Frédéric Beigbeder: “When I was little, there was sex everywhere, we came across exhibitionists walking in the streets“

With

, tome II d'

, Frédéric Beigbeder revives the autobiographical narrative to transport us to different times and places in his life, going from one Polaroid to another while he writes from the tip of the Arcachon basin, Cap Ferret, where his friend Benoît Bartherotte welcomed him.

Since 1985, this ex-Parisian businessman, introduced to him by Laura Smet in 2004, has been running a business that is both inspired by the myth of Sisyphus and the magnificent madness of Don Quixote: he defends the land threatened by the ocean. to swallow up – as Marguerite Duras' mother tried in

– by dumping millions of tons of rubble into the waves, forming a dyke… A project on which the author of

is meditating while delivering a kind of self-portrait that artfully weaves laughter and melancholy, hilarious passages and bursts of nostalgia.

Read alsoExclusive: Laura Smet, her new life in Cap Ferret

In video, Christiane Taubira moved by reading a passage from her book on November 13

Madame Figaro.–

I didn't think of it, but it is indeed a metaphor for our condition.

We screwed up nature, it will want to eliminate us, and then there will be no other solution than adaptation.

This is how Benoît Bartherotte defends the earth against the ocean – an image whose beauty lies in what it says about where we are as a species.

He claims that he is not fighting against nature, that he is just trying to circumvent its laws, but finally he has been struggling for fifty years, and we can say that he has succeeded where Duras' mother failed. , even if it remains temporary – just like us, for the rest.

What prompted you to follow up on

There is a link for me between confinement and memory.

If you cloister me, I remember – since I can't do geographical travel, I do time travel.

Nostalgia is in my case the result of seclusion.

For

, it was a police custody of thirty-six hours, there it is a confinement of several months.

When there are no more cinemas, theaters, restaurants or nightclubs, all that remains is to write about its past.

dates from twelve years ago, and I took the measure with

an interesting phenomenon: memories are not the same at almost sixty and at forty.

I put the accent on the divorce of my parents and the forgotten early childhood, there I look more at what I was able to manufacture between 20 and 50 years old.

I feel like Generation X, between boomers and millennials, hasn't told their story a lot

Frederic Beigbeder

Is it therefore also an evocation of your generation?

I feel like Generation X, between boomers and millennials, hasn't told their story a lot.

It was the time of the excessive consumer society, of incredible comfort, just before the Internet and the mobile phone, with total freedom.

But it was also the seventies, with parents who freed themselves from everything, including their children, who found themselves confused and sometimes mistreated... When I was little, there was sex everywhere, we met exhibitionists walking in the streets.

I was beaten by priests in a Catholic school, and at the same time I was very free – I went to school alone at 7 years old… We were often alone, in fact, alone in front of the TV or alone among many people.

At 13, I

was at Castel with my mother and my stepfather.

Was I in my place in this club at this age?

Probably not, and at the same time, it fascinated me - so much that I stayed at Castel all my life!

This time, there is no emoticon as a title, but sentences set with white spaces…

Each time I try to find a different form.

These may be gimmicks – in

, each chapter corresponded to a minute of the 9/11 tragedy;

in

we changed people with each chapter, I, you, he… This kind of almost visual artifice helps me to write.

I do it quite selfishly, and this time it's risky: you can take the book for a collection of aphorisms, while the sentences are linked.

Simply, we were forced to social distancing and it is reflected in my book… Spreading the sentences puts more pressure on the author – a bad sentence will be more visible –, and, at the same time, it inspires to say that 'we have one sentence to write a day and that his work will be finished.

I also note that there is a tendency in the contemporary novel to return much more often to the line, which I do not know if it is due to competition from social networks or to the fear of boring readers.

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Have you tried to build a wall of the past against the present, like your friend builds a dike against the ocean?

Since my beginnings in 1990, I have tried to save scraps of an amnesiac existence.

My generation has not – not yet, at least – faced a cataclysm.

All my life, I've been told that we've been lucky, that we've lived in a peaceful country, that we've never lacked for anything;

having grown up in Neuilly-sur-Seine, I could complain even less.

And now we are faced with a series of natural disasters and an endless pandemic.

When 9/11 happened, I wrote

.

But what awaits us is ten thousand times 9/11.

Our generation needs to tell how its cozy story will turn into something much less cozy!

Freedom, comfort will disappear, this system of eternal consumption is no longer viable, and if I have a vague coherence in my work, it is there.

"Everything is temporary, love, art, planet Earth, you, me, especially me" is a sentence of

that I could perfectly resign.

Can we see in the end of

The wording is a bit pompous, but, yes, I wanted to retain something of what I had been through and of those people.

When you do autobiographies, you write names and you tell yourself that they'll always be lying around somewhere, on a station turnstile, in an old yellowed paperback, when there aren't even any human beings left... writing is writing a name in sand.

It's an absurd step, but all the more beautiful for being absurd.

This is the great lesson of Cyrano de Bergerac - "It's much more beautiful when it's useless" -,

A dam against the Atlantic,

by Frédéric Beigbeder, Éditions Grasset, 272 p., €20.