Listen to Pierre Lemaitre is almost as fun as reading it. A fair point of vanity and lucidity that irritates and delights. Halfway between the perched and interview, Lemaitre shuns those words before but reaffirms perhaps-in the most important: the See you up there (Salamandra ) , the novel that won the 2013 Goncourt Prize, becoming a whole-more selling half a million copies in Spain. Lemaitre, who has visited Spain to attend the Hay Festival Segovia (the guest country this year is France) talks about his recent success after nearly a year since being honored with an award at whose track record are, for example, Proust and Malraux.
this novel is the story of a friendship in the war? No, it’s the story of a scam, he says: that the characters suffer and perpetrators. Set in the Grand Guerre , which this year marks the centenary is fulfilled, See you up there , according to critics, are looking to the public without sacrificing literary quality. Some spoke of it as a extraordinary novel , others as a light comedy. The action takes place in the first final months of the war, just before declaring the armistice, when vain Pradelle lieutenant decides to launch an absurd offensive in order to derive some personal benefit.
Listen to Pierre Lemaitre is almost as fun as reading it, a point just vanity and lucidity that irritates and delights
Two of his men go seriously wounded the soldier of humble origins and pusillanimous character, Albert , which is hit by a shell, and his partner, Edouard , who manages to save about to suffocate; in the attempt, a piece of shrapnel disfigures the face. Albert is indebted to Édouard , to the point that helps you change identity to be given dead. A long and complicated life adventure that happens in the atmosphere and in war to peace following months reveal how each character-from Pradelle Edouard- to return to a miserable reality , you do not remember or the hosts.
is there in a jumble of black and picaresque novel of social commentary and political characters will take hold ldonde crime, perhaps, for another-one-the revenge of society he sent them to war. In between, of course, the love story comes to water, according to Spanish publishers, creates a perfect fusion between high literature and popular literature, a separation that a Lemaitre does not make it funny but has already placed him in the way of a film adaptation of the novel.
this novel is the story of a friendship in the war? No, it’s the story of a scam
Professor of Literature for adults, Lemaitre decided to change course and become a writer at age 56. He debuted with a novel. Soon it will be released in Spain (it will Alfaguara) Wedding Dress , the thriller with which unveiled.
– See you up there matches the tragedy and the picaresque; drama and black humor; chronic as well as the portrait. Do you have every intention of a nineteenth-century novel?
One thing is what happens when I imagine a novel, when I write another and another when the term. Have I made a drama or tragedy? I do not know how these things work. It is both what happens to the characters in a year of work, I do not know how I did.
“In fiction we write false things to say true things”
No I will deny that black humor is a powerful record, virtually unifies the book, gives it meaning. Édouard scam, the constant attempt to get back at his characters, all more or less delusional ways.
Maybe so, but it is not a decision. I write with emotions, with what I feel at the moment. If something makes me mood or moves me, is reflected in the book. I write as I am.
What is it that grips Pradelle when ordering this offensive that almost kills its just men when peace was declared? Does stupidity or insanity?
‘The novelist has to offer reflections that make you think and feel emotion in the reader. This action, Lieutenant Pradelle in 1918, just before the armistice, says something true about what were those years. That’s what this is all about. In fiction we write false things to say true things. The action itself is not true but its meaning is right.
“Historians have had the great war differently depending on the generation”
‘The development of a speech about the Great War, has been so complicated for France as it has in the rest of Europe?
‘ The historians have told the Great War differently depending on the generation. I think the French are knowledgeable about this war and know it, know what it was. However, in that attempt, there is an important European failure . The European Commission has given up commemorating the first war in a unified way. That has to do with a cultural failure. A century later, Europe has failed to count its history. We’ve made a political, economic, financial Europe but still suffer from the lack of a cultural Europe.
‘The theme of this novel, but war is peace. The three characters who return from the front are in a terrible landscape of grievance and misery. They are all the time revolting against her.
