when Maylis de Kerangal tells of Le Havre, her “Stalingrad-sur-Seine” – L’Express

From her, from her books, the reader remembers above all that she projects into literature a profession, a technique which only rarely appears there. Heart transplantation in Repair the livingconstruction engineering in Birth of a bridge or the art of trompe l’oeil in A world at your fingertips. Surf dayher latest novel published by Verticales, highlights another face of Maylis de Kerangal’s work: her taste for places. When others focus on social relationships and human feelings to awaken their imaginations, geography comes first. “I need a physical, sensory anchor, places give birth to fiction,” claims the novelist, convinced that the place where we grow up determines our relationship with the world.

Maylis de Kerangal was born in Toulon, but she made Le Havre her emotional and literary home base. More than ever, in Surf daywhich earned it a place on the second Goncourt list, the Norman town is a character. Because the body of a man was found on the beach with his telephone number on a cinema ticket, the narrator returns to the footsteps of her youth for an investigation that is less police than melancholy and interior. Maylis de Kerangal has no other family ties in Seine-Maritime other than the chance of life which led her father, a ship pilot, to settle his household there. She left the city at 18, her baccalaureate in hand and without regrets. Yet she continues to say “we” when she talks about it.

For the cover of the book, she proposed a photo that she had taken herself, a photo in which Le Havre looks like a little New York, with its skyline, the sea and its trailing sky which suggests the past depression. The writer has a thousand words to describe its geographical singularity. Because it opens onto a horizon, onto the high seas at the end of which lies the United States, the city expresses waiting but also the promise of departure. Because it is at the end of the rail line and without a university for a long time, it is also a terminus from which young people escape by train to Paris. “All this forms a particular geography, especially since the sea is a sea of ​​work, a sea of ​​commerce, harsh, rough, a little hostile,” continues Maylis de Kerangal. Little things shape habits. To resist the wind that crosses it, we cling to the cigarette or the sheet of paper that we hold in our hand; the changing weather makes even the slightest outing precarious.

The singularity of Le Havre is also historical. The city has long lived in contrast to the rest of the country. While in 1944, France celebrated the Liberation, it spoke of the Allies as “liberators”: on September 5 and 6, bombings left 2,000 dead in two days, the city was destroyed, martyred. In the 1980s, while in the United Kingdom and the United States, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan opened a liberal era, when capitalism was triumphant, Le Havre kept its old-fashioned communist municipality. “We had the feeling of a city that was going backwards, against history,” explains Maylis de Kerangal. For a long time, she will remain unloved. It is called “Stalingrad-sur-Seine”. Some visiting relatives do not hesitate to say “it feels like we are in Eastern Europe”, or even to ask “How can you live here?”

Farewell to the liner France in 1979, which brought together thousands of Le Havre residents at the port, was a painful moment of popular communion, as much as the closure of an emblematic factory could be elsewhere. However, the city has long had a very specific cultural policy – ​​wasn’t it here that the first cultural center was created by André Malraux in 1961? And the collections of the Museum of Modern Art bear witness to the wealth of part of the population. It will take a mayor, Edouard Philippe, who became Prime Minister, a swimming pool revisited by Jean Nouvel and the classification of Auguste Perret’s concrete city center as a UNESCO world heritage site for the people of Le Havre to look lovingly on the one that they have long called “our ugly city”.

Before Le Havre, other places shed their unique light on the stories of Maylis de Kerangal. In 2008, Corniche Kennedy is imbued with the heat and the Mediterranean which bathe the three kilometers of the Corniche of Marseille. For those familiar with the city, just read this adolescent column to hear the kids calling out to each other with accents, see them get off their scooters at the seaside and cuckold while diving from the rocks in front of a few sun-dark girls that they want to impress. In Tangent towards the easta compartment of the Trans-Siberian railway hosts the chance encounter between Hélène, a French woman, and Alyosha, a deserter soldier. Too many cigarettes smoked, the constant presence of a provodnitsa (train supervisor), Lake Baikal is enough to say promiscuity, flight and fear.

To tell the world as it is, the novelist carefully chooses the names of her characters. “They say a lot. Besides, change the first names in a book and have someone reread it, it’s no longer the same text,” continues Maylis de Kerangal, who says “dreaming about proper names” . When, in Surf day she names her police officer Zambra, she wants to evoke a figure of immigration, but also a Chilean writer she loves. The Ukrainian refugees on their way to exile only have first names as an incomplete identity when the narrator’s husband and daughter are called Blaise and Maïa, indicators of the Parisian social environment in which they evolve. “The sociology of first names fascinates me. A century ago, 90% of girls were called Marie to mark their integration into the nation. Nowadays, we want to distinguish ourselves and even if we baptize our daughter that way, we will write it with two r’s or a y”, takes up the one whose first name, rare, is also a derivative of Marie.

The “proper names” of the company chosen to describe an era

Cigarette brands, car brands… the novelist also works on the “proper names of society” which speak of a decade, an environment. Having an address @noos.fr or @wanadoo.fr, isn’t that a sign of a more advanced age than @gmail? If there is no question for her of renouncing literature, if she sprinkles her texts here and there with unusual adverbs like “evenly” or “beautifully” whose swing she likes but which some may find precious, Maylis de Kerangal aims to tell the story of a world anchored in reality, the world as it is, today and now.

To write Birth of a bridge is also about an era driven by the idea of ​​progress, of confidence in the future. Surf day is not just a nostalgic stroll, the book is crossed by ultra-contemporary themes, migration, drug trafficking, artificial intelligence, ghostingthis practice which consists of disappearing in the middle of a romantic relationship without ever giving any sign of life again. Some will see these as artificial digressions, but not her: “The novel is not intended to take on current events, but it is intended to make them heard, in a perhaps more modest but also more intense way.”

In the middle of an autumn punctuated by around fifty meetings in bookstores, Maylis de Kerangal is maturing the geography of her next text. She thinks of a house, an excuse to explore family relationships. A chalet in the mountains? A farmhouse in the scrubland? She doesn’t know yet. From the space chosen from the current abundance of his imagination the contours of his novel will emerge. With Maylis de Kerangal, fictions are always born from places.