Back to school 2025: Jakuta Alikavazovic, “I am revolted by the banality of human destiny”

In 2021. For example, Jakuta Alikavazovic received the Medici test price for Like a sky in us (Stock), romantic account of her night spent at the Louvre in which she evoked her father. Nevertheless, She returns in this back to school with To the big ones. For example, Sublime novel on the absence where she paints the portrait of a missing mother this time. For example, A book in the form of a kaleidoscope back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, which recounts. Moreover, within one of these meticulous constructions whose author has the secret, the exile, the trap of domesticity and mother-daughter transmission. Similarly, All with her writing well, bewitching. Meanwhile, At 45, the novelist and translator publishes her best book.

In the thanks of your novel. Therefore, you write that “Although it is inspired by real facts, [il] is a work of fiction ”. Nevertheless, What was its starting point?

The starting point was a feeling of forbidden: that it was forbidden to write. Therefore, think of certain things related to my family, certain events, certain silences, certain mysteries. Similarly, I, for the first time in my writer’s life, started this book with a feeling of transgression.

“The suspense is the art of the novel. Nevertheless, What makes you want to turn the pages? However, An art of construction, a way of giving you certain answers while opening other back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, questions”

Why refute the autobiographical character?

The raw material of the book is biographical and autobiographical. Similarly, We could qualify him – if he had to put a label – of autobiographical fiction. However, I’m leaving from myself and mine, it’s true. Therefore, But the novel, in its broadest sense, is my favorite writing and composition mode. For example, even when the material is autobiographical, I add suspense. However, the suspense is the art of the novel. Consequently, What makes you want to turn the pages? An art of construction, a way of giving you certain answers while opening up other questions. There is nothing more romantic.

You talk about forbidden around this novel. What seemed taboo to you in this literary project centered around this maternal figure? And how did you approach it?

Precisely. this proximity with, as we say in the cinema, “existing characters”, which are nonetheless characters back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, and that I appropriate as a writer. I didn’t think I would say this one day. but I discovered that it was not the same thing to write on the maternal that we have a child or not. By becoming a mother. I started to think about the transmission: to everything that we strive to transmit and to everything that is communicated in silence, in the things that we were in. We transmit stories, factual stories which, in families, are often fiction of fiction. All these things that are told have an implicit underground direction. They can orient what was called in the past a destiny.

“For a long time. I thought that the autobiographical question, the question of origin, had nothing to do with my writing”

You wrote in Like a sky in us be particularly fragile to the origin. Why did you want to go back to this back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, question?

For a long time. I thought that the autobiographical question, the question of origin, had nothing to do with my writing. She is also radically absent from my first books. And then I realized that we cannot escape who we are. Birth – in such. such environment, in such or such circumstances – builds this relationship to the world, this look which is the essence of the work of the writer.

There are so many singularities in the stories of exile. immigration: each family has their experience and, apart from sociology, there is no collective story. For a long time. I told myself that what had happened to my family by leaving Yugoslavia was too specific to be shared. And then I discovered that the others recognized pieces of their experience there. For example. I had people of Moroccan, Polish, Iranian origin who told me that they have recognized back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, themselves in the story of Paul (The advance of the night2017), son of an immigrant whose father chose to cut him completely from his roots. It gave me courage to approach these questions.

“We often talk about the great artists of renunciation. like Arthur Rimbaud, but the real artists of renunciation are women”

Through the itinerary of this mother, a poet who renounces poetry, the book also tells the story of the erasure of women artists …

The individual history of this woman who leaves her country. settles in France with intellectual ambitions and pluits under the weight of reality, as if the vagaries of the daily life made her rock, joins a collective history of women. We often talk about the great artists of renunciation, like Arthur Rimbaud, but the real artists of renunciation are women. There are not even enough works that remain for us to measure their back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, erasure over the centuries. Even today, you have to fight for the prolonged existence of women and their works in the artistic sphere.

“The works of art. the books that move me the most are those that come out of the arrow of time”

To the big ones Also addresses, in its structure in particular, the question of time. Is that a subject that concerns you more and more?

I am completely revolted by the banality of human destiny, which is to go from point A to point B. From life to death. The works of art. the books that move me the most are those that come out of the arrow of time to go towards a spiral time, in which there is no final point, no final disappearance, where everything is likely to return. I arrive at a time in my life when I have the intimate conviction back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, that time does not only. exist in its linear sense. And I want to share this secret in my novels. I tell myself that it can save people, like other books may have saved me from the impression of fatality.

The novel makes a parallel between the circle of poets of which the mother of the narrator is a part. a group of environmental activists … Why?

The poets. at least some and some of them, and the whistleblowers and whistleblowers have in common to be ahead of their time. They are not understood when they say what they have to say. And they pay the consequences. The fight or the poem will continue to live without them and will not be understood until much later. The temptation to get out of the world takes different forms in the book: there is the mother who folds up on the domestic back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, sphere. but there are also these activists who say that if we do not like what is happening, we can build a world next to it.

You write chronicles in Libération Since 2019. Your book has been crossed by very contemporary concerns (surveillance, conspiracy, covid, etc.). Does this exercise feed your novels?

It is rather the opposite. I was already very interested in these questions. in particular by technological issues and by surveillance, when I wrote The advance of the night. I am passionate about our time, she is terrible, captivating. I am fascinated by this moment of rocking which gives me the impression that this is it. we fell on the side of science fiction. I find it delicious, sometimes frightening, very often horrifying. But horror does not prevent a form of jubilation.

To the big ones De Jakuta Alikavazovic (gallid/“blanche”), 256 P., 20,5 €. In bookstore on August back school 2025: jakuta alikavazovic, 21.