As a young man, Patrick Deville confesses to having hesitated for a while between two paths to follow. That of literature and that of “cinema of reality”. No one will complain, when reading his books, that he chose to opt for the first. The latest aims to celebrate a place he knows more than well. The author of “Plague & Cholera” and “Samsara” was not born there. He was born opposite, at the Paimboeuf maternity ward, at the end of the 1950s, then grew up in the former Lazaret at Pointe de Mindin, which had become a psychiatric hospital. Saint-Nazaire, which is in question here, remains, he says, a “city where books and ships are stubbornly built”.
The last “pocket of German resistance” wiped off the map in February 1943 by Allied aerial bombardments, the district capital of the Loire-Atlantique department was fortunately rebuilt. Having undergone many changes since then and retaining its power of attraction intact.
“Seaports attract writers like a lighthouse attracts a storm,” says the prose writer who loves to travel, both in his library and on the rivers of the whole world.
Prints
We can come across a good number of writers in the erudite and embodied work of Patrick Deville. From Reinaldo Arenas to Jean Echenoz via Enrique Vila-Matas and Pierre Loti, Jean Rolin and Jules Verne. “Novel without fiction”, Deville’s invigorating “Saint-Nazaire” is full of anecdotes and impressions. It makes you want to go and explore the 150 hectares of the shipyard as quickly as possible. To go and browse around the “Building” (1) – where so many feathers from here and elsewhere settled down to work and breathe – or the La Marine bistro in the historic Petit-Maroc district. With his “Saint-Nazaire” in his pocket, a copy of “Ultramarine” by Malcolm Lowry or whatever you like.
(1) “Building”, the only tall building in the area.
“Saint-Nazaire”, by Patrick Deville, ed. Threshold, 156 p., €17.
Lifestyle
