Fall 1999: Marc Levy receives the famous call from Steven Spielberg announcing that he wants to buy the adaptation rights toAnd if it were true… – and it’s not a lie. The novel hasn’t even been released yet and now its author, an unknown 38-year-old, becomes famous overnight. As is often the case in fairy tales, the hero is struck by bad luck. While Levy’s book gets off to a flying start, some critics immediately block their noses – and continue to block them again.
Sitting opposite us at the bar of the Parisian hotel where he receives us, the writer with 50 million copies sold worldwide smiles at this old misunderstanding: “My first novel is a romantic comedy: I was therefore stamped lifelong author of romantic comedies When you look at what I’ve done, it’s funny… Where are you? is happening in humanitarian work in Honduras. It talks about misery, poverty, the inability to save, the difficulty of loving, there are 17,000 dead after two pages – it’s anything but a comedy. But all the press at the time was talking about my new romantic comedy. It wasn’t very serious, it was even fun… Children of Liberty is inspired by the life of my father, who was a resistance fighter. The Strange Journey of Mr Daldry evokes the Armenian genocide. If I had to do it again is a novel about the missing children of the Argentine dictatorship; it’s about torture, with lots of atrocities and unbearable scenes. Another idea of happiness looks at the Weather Underground, which merged with the Black Panthers before the FBI infiltrated the movement and committed terrorist acts in its name to discredit it. My trilogy 9 (It happened at night, The Twilight of the Wild Animals And Noah) is a political thriller. As for The Symphony of Monstersit deals with the war in Ukraine. But every time, bam, romantic comedy! There is an extraordinary lightness in not giving a damn about what people say about you. Not looking at myself in the mirror, I don’t care. Readers know…”
Exiled in London then in New York from the start of his stardom in the year 2000, Marc Levy observes all this from afar. If other authors do better than him in France, his sales figures remain colossal. His penultimate novel, Edye everything and life lights upwas sold out of 430,000 copies in all formats. The last one, The Symphony of Monstersis at 185,000 copies in large format. Already printed in 243,000 copies, the new one, The Bookstore of Banned Booksshould experience the same success. Is Marc Levy a cursed writer? All authors are, deep down. The misunderstood avant-gardes who drown in flops and anonymity (often rightly so) like certain popular novelists whom the so-called arbiters of good taste do not take the time to read.
“My father often wondered what a book was for”
For curious minds who would like to get rid of the prejudices they have towards our man, we recommend viewing Marc Levy, confidentiala documentary broadcast on Canal + in 2022. Full of humor about himself but melancholy as can be desired, Levy appears endearing, particularly when he returns to the scene of his early years, in Villefranche-sur-Mer. Would he have remained this sad child? “My father often wondered what a book was for. It seems to me that the first book we remember is the one that made us no longer feel alone – of that loneliness of adolescence that no one admits and I don’t recognize it particularly when I arrived in Paris in 6th grade. The Parisians look down on the provincials, and the transition from primary to secondary school was not easy. Words by Prévert, and I came across ‘Le Cancre’ – an electric shock. Then The Night of Times of Barjavel made me dream, and I took an incredible slap with The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck…”
Now 63, Marc continues to speak often about his father, Raymond Levy, an art publisher who escaped from the train taking him to Dachau and was later the author of Schwartzenmurtz or party spirit (published by Albin Michel in 1977), a novel which earned him his quarter of an hour of fame at Apostrophes : “He was very funny. In Schwartzenmurtzeverything is in the second degree, there is a form of self-deprecation: it is the story of a man who joins the Resistance without doing it on purpose! He does everything almost in spite of himself… My father was passionate about words. When his friend Bernard Pivot had doubts about a word, he called him first! ” In the year 2000, it was the turn of the son (visibly scared to death when we see the images again) to go to Culture broth : “Pivot was incorruptible. He had not invited me out of friendship for my father – he never would have done so. Afterwards, he was delighted with my success but did not speak to me about my books. If you come across a doctor friend at a dinner, you don’t bother him with your sore throat Pivot was like that… Ten years ago, we met again in Madrid: we had dinner together for four hours, but we hadn’t. spoken nor of my novels or its broadcasts.”
“A story inventor turned writer”
Here we touch on one of Levy’s mysteries. Close to Pivot, his father was also close to Jorge Semprun and Michel Piccoli. In short, young Marc was a child of the ball. How is it that he never had the card, unlike Vincent Cassel, Sylvain Tesson, Thomas Dutronc and so many other more or less gifted “sons of” who only reap praise in the cultural sphere? While we pass everything to these heirs, we forgive nothing to Levy. Guillaume Gallienne, one of his long-time friends (even before And if it was true…), slips in this explanation: “Marc is not a man of letters but an inventor of stories who became a writer.” The Goncourt Prize is not for tomorrow.
With The Bookstore of Banned Bookshas Marc Levy signed a romantic comedy? Please don’t bring up those bad words. This contemporary fable, which features a bookseller prosecuted for having secretly distributed prohibited novels, is a reflection on the place of literature in our societies where freedom tends to decline. A newspaper, titled The Lighthousesupports the authoritarian regime. Does Levy have any real press headlines in mind? “When democracies really take imperative measures to protect themselves, the acquisition of media by oligarchs will be prohibited. It should be. It’s impossible, as if pharmacies and hospitals were bought by pharmaceutical labs. We can do otherwise: Guardian is an independent newspaper, one of the largest news dailies in the world, and probably one of the most credible. Conversely, the editorial line recently taken by the JDD by Vincent Bolloré demonstrates exactly the excesses that occur when a man who has a lot of money buys a widely circulated newspaper and uses it as his ideological weapon. I read the JDD from last week: its journalists consider that the great issue which will destroy our civilization is ‘woke’ culture. Their public enemy No. 1 is the drag queen or the transsexual – because, as we know, there has been an explosion in the number of murders committed by transsexuals in recent years.” This is the real Levy: critical and willingly caustic. Let us no longer disguise him as an author of romantic novels.
The Bookstore of Banned Books, pby Marc Levy. Robert Laffont, 343 p., €21.90.
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