There is a man in Bordeaux who has a plan. His name is Pierre Lemaitre (Paris, 1951) and, like a Napoleon of letters or a revived Dumas, he has set out to portray the entire 20th century, in a series of novels that paint a fresco that is as adrenaline-fueled as it is tragicomic. The Wide World, on sale next Thursday, begins shortly after the end of World War II, in 1948, when the son of an important family of Beirut soap-makers – a closet gay – leaves for Saigon to reunite with his beloved, a French colonial soldier fighting against the communist guerrillas. Meanwhile, in Paris, his brother François de él enters journalistic circles. The other brother, Jean, a gray husband, hides a tremendous and bloody secret. And the girl, Helène, dreams of becoming emancipated. With all these characters still jumping in his head – the sequel has just come out in France – the author receives this newspaper in a hotel in Bordeaux.
What was the origin of this novel?
It was something purely mechanical, in my trilogy The Children of Disaster I had written about the 20s, 30s, 40s… and I said to myself: ‘I’m going to do the 50s! And then I’ll do 60!’ Isn’t that amazing? What genius! I have some things… So, from saying to doing, I started another trilogy to follow the first one, which is actually going to be a tetralogy (things got complicated) that will end in 1965. And do you know what I’ll do next? Another trilogy! One that will begin in the early 70s and end with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
What a planning. When will this great project end?
I have approximately six years of work left.
In 1948, France was not officially at war but in Saigon it seems that it was…
There the capitalists were at war, true, and the government wanted to keep their colony as it was, but the majority of people in France were absolutely the same, it was a professional conflict, families did not send their sons to fight in Saigon , as it did happen later in Algeria. It was a distant, exotic war.
What about the multiplication of the money that was sent to France, is it true?
As I tell it. It’s no secret, historians talk about it even though people have forgotten about it. The exchange rate made the piastres that were sent to France multiply their value: every 10 piastres that were sent to the metropolis became 17, almost doubling their value. This traffic in piastres, based on converting them into francs, was completely legal, requiring authorization from the administration. The difference was paid by the French state. Thus, the government injected money without restraint into that colony. Why? My hypothesis is that the politicians understood that they could not win the war militarily and decided to buy the colony with the force of money. The French army had just fought in two world wars, but had no idea how to deal with a guerrilla. A majestic Napoleonic legion arrived, in their beautiful uniforms, and a scruffy kid threw a grenade at them and ran away…
The bureaucratic structures of the colony that it reflects are Kafkaesque.
The French administration is Kafkaesque since Napoleon. The centralization of the State turns it into something absurd, caricatural. We have exported this model to all the countries we have colonized (Algeria, Indochina…) and others have willingly copied us.
The scenes of the religious sect, with its rituals, are Ubuesque.
They are… but they are real facts. I have taken traits from three or four actually existing sects. Pasteur, Marie Curie, Einstein… were his idols, his saints. They thought that all these great personalities were sent from God to do good to mankind, and they built a cult based on them. The country was fractured, dominated by the French on one side and the guerrillas on the other. Both were savages, two gangs of murderers: the guerrillas extorted the people of the villages, the French tortured them. The sect brought peace, provided a self-defense army, and the peasants saw in them a refuge from the two warring sides. They were believing and superstitious people who embraced the colorful animism that was proposed to them.
Jean is henpecked, but magnetic in his weakness…
You have to see it in relation to his wife Geneviève, manipulative and truly evil: she has no desire to sleep with her husband, who is overweight, the mere idea seems an aberration to her, but she is excited when he loses control and stains his hands. blood hands.
François, the journalist, experiences the frenetic atmosphere of the newsrooms.
There is a lot of documentation, memoirs of journalists of the time, that describe a kind of El Dorado of the written press. Once the paper crisis was over, the newspapers began to earn money and hired many journalists, each time better paid. Everyone had the impression of living a great adventure.
What are ‘the glorious thirty’?
A term coined by the economist Jean Fourastié in 1979 to refer to the years between the end of the Second World War and the first oil crisis. It is a period of enormous economic progress, the total victory of capitalism, the standard of living has never increased so much, there was full employment (can you imagine, 0% unemployment?), people bought their flats, refrigerators, televisions, telephones … but Fourastié did not tell us that it was not all like that. If you take a closer look, 1948 was nothing glorious, the good times didn’t really start until 1952, because from the end of the war to that year unemployment, inflation and social conflicts were running rampant.
Helène finds it very difficult to study Fine Arts. Were there so many obstacles for women?
Of course. There were places that prohibited women and dogs from entering. They were very marginalized. The very model of beauty was a large-breasted, motherly woman. It will be later when the buttocks prevail, with the generation of Jane Birkin.
Was that progress?
Clear! The other thing was to relegate women to the status of mother, with the rise of the myth of motherhood, they could only talk about babies, strollers, diapers… Helène is 18 years old and confusedly feels that, in order to succeed, she will have to use certain weapons , hence why she sleeps with her teacher, she realizes that life is very close for girls.
Of course, his characters always have a problematic sexuality…
Problematic sexuality? And who doesn’t have it, friend? Ah, if you knew me a little better… With your hand on your heart, think of yourself, or even of my editor Anik Lapointe, here present… But I’m willing to concede that maybe you and I don’t we have as problematic as some characters in my novels.
In France, on January 10, the continuation of The Wide World will appear, entitled Silence and Wrath. What can we advance?
We will follow the Pelletier brothers, in each novel there is a different one of them who is the plot axis, but if The Wide World is basically an adventure novel, Silence and Wrath is a social novel, a tribute to Zola. I am going to appropriate the great literary genres. The next installment, the third, will star François and will be a spy novel, a tribute to Hitchcock and Le Carré. The fourth and last will be a police novel.
If it is a social novel, will there be less humor?
No, there is, but not in the main plot line but in the secondary one: Louis employs a boy who practices boxing in his soap shop, he is very bad, a lousy fighter but, due to a set of crazy circumstances, he reaches the final of an important competition.
Are there many French novels about Indochina?
There were in another time, in the 50s and 60s. It is a war that has disappeared from the memory of the French. The last author who addressed the Indochinese theme was Marguerite Duras but, if she looks closely, she doesn’t talk about the war but about the country. Another thing is Algeria, which is still a gold mine.
About the secret that Pelletier hides…
There is a nod that we are not going to reveal and that, although the novel may be liked by those who read it for the first time, I wanted there to also be a loyalty award for those who have followed me since See you up there, in 2013 , throughout four books. They deserve a little gift, didn’t you like it?
