meeting with the novelist Marcus Malte Thursday November 19, 2024

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On Thursday, November 19 at 7 p.m., Amélie Louat from the La Grande Évasion bookstore in La Gacilly welcomes the novelist Marcus Malte for a meeting around his latest book “Aux Margins du Palais”, published by Zulma last September. The work was part of the bookseller’s reading recommendations for the start of the literary season. Interview.

Actu : Is your novel “At the Margins of the Palace” a political tale?

Marcus Malta: It is rather a political fable, a farce, which I placed in an imaginary country, but which quite closely resembles ours. Which allows me to talk about certain serious and serious social subjects in a colorful and humorous tone.

For you, the situation in France is not encouraging?

: I was shocked and angry at the responses given by those in power to the social movements of recent years, the yellow vest crisis and the demonstrations against pension reform. I chose to talk about it while adopting a rather humorous tone, to better convey the point. I didn’t want to make it a political leaflet. Because it remains a novel, a fiction.

You are describing a sort of republican monarchy…

: It is rather an oligarchy, with a head of state elected despite 95% abstention. I describe the injustice that reigns and the anger that emerges from this ever-deepening divide between those who have and those who are possessed. Our democracy has a tendency to become a kind of oligarchy, even a plutocracy, with an elite which thinks above all of its interests, which only represents the most fortunate, and not the people.

Your book was written before the dissolution and the legislative elections. Would it have been different if you had known about these events?

: It would have been fundamentally because the news has largely caught up with the fiction! What I am saying is quite similar to what has happened in recent months. I also regret that politicians do not read my book because I give “advice”, formulas, or solutions for certain things. I explain, for example, how to form a government. Which could have been useful in recent months!

Are you working on another project?

: It’s still a little early to talk about it. I try to write different novels each time. I am publishing “Love Parade”, a collection of poetry published by Editions du Petit Écart, which brings together a few dozen poems that I have written over more than 20 years.

Is the novel an opportunity to express truths that cannot be said otherwise?

: Yes, it allows us to express quite profound things, which touch people, because we go into emotion. We don’t just explain things or show them. We try to make people feel them, to move them. It has to be gut-wrenching.

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