Fall 2007. David Foenkinos has just published his sixth novel, the excellent Who remembers David Foenkinos?where he has fun staging the passage to which he is then confronted. On this occasion, he is invited to talk about his book at the Fnac in the Place d’Italie, in Paris. The crowd does not hurry: one person attends this literary meeting. Information taken, this woman does not even know who is the writer – she forgot the keys to her house and hangs out in this Fnac while waiting for her husband to go back … A year after this funny disappointment, Foenkinos comes out Our separationswhich does not reach the 3,000 copies. Is failure its future? Miracle: Twelve months are still passing, Foenkinos insists and returns in August 2009 with The delicacy. This time, it is glory – the novel is today at 1.5 million copies. Since this huge tube, everything has smiled at the author of Charlotte (Renaudot prize 2014). Alternating dramas (Two sisters) and comedies (The Martin family), and by succeeding in rejuvenating his readership (thanks to Beauty), it sold a total of 4 million pounds. Which was not a matter of self for this child of an HLM tower of Villejuif.
In his Parisian apartment, with a rather stripped decoration, where Foenkinos receives us to discuss his new novel, Everyone loves Claraa detail strikes us. An official portrait of 1981 by François Mitterrand dominates the dining room. Explanation of the master of the house: “Beyond the kitsch, I really believe in the forces of the mind. I had been marked by the last wishes of Mitterrand as president, in 1994. I have a Cartesian side but I Take very seriously astrology and numerology-I love it. My book is nourished by these meetings with these amazing people who will not give you the figures of the lottery but have intuitions on others. “
Intermingling the lives of several characters, Everyone loves Clara Tells in particular the accident of which a 16 -year -old teenager is victim, said Clara. After eight months of coma, she wakes up with a gift of clairvoyance. Those who know the history of Foenkinos will make the link with his own past. In January 1991, also 16 years old, he landed in the emergency room of the Kremlin-Bicêtre in a serious state. An infection of the pleura, usually reserved for the elderly, had made him brush death. He had spent several weeks in intensive care. From this long hospitalization dates from his passion for books and his vocation as a writer: “Everyone loves Clara is a disguised autobiography: I am a false fiction writer! Without my heart operation, I might have become a dentist, but never writer-I had no artistic sensitivity. It unlocked my imagination. There is a link between writing and clairvoyance. I am very mystical in my own way, immersed permanently in reading the signs of life. One example: I settled here a little at random, and I am in front of the Drouant cooking school – like the restaurant where the Goncourt price is awarded! Even if I no longer make literary return, I find it funny … “
“I am in total bulimia”
Lying on his hospital bed during the second seven -seizure of the Mitterrand sphinx, the young Foenkinos regained his foothill by devouring Henry Miller, Nabokov, Kundara, Kafka, Camus, Dostoyevski or Albert Cohen, then the too little known Bernard Frank, who remains the One of his masters: “He too is a survivor. I like his lightness, his mind and his erudition. The literary panoplyit’s phenomenal! And there is this very fun passage somewhere where he says that he must be careful because, if he continues like this, he will end up becoming a Gallimard author … “In the books of Foenkinos, there is regular reflection on the literature. Everyone loves Clara is an unhappy and mysterious man named Eric Ruprez, who released a first novel in 1982 at midnight editions and has not published anything since. Should we see an alternative version of Foenkinos?
“It is a central figure of the book, indeed: a writer who no longer writes. I have never written so much in my life, I publish a book per year, I am already writing the next one, I am in a total bulimia and I put in my novel a writer whose inspiration has completely dried up … I liked the idea that he could not write for forty years and that one day he calls his editor as If nothing was by saying that it is good, he finished the second! A writer who does not write arouses more interest than a writer who writes – there is this aura a little mythical, with In addition to midnight editions … When Eric meets Clara, something gushes into him. had not yet approached the angle of writing. Besides, I never considered a possibility of selling books. For almost ten years I was quite confidential, without bitterness – it seemed to me that it was the fate of writers. I lived with little money, I dragged an innumerable amount of film projects that were not made. I was surprised by the success of The delicacywho changed my life … “
“Success is often weighted by terrible events …”
Behind his facade fantasy, Foenkinos hides a more anxious man than we imagine: “When I’m done Charlotte [NDLR : son livre sur l’artiste Charlotte Salomon]I told myself that it was the book of my life, that I would not do other after. This is the only time I took a break for a year. I then reread a novel from Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby and company – A kind of compilation of writers who have stopped writing. It had inspired me The Henri Pick mystery. The inability to create is a theme that comes back from time to time with me. The book that fascinated me the most in the past two years is the biography of Philip Roth, signed Blake Bailey. We see Roth as the summit he is but in truth, for thirty years, of Portnoy and its complex has The stain, He sold fewer and fewer books. I imagined Roth as a kind of a little perverse enjoyer when his life was a series of difficulties and suffering, with a tragic marriage, a lot of health problems, a hell. Success is often weighted by terrible events … “
David Foenkinos looks like his best friend, Florian Zeller. By politeness or art of prudence in the sense that Baltasar Gracian understood, they do not go completely when they go to radio and television. Some, often embittered, blame them for an image deemed smooth. Those who frequent them in private know their spicy humor and their great intelligence. For the first time since their simultaneous beginnings in 2002 (Artificial snows For Zeller, Inversion of idiocy For Foenkinos), the two comrades will work together: they are writing a series with four hands. Although not having any gift of clairvoyance, we can predict that success will be there.
Everyone loves Clara. By David Foenkinos. Gallimard, 193 p., € 20.
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