Benoît Séverac is a Toulouse author of dark and detective literature. The sound of our lost footstepsPrize of the Academy of Occitanie of Arts is his latest thriller. Here he is back in children's literature with The Clash, published by Syros.
The interview with Benoît Séverac
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listen (13min)
The clash is the giant and hallucinatory brawl between punks and skinheads that Nicolas, 15, witnesses while he is on a language trip to Birmingham, a working-class city opposite the countryside where he lives in France. The plot takes place at the end of the 1970s, England is not yet part of what will become the European Union. Straight out of the family and provincial cocoon, the young man finds himself in a host family whose eldest is a punk. He is literally fascinated by this rebel and will allow himself to be influenced by him to the point of taking risks. It is the shock of the meeting of two different worlds and the discovery of another culture.
“This book is about the reason why we travel and about these famous language trips which we made films about, which we had a good laugh about, which we made fun of a little and which, ultimately, really train young people in the world. literal sense of the term. It's a very personal experience, in fact. It's the most personal novel I've ever written.”
Benoît Severacat franceinfo
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The story is therefore that of Nicolas, who tells it to his son who is in turn preparing to leave on a linguistic trip. He reveals himself to him sincerely, in a beautiful moment of father-son complicity, during a hike in the Pyrenees, a region dear to the author.
The author wants to address young people aged 13 and over: “The visceral springs of what a teenager is, and in particular this idea of transgression. How far we can go and where we shouldn't go. How much we are influenced by our friends. The relationship with authority itself, love too. The relationship with the group. The question of positioning in the group, the perspective of others. What can we do just to please, to stand out? All this has not changed. It always interests me to work on that and to remember that a teenager, in the end, is always that, yes.”
Everything could have changed, we know that it doesn't end in tragedy since the father is there to tell the story. This novel, even if it is not a thriller, can be read in one sitting.
The entire interview with Benoît Séverac (13 mins) can be found at the top of this page.
