An Interview with Laurent Mauvignier

It is the season’s most surprising hit. For weeks, Laurent Mauvignier topped the charts with his new novel, Des Hommes, outdoing star authors like Amélie Nothomb, Frédéric Beigbeder and Bernard Werber. The surprise was certainly not the book’s quality: The 42-year-old Toulousain has proven over the last ten years that he is among the best French writers alive, and Des Hommes, an extraordinary account of the Algerian war, may be his finest novel to date. But it would have been hard to predict that the discreet author, published by a small press, rarely seen on television, would achieve mass market success. It is a joyous paradox to see Mauvignier, a writer of interiority and solitude, suddenly catch fire with the public.

Getting to know Mauvignier is no easy task: He keeps the details of his life to himself. He was born in Tours, in 1967, to a rural family with no use for books. But a long hospital stay in childhood — he gives no specifics — changed the course of his life. An aunt brought him a book, Un Bon Petit Diable by the Comtesse de Ségur, to read while convalescing. He finished it, then began to imagine a continuation to the story….

“It was like falling in love,” he recalls. “Suddenly, I could tell myself a story…the story of me being a writer.” During his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Laurent Mauvignier kept on writing, befriended the writer Tanguy Viel, and submitted his first novel to a very exacting publishing house, Editions de Minuit. “I knew they rarely published first novels, so I was really surprised that they accepted my text,” he says. Loin d’Eux (Far from Them) came out in 1999. Six more novels followed, all garnering tremendous critical praise; Apprendre à Finir received the Wepler prize in 2000.

Holiday at Club Bled

It was Minuit that in 1958 had published a shocking autobiography by an Algerian victim of torture at the hands of the French Army, Henri Alleg’s The Question. Half a century later, the same company issued Des Hommes, which addresses the same bloody moment in French history. The novel begins in a small village in contemporary France, at a party hosted by newly retired Solange. Suddenly, in walks her brother Bernard, nicknamed “Feu-de-Bois,” an aged and dissolute drunkard, practically a bum. Shocking everyone present, he gives her a gold brooch that is obviously beyond his means. Tension mounts, insults are exchanged, and Bernard ends up committing a racist assault on Chefraoui and his family, the Arabs of the village. At this point Rabut (the narrator and Bernard’s cousin) steps in. He calls up from the past their tragic “holiday at Club Bled,” when they were barely 20, sent to battle an invisible enemy in an unknown country — bled is slang for the middle of nowhere, the back of beyond. An absurd conflict, which Rabut summarizes tersely: “War is always bad guys attacking good guys; but this time, it wasn’t anything like that, it was just some men, that’s all.”

“This project originated long ago in something very personal, though shared by millions of people from my generation,” says Mauvignier of his astonishing novel. “My mother used to show me pictures my father took in Algeria, where he was stationed for 28 months. In these photos there was no sign of war, or of the violence my mother would talk about. They were almost like holiday pictures, with smiling kids, nice landscapes, sun, the city of Oran. But when my father committed suicide, the question began to gnaw at me: Did the Algerian war have something to do with it? If so, who will speak about what has been silenced? What is it that has been silenced?”

That was the starting point for this poignant story about love, guilt and remorse, less a political manifesto than a psychological study of the traumas inflicted by war. It can be compared to Michael Cimino’s masterpiece film The Deer Hunter. Mauvignier nods: “In his movie, Cimino talks about his characters, not the Vietnam war. Vietnam is men yelling, playing Russian roulette, dying, struggling, understanding nothing. This is what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to assign guilt or blame, or get into moral lessons. I just wanted to show, with a few characters, what violence is, the experience of war, of fear, and the way personal life is totally intermingled with history.”

What lies beneath the stones

His previous novel, Dans la Foule (In the Crowd), recently translated into English, deals with another group trauma: the Heysel Stadium tragedy in Brussels. In 1985 the European soccer cup finals ended with the death of 39 fans, crushed beneath a wall toppled by stampeding hooligans. All of the dead were innocent victims of mass folly. Is his writing a way of resurrecting them? “I don’t really know what the purpose of literature is,” he replies. “Maybe it is its uselessness that makes it indispensable in a world where everything needs finality. I only know it is a tool for me to expose something I sense is present, very near to us, but has no body, no voice, and whose silence demands to be broken. It is a tool to expose what lies beneath the stones.”

Still more difficult is discovering what lies beneath the author’s surface. Despite his newfound success, Mauvignier, recently artist-in-residence at the Villa Medici in Rome, hardly ever appears in public, somewhat like the late Julien Gracq. And he admits that he does not seek media attention. “I never feel more like myself than when I’m writing, and I’ve always been suspicious of smooth talkers. I don’t know the codes that would make me a media figure,” he says candidly. “My life is in my work, so I work.” With his natural talent and the ambitious subject matter of his new book, it’s no wonder his name keeps cropping up in the same breath as “Prix Goncourt” — France’s most prestigious literary prize.

Des Hommes, Editions de Minuit

In the Crowd, Faber and Faber

 

Originally published in the November 2009 issue of France Today.