Few authors draw crowds like the Frenchman Pierre Lemaitre (Paris, 1951), who recently filled the auditorium of the Jaume Fuster library in Barcelona, ??arousing unusual passions in literature, and even stopped to attend to the many people who had gathered left out. Supported by all the prestige that the Goncourt prize that he won in 2013 gives him, he claims like few others the popular novel (a tautology, for him), adrenaline-filled, choral, full of action, fun and a portrait of an era. ‘Silence and Anger’ (Salamandra/Joke) follows the characters we met in ‘The Wide World’ (2022), now in France in the 1950s. “The previous book,” he explains, in a hotel in Barcelona, It was a tribute to adventure novels (Beirut, Saigon…) and this is more of a nod to Zola’s naturalistic novel. The next one in this series will be about spies, and the last one will be a detective novel.”
-What have you done here with your beloved characters?
-The problem for the novelist is that he has to be prepared to inflict harm on his characters, he must be mean to them. Because, if he doesn’t put them in a difficult situation, nothing interesting will happen to them. It’s a struggle because, in a way, you love them, but to write a good book, you have to torture them. In the real world it’s different… well, actually… yeah, yeah, we do the same thing, there’s no difference.
-What interested you about the world of boxing?
-At first glance, it is a sport that I don’t like. But, when I looked through the newspapers of those years, ‘France Soir’ in particular, I saw that there was mostly football, cycling and boxing. And I had the idea of ??creating a bad boxer, someone terrible. I’ll tell you a secret: there is a scene in the novel ‘The Glory of the Empire’ by Jean d’Ormesson – which tells the story of an imaginary empire – in which there was a blind man and a child between the fights of muscular barbarians and that inspired me.
-Were French women really dirty as we read in a real article by Françoise Giroud?
-In the fiction I have Helène sign it but then, at the end, I reproduce the original article because, otherwise, they would believe that I made it up. To begin with, we are not talking about the same thing. Hygiene 70 years ago was not the same as today. Let’s not forget that it was a time when only three out of ten French people had a bathroom. I was born in 1951 and, until I was 7 or 8 years old, we washed in a basin, we didn’t have a sink. I had my first bathroom when I was 9 years old, in 1960. It is true that, today, if we took a woman from that time and put her next to us, we would find her, well, unkempt. But, at that time, she was not. Were women really unhygienic, in today’s terms? Yes, but also men, and not for the time. What catches my attention is that this article about the dirtiness of women is written for men. In other words, it’s their fault. What strikes me is that when Françoise Giroud writes this article for ‘Elle’, she borrows the vocabulary and language of male domination. She writes like a man. It’s Stockholm syndrome. The women of the time are hostages and end up thinking like men. This is the same Françoise Giroud who, 25 years later, became the first Secretary of State for the Status of Women. So it was interesting to see this progression.
-It reflects the enormous changes in consumer habits, household appliances, clothing in department stores… What was this revolution like?
-Glorious. It was the adolescence of modernity. There was a kind of naivety. Everything was easy. Salaries rose incessantly. There was full employment. The unemployed were lazy. Everything was easy and everything was available. If you were a worker, you dreamed of a car and, five years later, you had already bought it. Everyone dreamed of a better life, people went to live in housing estates. We had bathrooms! There was a kind of euphoria, albeit adolescent, because there was an inability to gauge what tomorrow would bring. No one was wondering what kind of world we were making. There was a terrible lack of awareness, even among normally well-informed people.
-It tells the story of a town that disappears submerged by water due to the Chevrigny dam.
-Yes, it is the story of the Tignes dam, it was traumatic. When I became interested in the question of the towns that had been covered by water, I was very surprised. There were dozens of them, already since the 1930s, but the popular upheaval began in 1952 with the Tignes dam. Before that, no emotion had been aroused, no one gave a damn. But what happens in 1952? It is the golden age of journalism. It was a newspaper that produced the event. In the case of the Tignes dam, the editor of the newspaper tells his reporter: ‘Go there, something important is happening.’ That had already happened a thousand times, no one cared but he has an intuition that the public will be interested. I send my heroine, Helène, but in reality he was a man, an excellent journalist, who wrote very well. That national emotion that is generated is prefabricated by the fact that the press directs the focus on that town that is going to disappear. People show solidarity, they get excited: ‘We are with them!’ That’s what I’m trying to show: the power of the media, which is something new.
-Would you have liked to work in a newspaper at that time?
-A lot. It shows, right? For a sense of adventure. It’s incredible: in 1946, this newspaper was made with the machines of a small Resistance newspaper, there was no paper and the product was so expensive that no one could read it. A disaster. And that same newspaper, in 25 years, will end up selling a million copies. One million! And, when De Gaulle dies, two million! Today, it would be a dream to achieve those circulations, not even ‘Le Monde’ dreams of something similar. Nobody can. Therefore, there was an enormous increase in the power of the press. It must have been very exciting to experience that explosion, week after week. I imagine the editorial office with the smell of red wine, sausages, sandwiches, people arguing, writing, it must have been great.
-And as for Jean, he can’t stop murdering women, right? We can see it as a metaphor, right? In reality, we all have something we can’t stop doing.
-With Jean he acquires murderous proportions, it worries me that you identify so much with him, if you need help we can talk about it privately later… He is an impulsive murderer, he is no more misogynist than most men of his time. Except his anger is directed at young women. There is no premeditation in it, everything happens on impulse. The psychoanalytic question is where this guy’s fantasy comes from so that his anger is always expressed like this. Well, I grant him that, in a way, he expresses the dark side of all our personalities.
-We also witness the miracle of the fertility of his wife, Geneviève.
-We already know, from the previous book, that she was not absolutely virginal, because she specialized in fellatio, she had a fairly precocious education in that field. But what makes me laugh a lot is this idea of ??her having children with everyone except her husband, with whom there is a prohibition on sexual relations. I really like this character, she makes me laugh.
-Abortion was a crime in France. What were the consequences of committing it?
-It was doubly terrible. On the one hand, women risked their lives doing it, they trusted botchworkers, and on top of that they were committing a crime and were being chased by the police. So it was a double punishment. Not only were they risking their lives, but they were also risking going to jail. That is the greatest symbol of male domination. At a time when women are made to believe they are liberated. We men make them believe it by giving them a vacuum cleaner. Here, here, a washing machine, this way you will save a lot of time. It is a very hypocritical time in which we make objects that seem liberating but are actually objects of slavery. The more vacuum cleaners and washing machines you have, the more you have to stay at home.
-In an official decree, it is established that the town ceases to exist. It wasn’t like that, was it?
-Yes, yes, as is, there is a decree that says that the town of Tignes ceases to exist administratively. Since the town physically no longer exists, it must cease to exist legally. If not, there could be a mayor with fins and a mask underwater. It is, therefore, the issue of identity.
-Hélène is a great journalist.
-Very good, because he has intuition. She arrives in town and senses what is happening. She knows who to talk to. As if by chance, she finds the right people to put together her story, the victims. That’s what great journalists are like. A war reporter, without intuition, does nothing. Your nose is what tells you where to go. That is your great weapon.
