«Toi darling, you have the face of a writer. » We remember this address which remained famous from Françoise Verny to Yann Queffélec. And seeing through the prism of a computer screen that of Dimitri Kantcheloff, full beard, lumberjack shirt, soft voice, a dog and a child not far away, as well as the sea and the forest, we begin to think that the same could be said of him. The rest, the conversation, will follow suit.
Kantcheloff, in his affable forties, publishes his third novel, the second with Finitude after a trial run with Les Avrils. Of his current publisher, he says: “I found my home, that is to say a place where people think about literature in the same way as I do. » Everyone stay calm is the lively story, lively and under the willingly claimed influence of Manchette, of the romantic and criminal encounter in Lyon, in 1979, of Victor Bromier, ex-VRP rather inclined to the bottle, and of Corine, punkette and leftist pasionaria who is not afraid either in his eyes or elsewhere… Between them, everything will be very tragic and nothing will be serious. We abandon ourselves with delight to what the editor nicely defines as a “Bonnie & Clyde under Giscard”.
It was his passion for the 1970s, which he did not know (he was born in 1981), which gave birth to this book. “Yes, it comes first of all from my taste for French cinema of those years, that of Melville, Corneau, Séria, Boisset, Blier, trying to introduce something a little modern . […] I also wanted to try my hand at writing a love story for the first time. » He admits to having been bathed in this nostalgia from an early age (“maybe a little corny…”) from the seventies. His adolescence was rocked by the music of Pink Floyd and Led Zep more than any contemporary group. Son of a Lebanese father who arrived in France in the 1950s, Dimitri spent the first nineteen years of his life in Lyon where he was a Catholic student. School is hardly a haven for him, unlike rock. “The guitar and the beers, that’s all I wanted. » After leaving the capital of Gaul, he perfected his humanities in the subject in London, before enrolling in a pub school in Paris. He readily admits to having partied a lot in the years that followed and to having gotten a little lost. Which led him, at the age of 33, to leave everything again and settle in La Croix-Valmer, not far from Saint-Tropez.
This is where writing comes to find him, just like reading, discovered in its most contemporary occurrences late in life. Carrère, Manchette, Simenon, and above all Echenoz, will be his models. All those like him who swear by efficiency in literature. If he recognizes “love having written much more than writing”Dimitri does not intend to stop there, teeming with projects (a graphic novel, non-fiction…). On the condition, however, that the rehearsal studio he has just installed at his home does not distract this familiar spinner from the right path of literature…
Dimitri Kantcheloff
Everyone stay calm
Finitude
Edition: 4,000 copies.
Price: €18; 192 pp.
ISBN: 9782363392213
