Would Malaussene be his elixir of youth or would the civil registrars of Casablanca have been mistaken? Still, it’s hard to believe that the youthful-looking man who receives us at the end of December has just passed the 78-year-old mark, even though he has just finished a theatrical tour (From dream to scene) for a month in Italy. No apparent fatigue, just restaurant fatigue, he tells us.
So here we are at his home, in his favorite Belleville, to celebrate the 8th and final volume of his Malaussène saga, which began in 1985. Eight volumes in thirty-eight years, some 5.5 million copies sold, around twenty translations! An incredible adventure, initiated in Gallimard’s Black Series, continued in White and which ends, he tells us, with this Terminus Malaussenesecond part of the Case Malaussene: They lied to me (Folio), published in 2017. But can we believe the one who told us, in 1995, when the 4th volume, “There will be no sequel, it’s a tetralogy and period?”
“In fact, I wanted to rediscover metaphorical writing and continue to explore the different types of possible orality, explicit dialogues, interior monologues. The aim was also to solve an enigma without going through the traditional codes of police investigation”, he confides to us today. And that’s good ! Because there is no lack of energy, the former French teacher, to narrate the whimsical adventures of Benjamin, the scapegoat of Talion editions directed by the ineffable Queen Zabo, and of his smala as numerous as it is crazy .
All in a novel-river which reads as one tastes a packet of good madeleines and which reserves a final with small onions. Precision of the maestro: “The goal is that nothing of what is planned happens.” That the distracted do not worry, the benevolent Pennac reminds them of the main character traits of the protagonists, from the three cousins with the baroque first name (Monsieur Malaussene, Maracuja and C’est un ange) to the examining magistrate Verdun, little sister of Benjamin: “In two thousand and a few pages, they will have done everything to me”, writes the author, who continues to multiply the nods to previous episodes.
“Being able to laugh at the tinsel of reality”
Precisely, we had remained at the “artistic” kidnapping by the three Malaussene scoundrels of Tuc, Maracuja’s promise, and his father Georges Lapieta. Problem: they were overtaken by Pépère and his henchmen. Grandpa? The real villain of the novel – “the product of our scary times”, according to Pennac. With the soft voice of a harmless old man who loves gratin dauphinois, the man hides his game well: obsessive, a past master in the art of torture and murder, he is at the head of a band of groupies brought up with good manners. and the worst abuses. Kidnapping, blackmail, rigged bets, trafficking in young Brazilian soccer players, sale of Chinese or Mexican “candy” accelerating the end of life… Pépère’s imagination is endless, as is the author’s pleasure in playing with the language, in order “to be able to laugh at the tinsel of reality”.
Because make no mistake, Pennac is the champion of diversion: behind the extravagance of the situations lurk very contemporary concerns, such as the growing market for nursing homes, euthanasia, the supremacy of money in football, embezzlement of the powerful, the affairs that are stifled, the strength of social networks, and that of investigative books…. The author also plays with his characters, behind whom hide many of his friends – he enjoys awarding the Nobel Prize in Physics to one of them – but who can also take on the traits of a few personalities such as the artist JR (“a neighbor”)Maradona (“a little cube who, with a ball between his feet, became Pina Bausch”) or even Bernard Tapie camouflaged as Georges Lapieta (“the kind of guy we would like to love, like Chirac, but they are in the camp opposite…”).
With his profession and the confidence of his publisher, Antoine Gallimard, who had this Terminus at 110,000 copies, Daniel Pennac should be most serene. Not sure: “I subscribe to doubt and I know ambivalence, that’s the downside of aging”, loose the former dunce, with an adolescent smile.
Malaussene terminus. The Malaussene Case, 2. Gallimard, 448 pages, €23.