Guillaume Musso (Antibole, 1974) has a record that will be very difficult to match. For the last 12 years, one after the other, he has been the best-selling author in France. Last year alone, he sold more than a million copies in the neighboring country with suspense novels such as Angélique (AdN), which is now coming to Spain. A phenomenon that has spread to 45 countries and for which he tries, he says, not to look for an explanation. “I write novels that are hybrids. I don’t have a specific culture of crime novels, nor do I ever feel like writing them. I write novels in which there is suspense, but what interests me above all is the complexity of the human soul, which is the essence of the novel. Milan Kundera said that the spirit of the novel is that of complexity, which must constantly tell the reader that things are much more complex than they think. A novel can bring it up, in a film you don’t have time to do it. It is the interiority that is the true added value of the novel today, the singularity”, explains the writer in Paris.
Son of a librarian, he remembers that his sudden infatuation with literature when he was 11 years old was Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, because “I had the impression of reading a forbidden book because you were diving into the psyche of completely marginal characters. As Eco said, if you don’t read, you live a life. If you read books, you can live a hundred thousand.”
Lives like Angèlique’s, in which the death of a former dance star triggers an investigation that ends up delving into the dissatisfactions and resentments of our lives. “There are three clear influences in this book. Hitchcock on the more cinematic and voyeur side. Patricia Highsmith because she has always written about the ambiguity of characters. And Simenon, who said he wanted to understand the characters and not judge them. “It’s a book of murky characters. Taillefer, the policeman, and Angélique, for me, are from the same family, two sides of the same coin. And the pleasure of writing the book was to stage these characters on the border between good and evil and that they can choose evil. They are characters who feel they don’t belong, even as they notice the life they deserve. It is a very widespread feeling today, one of the characteristics of the contemporary world. There are more and more people with resentment, with the impression that they are not in the place they deserve. When you’re writing, if you have a character who thinks he’s not where he belongs, he’ll try to break the rules to get there.”
Musso remarks that he tries to “write the novel that I would like to find as a reader. It’s the only one.” “When I write I always try to put myself in the frame of mind I had when I wrote the first work and I didn’t know if I would publish it or not. You can’t write thinking that you have to please millions of people. I am read by people of very different ages and from extremely different countries. And if they read me for very different reasons, I prefer not to question myself too much. Something quite magical has touched me and I try to make that magic last by avoiding putting it into an equation. Not rationalizing it,” he explains in the offices of his publisher on the rue Montparnasse, where he, extremely disciplined, has an office to write in the morning before going to another office in his old apartment in the afternoon and returning with the his family at eight o’clock. “I have organized days like an office job and this allows me to have regularity, to know when I work, to show my children that literature is a real job and to be available for them when I’m at home”, he smiles confidently.
