This is the revelation of the start of the winter school year: Constantin Alexandrakis tells the story of a sexual assault of which he was the victim during childhood, in a text that is as literary as it is impactful. When speech is also freed from the side of men.
Hospitality to the demon, second story by Constantin Alexandrakis after Twice born (Verticales 2017) is one of the literary shocks of the beginning of the year 2025. A father, named “The Father” who shortly after the birth of his daughter is invaded by memories of a sexual assault that he suffered in his childhood and who fears reproducing it.
This is one of the first times, to our knowledge, that a man has spoken about the ravages of child crime and in doing so, tells his story. As in sad tiger by Neige Sinno who prefaces Hospitality to the demonthe fictionalized testimony, between humor and “gothic” nightmare, takes on a literary scope that elevates it. A tale of facts that welcomes all demons: those from the outside who threaten us and especially those from the inside who inhabit us and gnaw at us. The short chapters are titled, sometimes explicitly, “They are everywhere (among us)”, sometimes in a more enigmatic way, “Somebody’s somebody”, worrying, “We have the desert, we” or terrifying, “Remove the jelly from your spine”.
Interview with Constantin Alexandrakis
The meeting with Constantin Alexandrakis takes place at the bar of a plush hotel in the beautiful districts of Paris. A big guy of 46 years old, he came from the North where he lives between Lille and Arras, dressed warmly without much concern for any fashion and wearing a tired chapka. Cautious, he does not want to talk about his private life, and intimidated because it is his first interview. He says that he has not prepared anything, that he does not know, like his book, where the exchange will lead us. Off to the hike.
How did you get Neige Sinno to write the preface to your book?
Constantin Alexandrakis – Quite simply by sending him a message with my manuscript after the publication of sad tiger the reading of which carried me away in many ways. I had a feeling that against the same background of darkness and sadness, what’s more because we are roughly the same age, we could perhaps understand each other. I was trembling that she would refuse. That she accepted is an honor and a joy.
Neige Sinno writes that she was torn between two contradictory movements: the desire to flee yet another story about the terrible story of an abused child and the equally powerful desire to run straight to the end. Is it a kind of marathon for the reader?
Marathon? There is that. It is indeed a question of endurance of the story, its breathless side, which I hope is also oxygenating.
Your book begins with the description of the chaotic relationship between a young father and his little daughter, which is very funny…
I am not fully aware of what I am writing. I rush into the pile and then I don’t know how to stop. If the beginning of the book is funny it is unintentional, because this guy, the narrator, really suffers from being a father overwhelmed by raising his daughter. He screws up everything he does, between the accounting shared with his partner for diapers and the desire to strangle his little one when she screams too much. But I don’t make fun of him or laugh at his expense. The relative comedy of his situation undoubtedly comes from my own upbringing. I was raised to be constantly humorous, especially when it comes to things that aren’t funny at all. In this regard, the writer who made me want to write the most was David Foster Wallace with, among others, his Lobster Considerations which are both hopeful and hilarious.
“These are self-demons that haunt us and that we must fully welcome by trying to tame them, with fear in our stomach”
From page 28 you write about the narrator: ‘Let us point out that he suffered minor, intermittent sexual assaults, somewhere between the ages of 9 and 14.”It’s as if, reader, we’re twisting our ankle…
Yes, it’s an almost physical shock but cushioned by its conciseness, because I didn’t want to make a whole drama out of it, a whole meal of heroism through victimization. There is a phrase from Adorno that stays with me and serves as a guide when he writes about the Shoah: “The horror has happened to him, the horror has taken place, the horror will take place.”I struggle in the same kind of chaotic journey. In this sense, the end of the book, its outcome is an impasse, a failure. Lots of anger and impossible reconciliation on this issue of the sexual abuse of a child by an adult. How do we get out of the desire for revenge, how do we get out of resentment? Frankly, I don’t know anything about it. These are self-demons that haunt us and that we must fully welcome by trying to tame them, with fear in our stomachs. I find it hard to be progressive. We still have to fight even if the fight is endless
Did you hesitate before writing?
Of course. I even considered publishing under a pseudonym. I’m a straight white guy who writes about issues of sexual abuse, which is, sadly, dare I say, rather the domain of women. I was afraid of getting screwed over the theme of “what is he getting into?”.
You too can beat yourself: texts by Matzneff on pedophilia, another mind-blowing text by Michel Polac, or even your reading at the expense of the Lolita de Nabokov?
The discussion, the debate, necessarily includes its share of fighting, otherwise there is no point in discussing. I am not the first, fortunately, to ask questions about writings that are, to say the least, complacent. It seems to me that this beneficial critical work is continuing its course and increasing day by day. I come from a time, that of my parents, roughly the 1970s and 1980s, where the sexual revolution, in certain left-wing circles, was on the agenda. In the twists and turns of this necessary revolution, pedophilia could be presented as the last stage of transgression. I do not instruct the trial of the elders, I am neither judge nor prosecutor. But I have a lot of difficulty, to say the least since I experienced it, to admit that pedophilia, the one-sided sexual abuse of an adult on a child, would be a liberation supreme. There is still an impenetrable border for me between thoughts and actions. The file is heavy, very heavy. Sometimes it falls on my feet and it hurts.
“sad tiger did me good, I felt less alone. I admire his courage”
There are some great escapes in your story: for example a kind of Danish virus, fueled by quotes from sagas, Viking stories, even the typography sometimes invaded by Nordic characters. For what ?
This is what we call special characters which I wanted to appear a little crazy and disturbing like an emergence of strangeness with strange signs. My name says it: I am of Greek origin but I only learned the Greek language at the age of 33. It was the discovery of a radical, intriguing and sometimes frightening otherness to which I devoted my first book, the title seems explicit to me, Twice born. I wrote it the day I learned that my supposedly dead father was alive and well over there in Greece and didn’t know he had a son. Otherness is once again the underlying subject of Hospitality to the demon. How to deal with the other’s language, however monstrous it may be?
You also offer hospitality to characters or people in particular less demonic like Prince whose logo is reproduced several times.
I’m a Prince geek! He’s my absolute singer. Hence the title of a chapter: “Under the purple rain”. I found many other friends in my quagmire. Following the #MeToo movement and among women writers, Neige Sinno in the lead obviously. sad tiger did me good, I felt less alone. I admire his courage. De-demonize the devil, give him a human chance, while maintaining that he is evil. We get through it, we don’t get through it.
Hospitality to the demon (Verticals), 240 p., €20. In bookstores January 9.
