Hervé Le Tellier, 67 years old, had his day of glory on November 30, 2020 during the presentation of the Goncourt prize for The Anomaly (Gallimard), immense success sold more than 1.4 million copies in large format and in paperback and translated throughout the world.
Four years after this triumph, as critical as it is popular, his new book, The Name on the Wall, is radically different. It is no longer a novel but a very personal and magnificent story which begins the day he discovered a name engraved on the plaster of the house he had bought in Drôme Provençale, in La Paillette – Montjoux, near Dieulefit. Written in capital letters, the name ANDRE CHAIX was also found on the Montjoux war memorial with his dates of birth and death, May 1924 – August 1944. André Chaix was a resistance fighter, a resistance fighter who died for his ideals at the age of 20 , two months and 30 days.
Meeting with Hervé Le Tellier
Hervé Le Tellier started from this chance, to try to revive André Chaix and his era with the courage that it took for men and women like him to fight the Nazis.
The writer reconstructed this short existence as closely as he could, helped by the numerous photos found and which he published in the book.
The story is not André Chaix’s novel, underlines Hervé Le Tellier, because it is just as much the sharing that the writer does with his readers of what he discovered and thought while writing this book. His investigation challenges him today: “I traveled in this era that I did not know, but who constituted me and shared with you what I learned while writing. ”
What were you doing at twenty?
The year 2024 is the centenary of the birth of André Chaix and 80 years have passed since his death, “but looking at the world as it is, I have no doubt that we must always talk about the Occupation, collaboration and fascism, racism and the rejection of the other until its destruction. ”
Hervé Le Tellier states straight away that he wanted “giving voice to the ideals for which André Chaix died and questioning our deep nature, our desire to belong to something greater, which leads to the best and the worst. ”
He sometimes puts himself on stage, wondering what he was doing when he was twenty years old, in 1977, the age of André Chaix’s death.
With modest, simple and splendid writing, he makes André Chaix present, alive, with his friends, his family. “A great winter sun lights up the hill, how beautiful nature is and how my heart breaks,” sang Leo Ferré in the Red Poster, to the glory of the resistance fighters who were shot.
gullNever giving in to the idea of the inferiority of others is the supreme fidelity to what makes us human.
In a few short chapters, Hervé Le Tellier tells us as much about the nameless cowardice of collaborators in France as about the courage of the resistance fighters.
Dieulefit
He does justice to Dieulefit which was during the war a refuge which saved so many Jews, resistance fighters, intellectuals, that no inhabitant of the village denounced to the Vichy police.
Hervé Le Tellier cannot hide “anger and rage” that he has kept within him since he discovered the film in high school Night and Fog by Alain Resnais. In 2024 again, he repeats; “we do not debate such ideas, we fight them. Because democracy is a conversation between civilized people, tolerance ends with the intolerable. ”
The Anomaly of Hervé Le Tellier
This short book is all the more poignant because it is a response to Hervé Le Tellier’s questioning who explains that he cannot “to think about death, my death, to tame it, to finally give meaning to a life that has none”. At the end of the story, he pays tribute to André Chaix whose story of his life allowed him “to explore this era where generosity and courage rubbed shoulders with selfishness and the abject as rarely. ”
André Chaix has become like a member of a family that he says he never had. With this story, he can now give meaning to his gaze each time he sees the name engraved on the plaster and “always smile with brotherhood”.
It also allows us to breathe new life into this wonderful word of fraternity so essential in the worrying fog of 2024.
⇒ The Name on the Wall | Story | Hervé Le Tellier | Gallimard, 165 pp. €19.80, digital €14
EXTRACT
“The Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years, it will be twelve. But these eleven years will be enough to shape terrible men and women. Nazism catalyzed in certain specimens of humanity their extraordinary aptitude for inhumanity. He constantly asks us the question of knowing what a man is, and what moves him.”
