books, always

“If you take the time to wash your car, you have time to read,” one of my friends, a literary festival programmer, gently retorted to the charming owner who welcomed us for the weekend in his sunny guest rooms. at a festival by the Atlantic. The friend had replied that to the offhand remark our host had just made when he placed a jar of homemade currant jelly on the table for breakfast: “I would like to read, but I don’t have time. »

For writers and other literature enthusiasts who only breathe to read and write, it’s painful when someone implies there’s always better things to do than open a book. This idea reaches us deep within ourselves, scratches the thin membrane that protects our reason against the horrors of the world and leads us, unconsciously, to feel totally useless.

This is what we put in a novel: our life, our feelings, the urgency to say something to other human beings, the desire to make a situation understood, the idea that we are tracing a peaceful path between tribes ready to kill each other, the hope that the past will enlighten the future, the extension of the vital impetus that pushes the child still in his mother’s womb to listen outwards, the will to do something, the celebration of language, the contours of the world. This is what the reader is supposed to find in a book: the warmth of fire in the night.

To people who spend thirty hours a month watching one series (and then another if they were disappointed with the previous one), or four hours a day staring at the screen of their laptop, I would like to make people understand this that literature is essential to their own life, like the soil that settles so that we can all eat. But most of the time, I give up in front of the magnitude of the challenge.

Because my arguments will only reap a fleeting look, a polite nod, and my interlocutor will find the first pretext for the conversation to move on to something else; stock market prices or the last Tour de France. Why literature is more important than any series, any stock market or sporting achievement, I couldn’t quite explain; I know it. So I give in instead of trying to convince, which makes me feel lazy and sad.

I tell you this because the other hard thing to accept when you’re a writer or just take books seriously is the issue of “productivity” that drives the wheels of our society. When I talk about a novel I’ve written, the question I’m always asked is: “When’s the next one?” » As if my book was only the last link in a long regular chain destined to end… when? When I die? And when caring relatives ask me: “Did you work well today? », I feel that the answer should resemble what is meant by a good day’s work: about eight hours of efficiency behind a workbench, a counter, saving lives in the overloaded department of a hospital. or maneuver a pallet truck.

There is also the question of the next subject of the next book, which I am supposed to have already in mind and know how to summarize in a convincing and clear way, like the synopsis of a thriller film, of an enticing start-up project. up (the famous “story” to tell investors) or a good advertising argument. Each time I try my hand at it and try to explain what my next novel will be made of, I feel that my speech becomes gassy, ​​the real meaning of the writing moving away, becoming inaccessible, like the core of the sun. Because the truth is that for the writer as for the reader, the important thing in a book is to discover there by chance a secret of life that one had not come to seek there.

Someone was telling me the other night that a friend he’s seen occasionally for thirty-five years talks to him every time, in a slightly pedantic tone, about the book she plans to write. For all these years, she has been talking about this same book with determination, without noticing the increasingly bored faces of her interlocutors.

To be prisoner of the novel that one will never write, here is something terrifying, but undoubtedly the best comprehension that one can have of the painful, evanescent and so random work of the writer.

What is the essence of life? This is probably, basically, the subject of all writers. And as the answer slips away, even for Stendhal, even for Dostoyevsky, even for Chinua Achebe, new books will be written. Perhaps this is another one of the cruel and beautiful tortures the jealous gods have devised for us dear humans.

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