Meeting with Rachel Kushner who is writing a fascinating novel about our times this January: The Lake of Creation. When a Californian novelist immerses herself in the movements of the French ultra-left, what emerges is a gripping spy novel, and a reflection on our origins.
Rachel Kushner has this rare quality specific to great writers: the art of evasion. In perpetual motion, it moves as soon as we think we grasp it. We knew it at least since Flamethrowers, her second novel, which was for many of us the discovery of an extraordinary novelist: a biker and passionate about Europe, as alert on the Italian intellectual life of the 70s as on contemporary America, she described an Italy of years of lead and the apprenticeship of an artist in search of radicality. Oscillating between an assumed intellectualism, formal research and a narrative sense, Kushner seemed much closer to the reflective European novel than to the contemporary American novel. His fourth novel, The lake of creation turns out to be a virtuoso work: political novel, spy novel, philosophical novel? It is no coincidence that this year he was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in the United States, as he touches with finesse on contemporary issues. Impossible to place this book which immerses us in an ultra-left France, within a reclusive community in the southwest which resembles Julien Coupat’s Tarnac group. Let us remember, in 2007, the Tarnac legal case left its mark. The lake of creation, as fictional as it is, takes us back to this region close to Périgord, and among activists accused not as at the time of possible sabotage on the SNCF lines, but mobilized on a subject closer to us, the mega basins . How to act regarding water exploitation? This simple question opens up broader perspectives, philosophical, moral, but also poetic, because the water retained in the soils and caves of this rural France allows Kushner to challenge us on the link of the contemporary individual to his origins. All this thanks to a character she invents, Bruno Lacombe. Close to Debord in 68, this post-situ who left for the countryside to escape urban capitalism, chose, after an intimate drama, to settle in a cave. From there, he only communicated with the community he founded through long emails, initiating a reflection on the origins of man, the battle of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and the possibility of building a viable community. These texts punctuate the plot of the novel, giving it depth. Because the action is narrated by Sadie, an American spy, who comes there to push this uneventful community to commit an attack. So here we are, surrounded between the formidable voice of the spy infiltrated with this idealistic youth, and that of Bruno. This novel asserts a play between suspense form and deployment of thought, which is reminiscent of certain novels by Don DeLillo, such as the recent Zero K.Kushner, close to DeLillo, knows how to move forward with mystery and slowness to lead the reader to a salutary disorientation: so at the end of the novel, who can say where Rachel Kushner is? In the cave with Bruno, seeking to resurrect the Neanderthal era? With Sadie, in existential solitude? Or within the community, among the idealists who try to propose a way of existence outside of capitalism? Through this novel, the novelist offers us a romantic lesson, but also a picture of our own moral disorientation.
Interview to be found in issue No. 184, available in digital version and in paper version
The lake of creationRachel Kushner, translated from English (United States) by Emmanuelle and Philippe Aronson, Stock (La Cosmopolite), 472 p., €23.90
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