It slips into the list of best sellers, among Marc Lévy, Michel Bussi, Delphine de Vigan or the Goncourt “The Anomaly”, with a journalistic account.
Another form of anomaly.
A surprise success of which Florence Aubenas is a repeat offender, ten years after "Le quai de Ouistreham".
The reporter told of her hiring as an interim cleaning lady looking for (very) odd jobs in Caen and gave a face to these "invisible" women: 450,000 copies sold.
The print run of "The Unknown of the Post", released in February, has already exceeded 100,000. Another true story, but crazy: the murder of the only postwoman in a village in the Jura, in which was involved the actor Gérald Thomassin, imprisoned, released, then disappeared in the wild for two years, while he has since benefited from a dismissal.
It is not known if the César of the best male hope in 1991 is still alive.
So many mysteries in this crime perhaps elucidated but still not judged.
Enigmatic, Florence Aubenas is in her own way.
In 2005, special correspondent for Liberation in Iraq, the journalist was captured and held hostage.
For five months, his face is displayed in enormous on the pediment of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, and in each newscast, so as not to forget it.
After these extreme experiences, most of the ex-hostages change their lives, write the story of their captivity to exorcise them.
She won't do either.
And will find the discretion on which it feeds, to make others talk more than itself.
“When you've been in a hostage situation, you don't care what other people think.
It gives a kind of latitude ”.
LP / Olivier Corsan
“I didn't want to be an ex-hostage, the one we call every time.
And I didn't want to write a book about it.
The guys who held me waved their Kalashnikovs one day saying they were going to kill me, then the next day they smiled at me, telling me that I was a journalist and that I would become as famous as Lady Di by writing my story.
It was driving me crazy.
I told myself that I would never write this book, so as not to please these assholes, these bastards, ”explains the one who writes today in Le Monde.
A year around the village of Bugey
How to be forgotten?
“Notoriety doesn't last.
Four years later, for the Quai de Ouistreham, I am hired under my real name ... "What his captivity has changed is daring to write long stories:" Before, I would never have allowed myself.
It wasn't for me.
When you've been in a hostage situation, you don't care what other people think.
It gives a kind of latitude ”.
Like financing "The unknown post" herself, by taking a sabbatical year, half of which spent from one Airbnb to another around the village of Bugey where the postwoman was murdered.
The entrance to his apartment in Montmartre is eaten up by his library.
LP / Olivier Corsan
She discovers there what she loves, a France that we do not talk about: “A lot of people live in Airbnbs because they have found a job but don't know if it will last, and go home on weekends. .
Their wife, their companion lives elsewhere.
Many rented a room like me, everyone took out their meals in the common room in the evening.
It's less sinister, and I love it ”.
We can easily imagine her, she who loves to listen to or write stories.
The entrance to her apartment in Montmartre is eaten up by her library: all Simenon, Flaubert - she reads "Madame Bovary" once a year - Maupassant, Balzac, Zola, writers from Eastern Europe and Americans, including specialists in "non-fiction", the genre of which she became the queen in France.
"L'inconnu de la poste" is a Simenon thriller but in which every detail has been verified.
She spent years there, driving her publisher crazy: “My book was supposed to be finished in 2017. The first version was a thousand pages long.
Do you see those boxes up there?
I had amassed a huge amount of documentation on the case and the region, three quarters of which did not serve me well ”.
She cuts two-thirds, rewrites in first person, but that's not her either.
Always erasure.
And the business which continues to rebound.
“Humbly I admit that I have erred”.
These places that emerge from oblivion, his signature
For seven years, she will have spent almost all her vacations around this village with an improbable and very real name, Montreal-la-Cluse, near a sumptuous lake and forests: “I have friends over there, my little ones. habits, a life, ”she laughs.
Florence Aubenas laughs, likes to drink, eat, continue to write every day for her diary ... LP / Olivier Corsan
All this time spent, these places that emerge from oblivion, it is his signature: “We are not that many to do like that.
Often, the news feeds the book.
In the Gregory affair, it took years to see the Vologne.
We had no idea of the region, we did not visualize it.
The Daval affair, do you see the places, the forest?
No ".
She tells about Nantua and this very industrialized Bugey valley but passed under the news radars: “Beyond the news item, my book also tells about a region marked by the desertion of public services.
This generalized closure leads to an impoverishment of the premises.
The fact of murdering a postwoman alone in her post, without a surveillance camera, because we thought that in a village it was useless, for 2,500 euros, at 8:30 in the morning, that means something.
We think that the problems are in the big cities, and there you go ... "
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How does she explain the success of her two such different books, marked by a long-lasting immersion in the deep France of those whom we do not talk about: "I'm looking for something that looks like an adventure, where you have to be? invent a life, rent an apartment in Caen or Nantua.
I let go and I don't pretend, I don't play.
"
This discretion in her is so impressive that no one dares to question her about her private life.
No doubt she has one.
She laughs, she likes to drink, eat, continue to write daily for her journal on what is happening, and more than anything, leave without knowing what she will find: “There, I'm going to the Cévennes.
I don't know if there is a subject.
But you have to go and see ”.
She has just turned sixty.
With each departure, it seems like everything begins.
EDITOR'S RATING: 5/5
"The unknown of the post"
, by Florence Aubenas, 236 pages, 19 euros.