With Listen to me until the end, Tess Gunty signs a great American novel

2023-05-05T04:28:38.640Z

At 30, the American author is the youngest winner of the National Book Award since Philip Roth. A happy omen for the one who tears the American dream to pieces, in a totally addictive first novel. Interview.

Listen to Me Until the End,

first novel that made her the youngest winner of the National Book Award since Philip Roth, Tess Gunty features a cast of characters as eccentric as they are endearing, from the man who likes to coat himself in fluorescent liquid to a Hollywood actress who wrote her own obituary, to a mother terrified of her baby's eyes.

At its center, a blonde and diaphanous heroine of radiant beauty, Blandine, who finally realizes a mystical dream (that of leaving her body), except that she has been stabbed... Mixing genres (one chapter is entirely drawn) and masterfully playing with points of view, Tess Gunty goes back in time, recomposes the puzzle, to unfold the events that led to this bloody denouement.

On video,
The Hill We Climb
, a poem by Amanda Gorman

Madame Figaro

.
– How would you describe your heroine?

Tess Gunty.

– Like a young girl who dreams of being a mystic when she has no faith.

In the ransacked post-industrial environment in which she evolves, Blandine doubts everything, but remains determined to reach a form of divine ecstasy, not for spiritual or religious reasons, but because she is an animal trapped: she wants to leave a foreign body.

Orphaned, she went from home to home and suffered multiple violence because of her sex and her vulnerability.

The mystics of the Middle Ages are a way out for her.

It is impossible for her to leave the town of Vacca Vale – she has no money, no diplomas, no family, no connections – but she can escape thanks to her spirit.

Hildegarde de Bingen then became his model: while d'

other mystics adopt a posture of submission, Hildegard possessed a form of power.

She had confidence in her mind and showed a voracious curiosity, she was interested in mathematics, medicine, music, biology...

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If Blandine didn't graduate, it's due to the affair she had with one of her teachers in high school…

It was very important to show how this story had shattered her life.

I wrote this part of the text during MeToo, thinking of all these relationships to which both parties had – allegedly – consented and which had nevertheless had catastrophic consequences on the life of one of the parties, always the even… There cannot be no power imbalance between a student and her teacher, in whom she sees a mentor.

It destroys Blandine's sense of values, her self-confidence, her faith in the education she receives.

She quits high school and continues to educate herself, but she doesn't

There cannot be no power imbalance between a student and her teacher, in whom she sees a mentor.

Tess Gunty

Why did you choose this polyphonic structure?

I thought of certain novels by George Eliot, James Joyce or, more recently, by David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, who believed in their reader enough to allow him to create his own experience within a complex and varied ecosystem.

And just as in any healthy ecosystem, each form of life is essential, I wanted each character, without necessarily having a key role in the plot, to enrich the book as a whole.

It was also about leaving an individualist focus that American capitalism greatly encouraged: during the Cold War, the CIA infiltrated writing programs to eliminate collective histories for fear of communism.

This had consequences for American literature, and if the

Listen to me until the end

was also a way to fight against all that.

“The internet and social media actually only reinforce isolation”

Your characters all have one thing in common: their loneliness…

Indeed.

A loneliness that is not new, but exacerbated by new realities.

Today, much less emphasis is placed on the notion of community;

people move, lead nomadic existences, change jobs, leave their families… Moreover, the Internet and social media, which claim to enlarge the circle of your relationships, in reality only reinforce your isolation.

Finally, the environment of this city in crisis that is Vacca Vale has extinguished all hope among its inhabitants.

They were made at birth with promises of security and comfort that were betrayed.

You come from a city comparable to the one you describe.

Were you inspired by it?

I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, where the Studebaker automobile company played a key role, and the story of the Zorn company in the novel is very close to that of Studebaker.

Like many cities, South Bend was born from the economic activity of the automobile, and began to die when this industry abandoned it.

Studebaker, like Zorn, ensured a prosperous existence for everyone for a century, and was a source of pride and an important pole of attraction.

Then it closed in the 1960s, and although I was born thirty years later, its ghost continued to haunt the town, giving the feeling that we lived in some otherworldly form.

The economic devastation could be seen in the expressions on people's faces, in the way they made decisions,

in violence, poverty, delinquency, much higher than the rest of Indiana or the national average.

When I was in high school, I saw South Bend appear on the list of ten cities in the United States dying... Each city has its own way of experiencing this despair, but in writing about it, I have started to see it as a pattern, a phenomenon, that was happening all over the Rust Belt.

And even though millions of people live in these regions, they remain invisible: no art reflects them, and when no film, no book, no series speaks about what you live, you have the impression that your stories and your lives don't matter.