“Describing the world is already a form of commitment.” Meeting with Olivier Weber, co-president of the Biography festival in Nîmes

How did you receive the offer to be co-president of the Biography festival in Nîmes?

It’s a beautiful invitation. I’ve been here before. This year the main theme is adventure writers. I am delighted to share this with Jean-Christophe Rufin, whom I have known for a long time. It’s a great theme because it brings together lots of things, travel literature, poetry, the great reporting dear to Albert Londres or Romain Gary…

You are publishing a book dedicated to Gérard de Nerval. We imagine you more as a reader of Hemingway or Kessel…

In addition, in the same year, there is the Adventure Lovers Dictionary… These are two sides of the same author. Gérard de Nerval practiced poetry from within, romantic, intimate, interior and exterior, with the journey to the Orient

“I try to always have poetry with me”

For me, it’s really part of my life. As Nicolas Bouvier said, when you are a travel writer, you travel six months a year, the rest of the time, you stay locked up writing. Nerval has carried me since childhood. This allowed me to be able to leave with “the wandering elk” every time.

You say that poetry is your first experience of vertigo…

I am fascinated by poetry. She has a capacity to reinvent the world, as did Rimbaud, the clairvoyant poet who also advocated the “disruption of all the senses”. When I’m deep in the mountains, in Central Asia, in the Himalayas or in Afghanistan, I try to always have poetry with me.

And then there is the inventiveness of the language. What is reality? There is always an interpretation. Poetry pushes us into a corner.

We feel that you have tenderness for Nerval…

Much respect. He was very innovative, he inspired Rimbaud, Proust, the surrealists. It’s huge. He is a bit provocative, he walked a lobster in the gardens of the Palais Royal with a blue ribbon. And at the same time he is very sensitive, discreet, friendly. He had a very warm outlook on the people and the world around him. We see him when he goes to Lebanon or Ottoman Egypt. The portraits he makes are very current and very humanist. I like the dimension of human adventure in literature, the discovery of others, the exploration of the world.

Why do we write? To transmit. I thank those who put Nerval, Goethe, Cervantes, Jack London, Conrad into my hands. They were big brothers, traveling companions, family.

In Nerval’s time, the world was much less known. The Orient began in Vienna! Do you miss that time?

You have to live with the times. In Nerval’s time, we already knew the Orient, there were already stories. The romantics took the Grand Tour. The world is unknown when you are young. I invite them to discover the Silk Roads, to go to South America… What I regret is mass tourism. 94% of tourists visit 2% of the world. Let’s get off the beaten track!

In the preface to your dictionary, you say that you do not consider yourself an adventurer…

I am an adventure-loving writer. I also remain a big reporter. I’m coming back from the Caucasus and I’m going back to Ukraine, then I’ll go to Kyrgyzstan. I travel the world, with a lot of melancholy and then, there is literature. When I meet certain characters in the jungle in the Amazon, resistance fighters in Afghanistan, humanitarian workers in Africa, sailors in the Red Sea, I wonder if I am in a dream or in reality. I want to put them in my novels.

“When I have fulfilled a dream, I leave again”

There is a phrase from Nerval that fascinates me and that I continue to apply. He says “I travel to verify my dreams”. I live a lot in this creative melancholy, which is not sadness. The poet Yves Bonnefoy spoke of “melancholy of hope”. When I have fulfilled a dream, I leave again.

For you, adventure does not come without commitment…

Describing the world, going to war zones, even for novels, is already a form of commitment. This is not activism, but a form of denunciation. I want to show what the human species experiences, what it hopes for, what it is capable of in the best and often in the worst. Despite everything, as Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard says, there are millions of acts of kindness every day. At the moment, I’m working a lot with Afghan women on a collection of poetry, which is also a form of engagement.

You met Nicolas Bouvier, a myth in adventure literature. What memory do you have of him?

I was returning from a distant trip, I stopped over in Singapore. A diplomat friend invited me to his home, on a hill with a garden from which we could see the entire port. There were ten of us and at the end of the table, there was Nicolas Bouvier. I was very young, a little paralyzed. I was writing The Drug Route, I was coming back from the bush in Burma, it was very dangerous. He was extremely nice, we talked about Japan, Afghanistan… He was very interested in me. He was very human, generous.

What does the incipit of Sad tropics Claude Levi-Strauss, “I hate travel and explorers” ?

It’s a quite disconcerting book, a very personal travelogue. It’s a little provocative, but Levi-Strauss will spend the next 400 pages saying otherwise.

What book would you recommend taking on an adventure?

I will say two. Use of the world by Nicolas Bouvier is a marvel of precision, humanism, inventiveness, emotion. After a car trip from Switzerland to Kabul, he says that we think we are at the end of the world, when we are at the center of the world.

And then Martin Edenby Jack London. It is at the same time a travel book, a tortured book, very melancholic. Jack London died at 40, he wrote 40 books. He is very sharp, very sensitive too. In this book, he talks about his life as an adventurer. He wanted to be a writer, but he wanted to do it through travel.