« Oui, Tata is a personal book… But I don’t know if it is more personal than my three previous novels. In each of them, I put myself and the people I met. »
The author, who took on an international stature with Change the flower waterhis second novel published in 2018, asks: “Why such enthusiasm for my novels? A book like Change the flower water is now read in sixty countries while I speak of a cemetery guard… Through my novels, I undoubtedly provide answers to intimate questions about sorrows, happiness, memories which touch people…”
Read also: A visit to Gueugnon in the house of Valérie Perrin, the author of “Change the water of flowers”
“Readers talk to me about the characters as if they were loved ones”
More than three years after the release of Threethe writer knew she “highly anticipated. The book was already first in sales before being released because it had been pre-ordered…” Et Tata will not disappoint the novelist’s readers, as we find the ingredients that have forged her previous successes: a gripping story like a thriller, endearing, complex characters and stories of love or disenchantment that always find a way to get tangled.
“When my readers come to see me, for a book signing, they all talk to me about my characters as if they were not, but rather close, intimate, realizes the novelist. I was co-writer: my books are very cinematic, we see the images, a bit as if we were in a dark room. »
And to concede: “A novel like Tata, it’s also two and a half years of work” relentless. For the character of Colette, her heroine whose apprenticeship we follow in a shoe repair shop, “I spent a lot of time at Mokhtar, a shoemaker in rue des Abesses, in Paris. And I transposed it many years earlier, in Gueugnon…”
Read also: Deauville. For the 100th anniversary of Les Planches, Claude Lelouch recounts the genesis of “A Man and a Woman”
“Let the reader rejoice”
Gueugnon is this town in Saône-et-Loire where Valérie Perrin grew up, where all local life revolved around the football club in which her own father played, and around the factory “which is 300 years old and brings the heart of this region to life”.
In this setting, Colette loves in secret, helps in silence, records her voice on audio cassettes. In Gueugnon, Colette crosses paths with Blanche, a young circus artist whose grace makes her dream. In Gueugnon, again, Colette died twice, to the great dismay of her niece, Agnès.
“When I write, I think above all of the reader, confides Valérie Perrin. I want him to ask questions, to be jubilant. Let him cry. I am writing to the reader that I too am and who loves to be carried away by a novel…”
The author may add a series of signatures, but she already has an idea of the images she will use in her fifth work. No, the one who regularly resides near Deauville (Calvados), with her husband, the director Claude Lelouch, will not camp this next scenario on the Normandy coast.
“It will be about the sea but about the Mediterranean. There will be a lot of Marseille, cicadas, Marcel Pagnol, in this next novel…”
TataAlbin Michel, 640 pages, 24 €.
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