“I know that books helped me understand the world,” says writer Xabi Molia

We are in the 90s. Paul, his brother Simon and Idoya burn with the same passion for books and the same desire to one day be writers. A magnificent cry of love to literature, “Life or Almost” takes us following these three characters vibrant with youth and fervor. A very beautiful novel, which Xabi Molia will present this Friday at Ombres Blanches.

Truffaut said that cinema is life better. For you, literature is life or almost?

It's a bit like that. It is a formula that can be taken in several ways and which says what literature is, or at least what literature can be. She may have the ambition to tell the story of a life, but also never quite manage to capture everything. The formula is from Idoya, who has this ambition to tell “almost all of life”. There is also the idea of ​​being “a little off” from life: the words are never quite the ones we would like to write.

You are the same age as your protagonists: are they close to the young man you were?

I think I'm a bit of all three! I have in common with them this passion for books. It’s like an oblique autobiography. I knew and still know the passions of these three characters, their fears too. They all three have a quest for the absolute. Paul finds success early on with a book that isn't great, and he is haunted by the fear of being a bad father. Maurice Nadaud said that all bookstore success is linked to a misunderstanding. To publish is to accept imperfection. I sleep very poorly the days before sending my manuscript to my editor and saying, “Come on, let’s go, let’s publish!”

As a teenager, were you as fascinated and in love with books as they were?

It is sometimes said of someone who is immersed in books all the time that he is isolated from the world, that he moves away from it. For my part, I know that books have helped me understand the world. I come from a family where there were no books and from a town, Bayonne, where there weren't many bookstores.

“Thirty years ago, people predicted the death of the book; no one says that anymore today”

Literature for me was Lagarde and Michard, and I knew nothing about the world of publishing! Also, when I discovered Georges Perec and in particular “La vie mode d'emploi”, I understood that I was authorized to do everything possible.

We read these chapters on Idoya's “perfect writers” with one hand on Google, because they don't all exist…

Like Idoya, I first wanted to write a book on “perfect writers”, before integrating Paul and Simon – in fact I still have the desire to write this book. It’s true that I had a lot of fun with this, because I also included authors in these chapters who actually existed! Literature is very mysterious: in this era when we have so many requests, proposals, on television, on television, on the radio, the book is always in resistance. Thirty years ago, people predicted his death: no one says that anymore today. During confinement, people wanted to read, to find their bookstore. What makes us love books so much?

Is this novel your cry of love to literature, to writers, to books? The idea that as long as you enter a bookstore, everything is not ruined?

That's exactly it. Please note: we will no longer experience moments like, at the death of Zola or Anatole France, all of Paris followed their coffin of the deceased writer. The writer-prophet who enlightens the crowds is over. But the fact remains that we like to read, to get away from the noise that disturbs us when we open a book and choose insularity. The choice of silence.