Weekly Books: The continuation of Big World a 2022 a you Silence and Anger in 2023, finally appears. We were getting impatient, why this two-year hiatus?
Pierre Lemaitre: Because it takes me almost 18 months to write a book and I can't publish one a year. The most judicious thing was to separate the tetralogy into two diptychs. So we have two books in two years, a two-year gap, and two books in two years again. There were several possible choices, but compared to booksellers, this is what seemed best to me. Besides, I'm not unhappy about having sparked a little desire!
Why did you choose precisely 1958 and 1959 for this third part?
This is extremely prosaic. In a saga, we are prisoner of the temporality of the characters. So we have to put the cursor where we need it in relation to the adventure we want to tell. For me, it had to be around this period, I looked at what had happened in history, I found Khrushchev, de-Stalinization, it was good. And then there is also the fact that this tetralogy was originally a trilogy.
“At the start I had an idea of ruthless formal elegance: I was going to form a triangle of three trilogies of thirty years”
Why did you add a volume?
Initially I had an idea of ruthless formal elegance: I was going to form a triangle of three trilogies spanning thirty years. That of the interwar period, known as “The Children of Disaster”, which began with Goodbye Up therewhich received the Goncourt prize, then that of the Trente Glorieuses, in progress, and finally, to come, the 30 years of crisis. Formally it was magnificent. Except that once finished The Big WorldI realized that I had a huge problem: my characters were taking ten years between each volume. I no longer recognized them myself, so imagine the reader… I carried out a double maneuver: increasing the number of books while shortening their duration. Instead of covering 1948-1975, the tetralogy opens in 1948 and ends in 1963. Thus, only four or five years pass between each book.
What did you want to highlight about this period?
First of all, a certain resonance with our times. When Putin brandishes the nuclear threat, from Ukraine, it is perfectly synchronous with the way in which Khrushchev threatened us with the atomic bomb. Then, historians agree that the century begins at the end of World War I and ends in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. What changes in 1989 is that the world which was oriented between East and West will become oriented North-South. This is the great reversal of the 90s. The end of communism means that the tectonic plates of geopolitics will shift. So to retrace my little history of the 20the century, I had to stage, somewhere, this axis, which will be reversed at the very end of the saga.
“I made a historical novel with the tools of crime fiction”
You are referring to John Le Carré, but this book has nothing to do with a spy novel?
-I am indeed a big fan of Le Carré, but it is often too complicated for me. SO A bright future is anything but a spy novel. It's about Intelligence, but I reduced the plot to a very simple question: there are three suspects, which one is the culprit? I whittled it down to the bone. The real subject is the survival of my character François, the Pelletier son. He is a journalist, he finds himself sent to Prague, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, for a mission that is beyond him. And we know it’s going to go wrong! In the thriller, and this is true for the spy novel, everything is based on a system of suspense and false leads. I did here what I've been doing ever since Goodbye up there : a historical novel with the tools of the thriller.
The men lead the action, but the women largely dominate your novel. Which do you prefer?
Difficult to choose. I love Colette, a child traumatized by sexual assault, I love the tragedy of Karla, who confesses her life crappy“in the name of a man she cannot remember”, but also the way in which Mine, François' hearing-impaired wife, manages to overcome her marital crisis. She has no doubts, and even when she does, she doesn't want to have them; and that is a true proof of love.
What about Geneviève, poor Jean's perverse wife?
Geneviève allows us to fantasmatically relieve ourselves of many things that we would be capable of doing. His nastiness is liberating for readers. But if I can be happy with one thing, it's that I managed to make a man who indulges in horrors moving. If we add up Jean's victims, he's a serial killer! Whereas the one you say is perverse has not killed anyone, but appears to us as the absolute monster.
It’s because we pity Jean, unable to escape his family who continue to call him “Bouboule”…
Bouboule was made by his father, and this model will impose itself on him. My hypothesis is that the family is the first institution that drives you crazy. Afterwards, it's school, then business or marriage, depending on the case. The family is the cradle of all our neuroses. There is no escaping it.
A bright future by Pierre Lemaitre
Calmann-Lévy, 590 pages, 23.90 euros
EAN 9782702183625
Circulation: 250,000 copies
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