It is as if someone had offered him a rendezvous on the moon, or, to get to the heart of the matter, if someone had suggested to his hero, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) to take a TGV between Turin and Basel… Teams, Zoom, WhatsApp… Quèsaco? Guy Boley answers us in substance, who is already struggling to write a message with his small telephone from the 2000s. Well, it is from his landline and his small Jura village (72 inhabitants, 80 cows) that the conversation begins, cheerful, on the occasion of the release ofTo my sister and onlyamazing fiction on the “Shakespearian” relationship between the German philosopher and his she-devil sister, Elisabeth.
“Become what you are”
“I’m close to angels, Boley tells us, I’ve exceeded my personal Annapurna as a writer. To publish with Grasset, to have prizes, to write a book with Pierre Michon…” It’s because he’s come a long way, this son of a blacksmith from Besançon, raised in a house without books, and who has not stopped devouring writings since the revelation, at age 10, of Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) reinforced, at 15 years, by Contemplations of Victor Hugo, until having let himself be invaded today, at the age of 71, by 15,000 books which he is desperately trying to put away. Bricklayer, bus driver, fire-eater, stuntman, tightrope walker, street musician, playwright… “Become what you are”… Since entering the literary scene in 2016, with sons of firecontinued in 2018 by When God was boxing as an amateur, the press repeatedly recalls the atypical career of the applicant with the white beard. Guy Boley is amused by it, who suffered thirty years of refusal (“I improved myself”) before publishing his two autobiographical novels and delivering, this fall, another formidable fiction… family on the astonishing relations between Friedrich and his younger sister, dead, very rich, thirty-five years after his brother blaster.
A flesh-and-blood Nietzsche
Guy Boley ignites: “Nietzsche fought for the good of humanity, he wanted to ‘awaken in the vulgar the sleeping genius’, advocated a world of peace and not of war. A world of artists, who would towards beauty. I read horrors about him, that’s false. He was neither anti-Semitic, nor facho, nor misogynist. I wanted to show that he had been Nazified, in particular Elisabeth, who faked and falsified many of his writings. (In short) silence. “Sometimes it is not tenable, it is true, but I am in bad faith, I like it a lot.” His meeting with the sickly man from Naumbourg (Saxony) dates from 2015, when he put on a dance show over the last ten years of the philosopher. “Until then, I had read Thus spake Zarathustra like everyone else and had understood nothing, like everyone else, except for a few aphorisms.”
Since then, he has made up for it: on the strength of the 200 pages of notes from the time, the 110 works compiled in his library, and three years of hard work, here he is delivering to us a Nietzsche in the flesh, “half- poet, half-philosopher, half-moralist playing words like Paganini on his violin or Liszt on his piano, unclassifiable writer […] whose sole purpose would have been to set fire to everything: to morality, to the State, to religion, to the outdated values of an exhausted Germany”. All in a poetic, robust, colorful, metaphorical, inventive language , drinkable, short, exciting, fruit of an endless labor (“I rewrite 50 times the same sentence”).
“To my sister and only”, by Guy Bolet
© / Grasset
Elisabeth, “saint” then witch
Two qualities are striking when reading his 480-page novel-river: the ease with which the author brings the neophyte reader into the world of the brilliant writer and his “scree of masterpieces” (Twilight of the idols, The Antichrist, Ecce gay, etc.) ; and his dexterity in showing the evolution of an Elisabeth, who, from entirely devoted (body and soul?) to her brother, will turn into an obscene witch. And then there are those scenes that Boley, one feels, took great pleasure in writing: the chapters on Wagner and Cosima, which begin with Friedrich’s visits to Tribschen and conclude with the frightening anti-Semitism of the accursed couple; and those devoted to the less unsympathetic name Bernhard Förster, who left with his wife, Elisabeth, to found a delirious Aryan colony in Paraguay, Nueva Germania. It’s hard to imagine that the juries will remain insensitive to the passion of the ex-fire-eater, smuggler of emotions and scout of destinies…
To my sister and only, by Guy Boley. Grasset, 480 pages, €24.