Pierre Lemaitre: "Bumped childhood is a consubstantial theme in my work"

In

Pierre Lemaitre continues the enterprise begun with his trilogy

,

and

Leaf through the Century.

In the second part of his tetralogy devoted to the Glorious Thirties, we find the Pelletier family, discovered in

, grappling with multiple adventures.

The tone of the adventure novel gives way to that of the social novel, notably through the character of Hélène, who has become a journalist and who finds herself pregnant without having planned it.

The author thus explores abortion, the condition of women, the place of women at work and in society, a theme found in the trajectory of one of the brothers, Jean, who while trying to dodge an investigation for murder who is close to him, employs workers for his clothing business... From the Pieds Nickelés outfit of the father, Louis Pelletier, who is trying to make a boxing champion out of one of his employees, to the machinations of the daughter-in-law Geneviève, who, not content with persecuting her husband, is now attacking her daughter, we can only salute the

like Tom Thumb to better tell us about an era and a family, whose destinies he ties and unties with mastery.

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Miss Figaro.

– What difference do you make between your trilogy and the tetralogy of which

When I wrote my trilogy, I knew that I wanted to work on the inter-war period, and that I would take a secondary character from a novel to make it the main character of the following novel.

I did this on three books, and it was very amusing, but I was not going to continue on ten... And as I progressed, I thought of renewing my reflection by trying – very modestly – to walk in the not the authors of the great sagas, like

by Thomas Mann,

by Roger Martin du Gard,

by Émile Zola, all those big literary machines that I've always adored.

I had wanted to do it for a long time, but I had the feeling that the system of the choral novel and the family saga required technical tools that I was not sure I had.

Then, approaching the Trente Glorieuses and reflecting on what

would be like , I said to myself that I was 70 years old and that it was now or never…

Did you have the idea of ​​giving a more feminine orientation, even feminist, to this novel?

This is how things happened: I had planned to tell the story of a sibling in four volumes, and I told my publisher that the first volume would be titled Étienne, the second Hélène, the third François and the fourth Jean, called Bouboule.

He thought it was great, and naturally when I finished the first novel he said it would be nice to change the titles, which he was right about.

The fact remains that the first part is centered on Étienne and the second on Hélène… I looked at the situation of women at that time, and, among all the possible problems, I chose abortion;

, which was a great variation around the theme of motherhood, with the children we want, those we don't want, those we have by surprise, those we declare and those we hidden.

The whole novel is therefore articulated around a heroine who is 23 years old in the 1950s and who wants to have an abortion;

I associated it with the issue of disability in women with Nine, that of social revenge with Geneviève, or even that of triumphant motherhood with Angèle.

So many portraits that make up a novel about women in those years...

When I approach a historical period, I set aside the major events, I leave these massifs at the back of the courtyard, like a backdrop.

The events in which I am interested should not be too well known, so that the reader has the feeling of discovering or rediscovering something

Pierre Lemaitre

You have reversed the usual roles by dealing with abuse not by the father, but by the mother, via Geneviève…

Damaged childhood is a theme consubstantial with my work – it appears in

etc

It was Fitzgerald, I believe, who said that a novelist only ever has two or three things to say and that he simply tries to say them correctly... There was also a novelistic issue: I wanted readers to be embarrassed by the tandem formed by Jean and Geneviève.

I feel like I got there the day a reader observed that Geneviève was a frightfully harmful person, and that she felt sorry for poor Bouboule.

I replied that she was perhaps right in her feelings, but that, all the same, it is Jean who kills women and not Geneviève… Putting readers face to face with their contradictions is, I think, one of the functions of literature.

In

village

where I talked about the First World War through the war memorials.

When I dealt with the Second World War, I chose to focus not on the Resistance or the Occupation, but on the exodus.

I did not deal with May 1968, and when it was necessary to stick to a colonial war, I chose not the war in Algeria, but the war in Indochina.

When I approach a historical period, I set aside the major events, I leave these massifs at the back of the courtyard, like a backdrop.

The events in which I am interested must have two qualities.

First, they should not be too well known, so that the reader has the feeling of discovering or rediscovering something.

And the second quality?

They must be significant in relation to my view of the period.

In

, I wanted to talk about construction, concrete, and so I started to dig into architecture and new towns, before telling myself that I was falling into the through which I wanted to avoid – the equivalent of May 1968 or the Algerian war, if you will.

We had to look elsewhere.

And as I was leafing through

in the library – I spend my time doing that – I came across the Tignes dam in 1952. It was the first time, to my knowledge, that such an event aroused national emotion.

The journalist from

follows what happens a bit like Hélène will have to do, even if of course I transposed.

Through the barrage, I can approach the question of construction, the question of energy, the question of the rural exodus, the relationship between town and country.

The theme was rich, and I thought that by bringing the last days of this village to life I could touch upon quite a few subjects, and that from all of this was going to emerge, a little like water from the lake, a certain vision of the early 1950s.

Do you feel closer to the policeman, the journalist or the historian, who often populate or haunt your books?

I am not a writer, but a novelist: I create stories.

The novelist is someone whose job is to articulate his vision of the world from a romantic fiction.

So I'm firing on all cylinders.

I'm going to look for history, investigation, journalism, detective stories, scripts – or even westerns, for the character of Destouches, whom I built like a solitary cowboy.

All you're talking about is what I find in my toolbox when I get up in the morning.

Anything that can serve fiction interests me, because my job is to tell stories as well as possible.