Whether her characters are silly or wise, vulnerable or ferocious, Yasmina Reza has never wanted anything other than to do them justice. Or rather to be fair to them. The powerful laughter she provokes in us, in the theater as in her books, is not a poisonous spasm. It is a surge of lucidity, a moment of truth: this man sitting naked on the edge of the bed, this woman who takes little dance steps in the middle of the living room suddenly appear to us not in their ridiculous posture, but in our universal vulnerability. A cartographer of human solitude, Yasmina Reza was bound to, one day or another, go and exercise the acuity of her gaze in the courts. Accounts of some factsher new book (Flammarion, 240 pages, 20 euros, digital 15 euros), thus mixes personal memories with reports of ordinary or sensational trials. She has managed to find her usual characters there, “beyond all hope”, and with them the great subject of his work: bodies assailed by the wear and tear of time, life prey to desolation.
Read the review by Régis Jauffret | Article reserved for our subscribers “Story of Certain Facts” by Yasmina Reza: like a tale for adults
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In a way, your books have always been about putting human existence and its insignificance on trial. But this is the first time you have tried your hand at the form of trial reports. Why?
I have been going to trials for a good fifteen years now. At first, I went without taking notes. Out of curiosity. Many writers are interested in news items, in what we believe to be different from ourselves. But trials are like a small box that contains the universal. What we believe to be different is not. No being can be reduced to a single moment, a single action. The whole of society is summoned to court. Apart from those primarily concerned, there is family, friends, lawyers, government personnel, witnesses… Basically, it is the familiar world. I ended up seeing there, at very different levels, what I have always questioned, the imperfection of life. Trials have become a subject in their own right, and not, as I initially believed, an ancillary source of inspiration. I have never written about anything else, the difficulty for man to inhabit the world.
“The one we think is different is not,” you say… In a striking chapter, you tell how, with other high school girls, you once harassed a teacher. In this book where violence and crimes are discussed, is this a way of wrapping up your own cruelty?
I interweave very different scales in Accounts of some factswhether it is by relating crimes, pains, joys, and I place myself in the middle of others. I summon my friends, my own existence. I do not believe that life is compartmentalized. It is messy, and goes from the very banal to the exceptional in no time. It is a common bath, with more or less opportunities, good luck. I could not extract myself from it. The story of Mme Kling, who was my history and geography teacher, still haunts me. This woman, who was kind and gentle, disappeared. She never gave another class. I see this story as a form of silent crime.
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