“How do you grow when we have not been seen?”

Stéphanie Chaillou signs in this return a novel of rare intensity. Therefore, Through the return of a man to the city he had fled. In addition, the author explores memory, exclusion and fragile family ties, in a sensitive language where each perception becomes revelation. In addition, She is our guest of this new podcast:

Jean-Noël built a stable existence alongside his companion, far from the modest and rough environment of his childhood. Furthermore, But father’s illness forces him to confront this inheritance. « He did not come to forgive. In addition, he especially did not come to request compensation, and yet he is there “Confides Chaillou, stressing the ambiguity of this approach. For example, The character advances between curiosity and refusal, inhabited by doubt about what he “how do you grow when really expects from this return.

Marimbaut’s decor is not chosen at random. Nevertheless, The author says she discovered Bazas. Furthermore, the real city that inspires her, almost by chance: “I went there once, and I had a crush on this place, its minerality, the beauty of its cathedral. I said to myself: I will place my novel there. She explains that she wanted to take up the challenge of writing from a fleeting impression. a unique memory, as if memory became a romantic material in its own right.

Family, difference and memory – “how do you grow when

This memory, precisely, constitutes the nerve of the story. Certain scenes – a departure, a fishing game – have set themselves in him with an indelible force. And yet they carry a disturbing unreality. « He knows it happened, but he still has trouble believing it », Underlines Chaillou. Incredulity coexists with fidelity to memories, drawing an intimate “how do you grow when paradox that the novel highlights.

More Return to Marimbaut is not reduced to introspection. The novel questions what blood ties mean when they were mined by distance and exclusion. Jean-Noël grew up on the fringes, sensitive to beauty and art when his family valued other codes.

This difference aroused humiliations and violence in school. The author describes a striking scene of canteen where the stigma is collective. a moment which lastingly imprints the identity of the character. « To be different, whether through the body, sensitivity or sexual orientation, this always produces exclusion She recalls.

What blood ties really mean

In this novel. the memory of the wounds is combined with a writing attentive to perceptions. Chaillou claims the role of sensitive experience in his work: « I have a lot of fun writing landscapes. trying to name sensations that have no name. This poetic approach irrigates a refined language, “how do you grow when where the infra-ordinary takes precedence over major events.

An unexpected figure also arises: that of “the beast”, a strange presence which observes Jean-Noël. Designed as a narrative counterpoint, it embodies a form of exteriority while becoming witness to her return. “” The beast was also an opportunity to give an external look. to ask the question: how do you grow when we were not seen? »

The writing, specifies Chaillou, oscillates between jubilation and requirement. « There are extremely pleasant moments, when I know I have something. But the strongest is this feeling that there was nothing, and that there is a book. If his previous works had a more marked autobiographical dimension, he fully assumes fiction. And it is in this pure invention that the most lively pleasure resides.

In filigree, the novel explores the irreducible singularity of the trajectories. Why, in the same family, some become foreigners to “how do you grow when their own? The answer. Chaillou finds her in an image that she borrows from Freud: ” A glass object that falls, you cannot know in advance how it will break. It is this fragility, this mystery of existence, that his writing tries to capture with precision and delicacy.

Photo credits: Stéphanie Chaillou © James Weston

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