The latest, “A Radiant Future” is in line with the previous ones: journalists flock to see it, they praise his writing which excels in all genres of the novel, here espionage, among others. And readers should follow.
Editions Calmann-Lévy are launching this January 21, 2025, the third part of the tetralogy “The Glorious Years”, which takes place in 1959. And on Wednesday, the first part, “Le Grand Monde”, appears in comic strip from Editions Rue de Sèvres, with Christian De Metter in the drawing.
It was supposed to be a trilogy. Ultimately, it will be four Books: too many ideas, too many events in the Pelletier family saga, which keep coming to mind for their creator.
“I work all the time. I am on my tractor, a small agricultural tractor, and then I realize that it continues to happen in my head,” explains Pierre Lemaitre to AFP, visiting Paris to promote the novel.
A 73-year-old worker in Dordogne
Because Pierre Lemaitre chose the countryside, in Dordogne. He praised it to the regional daily Sud-Ouest in 2023: “magical” and “absolutely astonishing beauty”, he proclaimed.
His daily life as a writer there, at the age of 73, is very studious, as banal as possible.
” I am a worker. When I talk about my method, I don't make people dream much. I get to work in the morning… I stop at lunchtime, I start again in the afternoon…”, he explains. “Yes, it’s office hours.”
And to add with all possible seriousness: “I have incredible luck. It’s because I have a very bad first draft. Very bad. Oh yes, it's lucky, because I have to rewrite a lot. I have friends who have a very good first draft. They don't work. »
But it doesn't come without pleasure. “I really like going down to my office in my dressing gown with my coffee, and then saying to myself: well, François is in Prague. »
-It is in the capital of what was then called Czechoslovakia that part of the action in “A Bright Future” takes place. And the novelist, winner of the 2013 Goncourt Prize, knew almost nothing about this country.
A launch of 250,000 copies
“I lived in Seine-Saint-Denis, so I knew what communism was, but it had nothing to do, obviously, with that beyond the Iron Curtain,” he admits. .
There, it is no longer a question of letting thoughts wander while working in the fields, but of documenting oneself seriously. In an appendix entitled “Reconnaissance”, the author provides his sources, including cutting-edge works on the perception of the danger of nuclear war by public opinion.
The critic and writer Frédéric Beigbeder wrote of him: “He publishes 19th century novels in the 21st century that speak of the 20th century. He wants to be our Zola, our Balzac, our Dumas… Will he end up Roger Martin du Gard or Romain Rolland? »
Pierre Lemaitre did not take the comparison badly at all. He describes these last two authors, even little read these days, as “great old ones who are a bit cumbersome for me. »
The figures give him reason not to worry about his audience. “A Radiant Future” is being released in 250,000 copies. “Le Grand Monde” and “Le Silence et la Colère”, the previous episodes, have already sold 1.2 million copies, according to Calmann-Lévy.
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