Is the fetus, in its mother’s womb, permeable to smells, lights, voices, in short, to a country…? Mathieu Belezi, conceived in Algeria while his father was doing his military service there as a paratrooper in 1953-1954, puts forward the hypothesis. Who knows if this is not to please her interlocutor at the Place de la Bastille, in Paris, who, on the occasion of the publication of I, the glorious, is surprised by his Algerian obsession, he, who, born in Limoges and living in Rome, has traveled the planet but has never set foot on the land of Albert Camus…
More seriously, Mathieu Belezi explains his tetralogy, begun in 2008, by a staggering lack, in his eyes, of works on colonization. “In France, who talks about the Algerian conquest?, the author ignites, in his own way, mezza voce. On the end of French Algeria, we have Laurent Mauvignier, Jérôme Ferrari, Erik Orsenna and a few others, but over the previous hundred years of turpitude, not many people, with the exception of a handful of historians such as Pierre Darmon and his formidable A century of Algerian passions. 1830-1945, (Fayard, 2009), Catherine Brun (in the review Memories in play) or Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer (At the origins of the Algerian WarDiscovery). Still, the amnesia continues. Emmanuel Macron still dared to speak recently of a ‘love affair’ with Algeria. A clumsy expression to say the least, it’s a story of massacres, it’s not a love story.”
“The love story”, Mathieu Belezi lives it with his new editor of Tripode, the fiery Frédéric Martin, who in 2022 became enthusiastic about his work (some 20 novels all the same) and for Attack the earth and the sun, which none of its great historic houses (Albin Michel, Flammarion) wanted. This novel, which narrates the atrocities committed in the 1840s through the voices of Séraphine, who came to settle in Algeria with her husband, and a soldier of the French army, notably received the Inter 2023 Book Prize. Result : 70,000 copies sold, while his previous opuses sailed between 2,000 and 4,000 sales, and transfers of rights to cinema and in nine languages. And Mathieu Belezi moves from the shadows to the light, almost dressed in the clothes of the cult author. “That people talk about me disturbs me enormously,” confides the writer, a bit like Nicolas de Staël when American success fell on him and who then said: ‘Since it’s sold, it’s ruined , I lost my universe and my silence […] go back ! To be nobody to others and everything to myself.’ Is that why I haven’t written anything for a year?”
A baroque novel with accents of magical realism
Failing to write, Belezi knits. So he resumed The Old Fools, the second part of his tetralogy published in 2011 and which he split into two, as initially planned, with on one side I, the gloriouswritten in the first person by a great colonist, Albert Vandel, a megalomaniacal ogre, and on the other, Crocodile Time (illustrations by Kamel Khélif), third-person account of the bloody conquest of the desert by the same Captain Vandel. What could be more contrasting than the frail Mathieu Belezi and the monstrous Albert Vandel, 140 years old and 140 kilos of colonial flesh, hunter of lions, women and Arabs? And yet, it is indeed the voice of this burlesque monster, extremely rich through plundering, which inhabited him throughout the writing of this baroque novel with accents of the magical realism of Garcia Marquez, Carpentier, Onetti, if dear to the author.
The novelist brings his antihero through a century of madness and debauchery of all kinds (his “24 centimeter cock” never rests) through epic scenes – including those of the rape of a Jewish baroness and the massacre of her family , of the gargantuan dinner offered to President Doumergue during the Centenary celebrations in 1930, of his victory over “the most ferocious of lions”, of his fight against the insurgents of 1871 or even of his flight to Ubu Roi, surrounded by his old fools, towards South African apartheid. Mathieu Belezi, who grabs the reader by the throat, could also appear as an old madman, but a brilliant old madman whose powerful language, with its torrent of words and his angry figures of speech, commands admiration.
I, the glorious, by Mathieu Belezi. Le Tripod, 332 p., €21.
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