Pierre Lemaitre is a great supporter of age.
Listening to him speak as we celebrate our birthdays is an even better balm than his books.
The Goncourt-winning French author has just published in Spain
La cholera y el silencio
(Salamandra), the second installment of his family saga set in post-war France, a highly entertaining plot with which he expands an audience that he already conquered with
See You Up There.
He was born in Paris 72 years ago and defends them as the great driving force behind his creation.
Ask.
You have been a psychologist, teacher and writer.
What has each job brought you?
A.
I think nothing.
What has brought me to my work is age, the multitude of experiences.
We don't write the same first novel at 25 as we did at 56, and I published my first novel at 56. You don't do that without benefiting from the entire
background
that 40 years of professional and social life represent.
My only advantage is that I am old.
Getting older doesn't have many things, but there is one, which is capitalizing on your experience.
Q.
Black or historical novel?
Advantages and disadvantages?
A.
I love the detective genre but not the historical one, because in this the story is more important than the novel.
I am not a historian, I am a novelist.
I rely on history, of course, but I place my work in the adventure genre.
I try to ensure that the documentation is not above my characters and that the story does not replace their emotions.
I use all the tools of the police genre: suspense, twists, surprise, false clues... but to write novels that are not police.
That is to say: I have changed my literary register, but I do it with the same tools that I used for the police.
Q.
Even the serial.
A.
The serial is the most modern thing that exists.
All television series are built on their narrative system: an episode with a twist ending that makes you want to watch the second and so on.
The series have borrowed that narrative system, but it is we, the novelists, who invented it.
We lend it voluntarily, yes, but it does not mean that we give it up.
Q.
You have planned to finish this second trilogy set in the post-war period and even a third until reaching the present.
When will you write about today?
A.
According to my calculations, when I am 93 years old.
My series of ten novels will end in 1989, when I will be 78 or 79 years old.
I think I will address the current period when it is a centenary.
Q.
That's optimism!
Why have you chosen to count an entire century?
A.
It's my century.
I was born in 1951, in the middle of this century and I am attached to it.
I am a man of the 20th century and a writer of the 21st.
And as such, I try to count the reference century for most of my life.
And there is another reason.
When I understood how the 20th century worked, I thought that we could cut it into three periods that each lasted 30 years: the interwars;
a second part, after World War II, which I call “the glorious years,” which I am working on;
and from 1973 to 1989, when the wall fell.
It's as if the century had told me: look, I've made the structure for you, now you just have to comply.
Q.
This time you have chosen the topic of abortion.
Because?
A.
I wanted to point to male domination and abortion is one of its worst figures.
Men have wanted to exercise power over women based on their bodies and motherhood.
Q.
How was abortion documented in the 1950s?
A.
It has been difficult because there was very little material.
Abortion is a kind of blind spot in history.
I have worked with two historians who were specialists in it and I have squeezed the most out of them.
Q.
Do you enjoy documenting?
A.
No, not at all!
I do it out of respect for my readers and the truth, almost for moral reasons, but that is not the core of my work.
The core of my work is telling stories.
Q.
And the greatest pleasure?
Is it pure writing?
A.
Yes. And also the programming, making the plan, the narrative strategy, thinking about what is going to happen and what I can do.
Q.
Your characters treat each other badly.
R.
Hitchcock said that the worse the bad guy, the better the movie.
In a novel you need strong antagonists.
Barcelona on February 26, 2024. Pierre Lemaitre poses at the French Institute of Barcelona. Kike Rincon
Q.
Your book also addresses the beginning of consumerism.
What is the biggest change in society at this time?
A.
At that time they did not realize that they were manufacturing climate change, which will surely be our end.
They believed that they had to consume a lot of oil and plastic, they lived in euphoria and economic enthusiasm as if the world were a teenager and there was no tomorrow.
Now we are in that tomorrow.
Q. It
also reflects fear.
To communism, to labor rights.
A.
Yes, it was a scary time.
The domination of capitalism has always generated fear: of declassification, of poverty, of ecological catastrophe, of hierarchies, of unemployment and the worst.
Capitalism is a weapon that has managed to play with all fears.
And the 20th century is that of the domination of capitalism.
The ecological crisis is a crisis of capitalism, there is no other culprit.
It is what has made us believe that it was okay to consume so much, as if it were synonymous with well-being.
Yesterday I arrived in Barcelona yesterday and my wife warned me that there was a lack of water.
It is the first time in 72 years that I arrive at a place and they ask me to be careful, it is incredible news for me.
Capitalism makes us think that the most important thing in the world is to take the plane to get to Barcelona, nothing more.
One day we won't be able to take that plane.
It will be prohibited except for exceptional causes.
Or they will tell us: you no longer have credit to use more water.
It's over, there is no more.
Only when we have our nose to the wall will we do something.
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