, what are you doing?
I like to write full life, stuck between Pythagoras and a zoom; The residences are not for me.
I reread this text, imperfect but the essential was there.
I resumed it, quickly and fluid. The antithesis of the other slow and sticky, sticky and lead.
And here is the Factory of Timidities, a novel built on reality, on forgotten, digested and spitled experience.
Fiction as a real that has succeeded.
It was good, reinventing, organizing, betraying and being faithful only to sensation. Than justly.
The story of a 17 -year -old kid who discovers work, love, writing.
Who uses an awkward and upset love to write.
Who is looking for its place in the group, a story in 5 summers (better than Costa and Mathieu) made up of more than memories.
Saint-Jean-de-Monts, summers, plagist seller, solar amber, cheap beer, shorts and cries on the embankment, soft tar, concrete everywhere, the sea at the end, the sand and the football games.
Anne, the sadistic lover who keeps him at a distance, the only one who counts, the momentum she asks, the others who are there, that he kisses but nothing helps.
There is bound to be dark in these timidities,
we do not do it again,
sweetness too,
We evolve.
Timidities are these spaces of a few centimeters that some trees leave between them.
They don’t touch each other.
Like Anne and the narrator, a reconstructed version of me at the age of my daughter – they pushed,
Yes, children, as we raise our heads.
This is what I had in these 280 pages:
A touch of childhood and adolescences.
A part of combat: finding your place and sweets.
The fire that lacked in the sad and black book that I wrote for the sixth time.
Armed with these new embers, I reopened this heavy manuscript like a calf shoulder, I put my pen flat, to both the seventh version.
To both of us, Rigaut Jacques.
Christophe Perruchas
Christophe Perruchas was born in 1972 in Nantes. Creation director, he worked in some major Parisian advertising agencies. He also opened grocery stores and a restaurant with three friends. He is also dad and allergic to plane trees.
After a first novel published in 2020, Seven gingresfinalist of the Prix de Flore, appeared in 2021 Come backnumber 1 of the list of explorers of the literary school year of the Orange Foundation.
Photo credits: Rouergue Edition
By guest author
Contact : [email protected]
