Three short days and then it’s gone. Suffice to say that you have to aim just to meet Jean-Paul Dubois in Paris. And this has been going on for twenty-three novels. “Three or four days of promotion, from Monday to Thursday normally, I love it, putting myself in line,” confides the Toulouse resident with the beautiful white mane. But he can do less. In 2019, to accompany his Goncourt won with All men do not inhabit the world in the same way way, he only stayed twenty-four hours, preoccupied by the illness of “the love of his life”, his 14-year-old golden retriever. Then he only made two trips to France to accompany his trophy, which did not prevent his Goncourt from selling more than 565,000 copies in large format (and 135,000 in Points). No mistake, the ex-journalist, novelist since 1984, does not snub his readers, on the contrary, he values them too much to grant them only two distracted minutes when they have just waited a long time. For The Origin of Tearsjust released, he has planned two unique meetings, within reach of a scooter.
“The book is an adult form of play”
Until then, why not, but soon other “rules”, sometimes strange, appear. In fact, this 74-year-old “libertarian” (in his own words) is steeped in rituals. So he always writes his novels in thirty-one days maximum. “I read I’ll go spit on your graves by Boris Vian, who he claimed to have done in twenty-four or twenty-five days, says Dubois, so, for my first book, I said to myself “hey, I’m going to race with Vian”. I never beat him, but I thought, basically, it’s not bad to work like that, that is to say from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m., at the rate of eight pages a day . And then I make little lists, I write down everything, the number of medications, glasses of Coke, orange juice, water, taken during the month. I love doing it this way, as a kid I loved playing with codes. The book is an adult form of the game, because writing is certainly the most unreasonable and irrational thing there is: you are telling in the most serious way something that does not exist to people who a priori do not don’t give a damn. To do that, you have to be doped. This is my method.”
Still, writing can be trying, as it was for this Origin of tears written in the Pink City during the month of August 2023, with 40 degrees during the day and 30 at night, thirty-one days in the dark behind the shutters! Hence, perhaps, the biting darkness of the novel, and, in any case, the embarrassment of its author. “Talking about it makes me uncomfortable,” he tells us, “it’s not autobiographical, obviously, except that I live in history all the time, through my past, the puzzle of my memory, my dogs, Hendaye, Hondarribia…” At this stage, it would be wise to say a few words on this Origin of tears whose narrator, named Paul, of course (like most of the “heroes” of his novels), is a lonely 51-year-old bachelor who has just gone to recover the body of his father, who died in Canada (another invariant of Dubois) . Once in France, he shot the hated father twice in the head. A sad sire that bastard Thomas Lanski, bad father, bad husband, brown entrepreneur… Is it a crime to kill a corpse? Paul is sentenced to a one-year care obligation. During the twelve sessions with the psychiatrist, a certain Dr. Frédéric Guzman with a watery eye (conjunctivitis), and while a torrential rain falls continuously on Toulouse in this year 2031, Paul will reveal himself and reveal the roots of the evil, the “original disaster”: his birth concomitant with the death of his mother and that of his twin brother.
“At night I got up to see if my father was breathing”
Jean-Paul Dubois did not lose a brother, but experienced the loneliness of being an only child. (“even today, I would pay a lot to have a sister”) and saw his carefreeness disappear at the age of 8 when he learned that his father, ill, could die at the slightest annoyance: “At night I got up to see if he was breathing. “Happiness” can end like that, you keep this worry for life, the apprehension of what can arrive.” The back and forth with the novel multiplies. Dag Hammarskjöld, the former UN Secretary General, Paul’s false grandfather? Revered by Dubois since he was 11 years old. The kid’s aborted runaway? The orgy of wafers? The death of the dog? The movie about the Korean who painted water drops? End of life with dignity? Drawn from the author’s past. Missing psychiatry sessions. There, it is the writing that does the work.
The Origin of Tears, by Jean-Paul Dubois. Editions de l’Olivier. 256 p., €21.
.