Guillaume Musso (Antibes, 1974) has a record that will be very difficult to match. For the past 12 years, one after the other, he has been France’s best-selling author. Last year alone he placed more than a million copies in the neighboring country with suspense novels like Angélique (AdN), which now arrives in Spain. A phenomenon that has spread to 45 countries and for which he tries, he says, not to seek an explanation. “I write novels that are hybrids. I don’t have a specific culture of detective novels nor do I ever have the impression of 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 he thinks. A novel can raise it, in a movie you don’t have time to do it. It is interiority that is the true added value of the novel today, its uniqueness,” explains the writer in Paris.
The son of a librarian, he remembers that his literary crush when he was 11 was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, because “I had the impression of reading a forbidden book because you delved into the psyche of completely marginal characters. As Eco said, if you don’t read, you live one 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. “In this book – he details – there are three clear influences. Hitchcock for the more cinematic and voyeuristic 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 is a book of shady 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 so that they can choose evil. They are characters who believe they are not in their place, or even not having the life they deserve. It is a widespread feeling today, one of the characteristics of the contemporary world. There are more and more people with resentment, with the impression of not being in the place they deserve. When writing, if you have a character who believes he is not in his right place, he will try to break the rules to achieve it.”
Musso remarks that he tries to “write the novel that I would like to find as a reader. “It’s the only thing.” “When I write I always try to put myself in the state of mind that I had when I wrote my first work and I didn’t know if it would be published or not. You can’t write thinking that millions of people must like you. People of very different ages and from extremely different countries read me. And if they read me for very different reasons, I prefer not to question myself too much. I have been touched by something quite magical and I try to make that magic last by not putting it in an equation. Not rationalizing it,” he says in the offices of his publishing house on Montparnasse Street, where he, extremely disciplined, has an office to write in the mornings before going to another in his old apartment in the afternoons and returning to his family at eight. “I have organized days like an office job and that allows me to have regularity, to know that I am going to work, to show my children that literature is a real profession and to be available to them when I am at home,” he smiles confidently.