‘War and its aftermath, as words, make us think that after all just a contest and that things will be as before, as if someone turned off the switch. Just when the war ends, there is a period called by historians ‘out of the war’, which lasts four or five years. It is complex and painful. For 50 months he lived a Europe-the war of 1914 in which he invested energy, resources, bureaucracy; killed millions of people died in it. I could physically, but psychologically after the war was necessary to mourn, learn to live differently from how they lived for 50 months. The tricky thing is that we do mourn for recover from the fact of losing a loved one. In this case it is much more complex because it comes up with something unwanted, even hated, but that has been there for a long time.
“The words war and postwar suggest that after all just a contest and that things will be as before. And no “
It’s easier to go to war to make peace, right?
When will the war there is a certain naivety. No one knows what will happen. The back has a problem: the pain and the feeling of loss is added expectations. We went to war, we lost everything or almost everything, but … why served
‘In 100 years of war has changed?; but what has made the fictional account of the war?
‘War is one of the universal themes of literature, like love. It is encapsulated in humanity. And literature has never stopped telling. However, how does has changed in terms of our perception of it. Books written just after 1920 in France have a very close people, every individual who makes war war. Fifty years later we have a more sociological view, group, groups, social classes. The literature is adapted to the way we perceive reality, so it remains a perfect machine to understand the world.
-Bernard Pivot said that this was a popular Goncourt, the term you disliked it. He said in an interview with The Country , who felt that the adjective was accused of doing, almost equaled less complicated literature under television.
It’s not popular word that bothers me is the way in which it is said. Many times we talk about popular and populist to say that word which revolts me. On television we find the best and the worst, since he tries to flatter the lower forms of entertainment to exciting series, made by people who know how to build great stories. As literature, it can make a great novel and bad, television can do populism or Breaking Bad . When speaking of popular literature is not the literature to which you are injured, but the public, to be underestimates.
“Literature is adapted to the how we perceive reality, so it remains a perfect machine to understand the world “
‘What is certain is that a new fiction that you dispute the throne to the novel: the television series. Judging by the waves of enthusiasm and series …
-Throughout 20 centuries literature not shared with any other media interest and the method of storytelling. When I wanted to tell a story, a story, a novel, a play … As the twentieth century new forms of fiction did pose: the cinema and television, but during the preceding twenty centuries existed theater and the novel . Now the novel has to compete with other well-armed means to tell good stories. Today literature suffers the competition, but somehow there is some justice in that. The literature had taken advantage of its monopoly of fiction for twenty centuries, it is normal today share that territory and compete with television or film.
‘You came to a magnificent literature age: in the 56th His experiences and readings, perhaps someone was already mature, do not expect surprises.
‘For 20 years I taught literary techniques. I tried to understand what tools the craftsmen of literature made their artifacts. I learned what was an adventure standpoint, protagonists, antagonists and dismounted as a watchmaker that mechanism. In my toolbox were all those things that served me to explain to students, but I realized that I used to write my own novels. So I made use of the tools that served me for 20 years. That in fact, on that, the only advantage I have is to be old. And believe me, old age is not as great as you paint.
“I started writing police because I knew how hard it was. You see, It can be old and naive “
They were librarians !, that depends on which can be confusing. However, they were not young candid. What a way to prepare for the novel.
Yes, you’re right. He taught people who were already book professionals, who were already good readers and those where the level of education was higher. They were not young men discovering literature. Their demands and expectations were higher. They had ambition. They would only know the book but knowing how they were made. That forced me to use the tools that had even better
Neither opted for a single genre, in fact, chose one of the most complicated. Policing
police ‘I began writing because I knew how hard it was. See? You may be old and naive. When I started writing I realized that I had made a major error calculation. The advantage is that it is very technical and I really like the literary technique I felt very encouraged and felt great pleasure. I enjoyed this.
There’s a perception of contemporary as excessively self-referential literature, yours, however it behaves with deployments and the enthusiasm of the nineteenth-century novel.
I understand what you mean, and in that sense, yes: this is a novel of the nineteenth century, because it’s my literary origin … Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas … but in the end, the achievement of this book is have done, more or less, a jump over a part of the literature of the twentieth century. That is, in the twenty-first century, I have written a novel of the nineteenth century. The construction is not very intellectual, not a self-referential psychological novel excessively nor. It is a book with ideas, like the novel of the nineteenth. It is a return in the history of literature, that what seems new? Well then it shows the eternal return in the history of literature.
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