The Anomaly was the 27th book by Hervé Le Tellier. How did he experience becoming a literary star at 63, after a long career as an underground author? Sitting opposite us at the bar of the Montalembert hotel, near the Gallimard editions, he laughs: “Oh, you have to put things into perspective! Taking yourself for a star is a personal decision: in reality, when you have the Goncourt , nothing happens, we don’t stop you in the street. An author remains anonymous – we’re not Brad Pitt, and I regret it! At the peak of the success of The Anomaly, I happened to travel on the train next to someone who was reading my novel, and no one ever recognized me. I experienced a sort of invisible celebrity, which puts the notion of starification into perspective a lot…”
He continues: “In The Anomalythere are cliffhangers at the end of each chapter, the methodology of people like Stephen King or Michael Crichton already employed by the serialists or Hergé in Tintin. I had played with the codes of the bestseller, without thinking for a second that it would have any effect on the sales of the book, which is nonetheless literary and experimental. Receiving the Goncourt at over 60 years old is a joyful surprise after an extremely free journey. I would have liked to experience such success when I was younger, but it might have been destructive: lacking perspective, I would have risked locking myself into a character who always reproduces the same book, which is a mistake…”
With The Name on the WallHervé Le Tellier did not write The Anomaly 2. Wondering about the name of André Chaix, mysteriously engraved on the wall of the house he bought in Drôme in 2016, he discovers that he is a resistance member of the French Interior Forces (FFI), killed by the Germans at the age of 20 in 1944. Le Tellier meticulously reconstructs the life of this unknown man. At the beginning of the book, without giving names, he mocks the writers who explain that their manuscript was an “obsession” for them. We remember a lunar interview given by Olivier Guez to World of books in 2017, during the release of The Disappearance of Josef Mengele. He had the nerve to declare: “It quickly became very hard… I don’t wish anyone to have to get up every morning thinking about Mengele. I lived with him, with this abject, mediocre character. abysmal. I would get in the ring against him. For the first six months, I would shout his name at night. Just that ! Having passed the age of having such nightmares, Le Tellier is more reasonable: “Everyone wants to one day write their book on the Occupation or the Shoah. I found myself with this desire to tackle it, like a lot. But the postural dimension of the writer possessed by his subject, what’s more, such a delicate subject, I didn’t want to take on – it’s indecent. It was important for me to remain modest. In my investigation, I didn’t don’t stage it, except when it makes sense to me and touches me, like when I talk about the suicide of the woman I loved, Piette, when we were 20, the age at which André Chaix also left alone his fiancée, Simone. I tried to find in this particular story what opens up to the general. This name on my wall was a very beautiful literary lever, even if I did not want to exploit it, to make it a pretext. André Chaix died when he would undoubtedly have preferred to live. This tragedy, the death of a young man who fell under the bullets of a Nazi armored car, is not enough to make him a figurehead of the resistance that he would have embodied all by himself. Wanting at all costs to transform destiny into destiny makes no sense…”
In his book, Le Tellier explains that he was struck, as a teenager, by the documentary Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, whose voice-over is provided by Michel Bouquet, to whom the writer resembles more and more as he ages (but this is anecdotal). At the Montalembert bar, he also mentions Lacombe Lucien by Louis Malle (screenplay co-written by Patrick Modiano): “It’s a fantastic film, a vitriolic portrait of collaboration, much more thanUranus – reason why, moreover, it was poorly received… We can clearly see that, among young people, there are not the good guys and the bastards, but a possible shift towards one or the other. other.”
From LCR to OuLiPo
Let’s talk about Le Tellier’s youth. Not everyone knows that, long before being a respectable winner of the Goncourt Prize, he was registered with the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR): “I was at the Stéphane-Mallarmé college, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. A 15 years ago, thanks to the France-USSR association, I went to Russia, from which I returned completely disgusted without having read. Return of the USSR of Gide, I shared the observation: I understood that this country was not the dream that its promoters had, but a pretty little dictatorship, very bureaucratic and corrupt. Anti-Stalinist, I was Trotskyist. In my high school, the funniest people were in the LCR or the FHAR – the famous Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action. We had a good laugh, and life is not meant to be bored…” Did he take physical risks within the LCR, like André Chaix enlisted in the FFI? “Honestly, no. It wasn’t fun, I believed in the ideas we stood for – and I still believe in some of them. But I only found myself in front of a gun once, nothing like young people from other countries. I remember sheltering a Colombian woman who was murdered two years later by a small fascist group. We were Europeans well protected by our democracies…”
After the LCR, Le Tellier later found another adoptive family: OuLiPo. In 1992, he was admitted to the literary circle co-founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau, and where Marcel Duchamp, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino had come before him. Since 2019, he has been the president of this intellectual and playful club, which is still as closed as ever, where we find around fifteen people as different as Anne Garréta or Clémentine Mélois: “We are Oulipian before becoming one, it is above all about to like playing with language. The OuLiPo is not a literary work group, we publish very different books, there is nothing in common between the poetry of Frédéric Forte and what Calvino wrote. ‘OuLiPo says nothing about an aesthetic, but testifies to a relationship with structure – we have a taste for constraints, like Perec in Disappearance. Finally, if you apply, you cannot be co-opted into OuLiPo. There is no knocking on the door. You must have been elected unanimously by the members, not by a majority. So no one can complain about the presence of a member. Anyway, few people are interested in what we do, we’re not fashionable…”
It was pointed out to Le Tellier that The Name on the Wall can recall Dora Bruderthis sober and sensitive book where Modiano followed in the footsteps of a Jewish teenager deported to Auschwitz: “I really like Dora Bruder, but it is a false investigation. I mean: it’s an intimate investigation, not technical. We are not at Philippe Jaenada’s house, who has an almost police approach, where he goes searching – I have admiration for Jaenada, as well as for Grégoire Bouillier.” The Occupation filtered by a fine sleuth from OuLiPo : this renews the genre It remains to be seen whether the anonymous André Chaix will make a name for himself.
The Name on the Wall, by Hervé Le Tellier. Gallimard, 162 p., €19.80.
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