After
La Condition Pavillonnaire,
where she rewrote
a Madame Bovary
version from the 1980s and 1990s, or even
Three Times the End of the World
, which revisited
Robinson Crusoe
(“Not under the sun and the coconut trees, because it was too easy, but in the Lot"), Sophie Divry tackles serial literature in a way that is as pleasant as it is gripping.
To discover
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Also read: Nathalie Rykiel: “In moments of doubt, it is very positive to look back and see the path accomplished”
As its title indicates,
Fantastique Histoire d'amour
combines a love story and a fantastic story, but also a detective story. We follow in turn Bastien, a solitary labor inspector, and Maïa, a scientific journalist, against the backdrop of a race for the mysterious "scintillating crystal", a more than precious stone that various parties seek to monopolize over the course of a work that is devouring itself.
Madame Figaro.
– Were you inspired by the codes of the thriller and the series, as indicated on the back cover of your book?
Sophie Divry.
–
I don’t watch that many series. I wanted, in the tradition of the serial novel, a well-conducted and well-rounded story. These days, we too often leave the pleasure of a good story, very present in the romance genre, to the cinema.
Fantastique Histoire d'amour
is intended to be a catchy work, rich in adventures, with these two characters that we follow in turn and who come together. The detective story was very enjoyable to build, but I was more interested in the romantic relationship, in psychology, in the moral fight against one's own limits and one's own fears... For me, this book is also a novel post-Covid, where people touch each other, make love, have contact…
Why did you want to alternate points of view?
In our society, if a book weaves together chapters narrated by a man and chapters that follow a woman, with a title like
Fantastic Love Story
, we know that something is going to happen... I decided to use an alternation of focal lengths in order to trap the reader and play with their expectations. Then, if Bastien came easily to me, the female character was more difficult to build. Bastien therefore says “I”, while Maïa is written in the third person. I had more trouble with her: I changed her first name twice, her job three times… I kept coming back to the character of Sophie in
When the Devil Came Out of the Bathroom
. To keep my heroine away from me, I decided to make her do two activities that are the opposite of my practices: indoor sports, because, like any self-respecting intellectual snob, running on a treadmill has always seemed stupid to me, and the Rubik's Cube, which went well with the profession of scientific journalist, but which, as a literary journalist, seemed to me an impossible hobby... And now I go to the gym twice a week and, to relax, I have played a Rubik's Cube while writing the novel... I became her!
Your hero is a labor inspector, your heroine a scientific journalist encountering economic difficulties... Was anchoring the novel in social issues important to you
?
This dimension – dealing with our relationship to society, our relationship to others, our economic status, our relationship to business… – pursues me book after book. I write novels for today, for today's readers, I don't design heroes uprooted from society. I am attached to the place it gives us, to the place we would like to occupy within it, the constraints that this supposes... I talked a lot about unemployment in
When the Devil came out of the bathroom
. Getting fired, looking for a job, that interests me, and I also like seeing and showing people at work. When I talk about my heroine's profession as a journalist, I say how she proceeds, the questions she asks, the way she angles and writes her articles. I wanted to describe all this precisely, especially since this profession is quite under attack.
For me, this book is a post-Covid novel, where people touch each other, make love, have contact
Sophie Divry
Diving into a little-known profession, as a labor inspector, must also be stimulating...
Except in Nicolas Mathieu's novel
Aux Animals la Guerre
, we find few labor inspector characters, and it is always interesting, in fact, to do not tackle an area that has been rehashed a hundred times. For a detective story, it's all the richer as the labor inspector carries out investigations. He sticks his nose where no one will see, he is very independent, there is a sheriff and social worker side, I find that it is a social function that is not exploited enough, with strong romantic potential. But after a while, both characters find themselves either fired or laid off: I also needed available characters to launch them into incredible adventures, and unemployment seemed like a credible solution!
How did you come up with the idea of the sparkling crystal that all the protagonists are fighting over?
The novel is like a Neapolitan cake: a fantastic layer, a realistic layer and a love story layer, the main one. The fantasy layer was the most complicated to process. I wanted a scientific derailment, but one that remained credible. The crystal symbolically represents a death drive, a destructive drive. But above all I needed something that explains why the first crime is unexplained, and why Bastien returns, like a wounded animal, to nestle at the bottom of a hydraulic compactor... I went to Cern, in Geneva, to meet a physicist and, given my weak skills in science, I decided to limit myself to the materials that are used in the CMS detector, one of the four that observes what is happening in the accelerator. I chose a particular material, with a nice name, “scintillating crystal”, with a precious stone appearance… Just as synthetic crystals to make ethical precious stones exist, scintillating crystals exist, they actually grow in ovens and have extremely interesting abilities to see and reflect light. This documentation work allowed me to realistically nourish this aspect of the plot.
What drives you to write, generally speaking?
I always need an aesthetic and literary challenge. Revisiting classics with
The Pavilion Condition
and
Three Times the End of the World
, designing a philosophical tale without any human being with
Curiosity
(the only character is a robot), talking about unemployment and precariousness, but not in a sinister way, in
When the Devil came out of the bathroom
... These challenges constitute my driving force, but my deep goal is to fictionalize our world in order to better understand and grasp it. I want to let myself be moved by what surrounds us, but without simply transcribing it like a journalist would. Fiction, this ability to tell a story that does not exist, also has a political character. Writing about oneself is important, if only from a societal point of view, but it's a bit like a map on a scale of 1... And then, I love moving people, the idea that they feel joy, sadness, empathy just thanks to my sentences is extraordinary.
Fantastic Love Story
, by Sophie Divry, Éditions du Seuil, 512 p., €24. Press Department