Maylis de Kerangal will be the guest of the Aix-en-Provence Biennale on November 29 at 8:30 p.m. as part of “Promises of Dawn” with her novel “Jour de resac” in her luggage.
Maylis de Kerangal: “I wanted to work in Le Havre”
And if the city of Le Havre, the one which gave France the President of the Republic René Coty elected in 1953 in incredible circumstances against Louis Jacquinot, was the main character of Maylis de Kerangal's novel “ Surf day » ? Let us recall for the anecdote that it was under the Fourth Republic and that the vote was not by direct universal suffrage, but came from electors. We were looking for a candidate who would not upset anyone and especially not the Gaullists who had vetoed anyone who was positively committed to the treaty on the European Defense Community (EDC) providing for the creation of a European army. Jacquinot had to do the trick. But at the time of the election a bus of senators to vote on his name broke down and did not arrive in time. Then in the 13th round René Coty, a good bourgeois from Le Havre, was elected. Unexpectedly in fact because he had certainly not previously given his opinion on this treaty hated by many, but, not to follow a personal political conviction but due to the fact that at that time he was at the hospital where he was undergoing surgery. “ I have no illusions: if I am President of the Republic, it is because I had prostate surgery. This operation exempted me from taking sides for or against the CED », he then declared, later specifying to Jacques Fauvel who recorded it in his Memoirs that he would undoubtedly have committed himself to the treaty. Who was responsible for an election to the Presidency of the Republic at the time…
Discovery of Le Havre in thriller mode
And Maylis from Kerangal for walking us with “ Surf day » inside Le Havre in thriller mode. In what is a sort of trompe l'oeil police investigation, the author gives the floor to a fifty-year-old Parisian film dubber, mother of Maïa, who one day receives a call from a Le Havre police officer explaining to her that the body of a man was found dead on the sea wall. An unidentified individual about whom she was supposed to be able to provide information, which forced her to come expressly to answer the authorities' questions.
Indeed, greeted by police lieutenant Olivier Zambra, she learned that the victim had in his pocket his cell phone number noted on a cinema ticket. Did she know him? Her negative response does not really satisfy the police officer, so, in order to actually help him, she undertakes a delve into her memories which could reveal the truth. The narrator once lived here and it is a journey in the present into a sometimes painful past. “ I wanted to work in Le Havre “, explains Maylis de Kerangal “it is a city where I spent many years and which I left at the age of eighteen. » The novelist's father was a ship pilot and her grandfather was a sea captain, so we understand that the sea and the port of Le Havre are anchor points for a story that is intended to be intimate, historical, political. .
Autopsy of a city that was on the ground
The bombings of the city which brought it to the ground during the Second World War, Maylis de Kerangal evokes them in precise prose from which she brings out moving and authentic images. “ I wanted to do the autopsy of this city“, she said. From yesterday to today, from the time of reconstruction to that of the presence of drug traffickers who made Le Havre a hub for drug trafficking, we follow our narrator in every street of the city, also with an evocation refugees, the war in Ukraine, and in counterpoint the memory of a certain Craven, the narrator's first love when she was sixteen and who disappeared without being heard from.
Wonderful storyteller Maylis de Kerangal will bring to Aix in her luggage this “ Surf day ” whose atmosphere is reminiscent of the novels of Loti and Simenon, and which she will evoke on November 29 at 8:30 p.m. at La Manufacture during the festival days “ The promises of dawn » (event which we will talk to you about very soon) which will take place from November 27 to 30 and which will be devoted to different portraits of Beirut, another port city. Surrounded by Camille Ammoun, Charif Majdalani, and Hyam Yared, three essential Lebanese writers, Maylis de Kerangal will approach the history of a place with its ambitions, its faults and its setbacks as if engraved in the visual field. Which is in fact the very artistic quintessence of all his work.
Jean-Rémi BARLAND
“Day of surf” by Maylis de Kerangal – Éditions Verticales/Gallimard – 242 pages – €21
Guest of the Aix-en-Provence Biennale, Maylis de Kerangal will be, as part of “Promesses de l’aube”, at the amphitheater of La Manufacture on November 29 at 8:30 p.m. in the company of Camille Ammoun, Charif Majdalani, and Hyam Yared.
