With “All Lives”, the musician publishes a first self -fiction story in which she tells the death of her partner in a refined and powerful language.
Rebeka Warrior has never finished surprising us. After developing universes that are both linked and radically different with its sexy Sushi, Mansfield.Tya and Kompromat groups, she is now awarded a first novel.
It is a novel, yes, or rather a self -fiction story, with an accent based on the term “fiction”. It is not shyness or fear on his part, but rather a love of the imagination that makes Rebeka Warrior insists. “Real does not exist when we write. It is impossible to rewrite reality. It is de facto distorted”, she said, sitting in a suit in her apartment with Japanese design.
In All lives (borrowed from The seagull de Tchekhov), she tells the cancer and the death of her partner Pauline. Then: mourning, the quest for meaning, spirituality, meeting with Zen, Buddhism, but also a session of Ayahuasca. It is a powerful story on love and death, life, its nonsense and its “full sense”. A story written in a minimalist and clear way, as if it were a long poem or a succession of Haikus. “It is due to twenty years of writing songs. I am used to removing the words that are useless, to keep only the phrases a little ‘punch’. In my head, it must sing.”
The book sings in choir since it welcomes extracts from other books: Sartre, Hervé Guibert, Marc Aurèle … As she notices, of the authors mainly male and white. “I am 47 years old, and when I started to read, there was not a plethora of goudous or feminists. I started with Sartre, with old whites. Marc Aurèle, for example, used the words that I myself wanted to say.
He became my best friend. Literature arrives strangely in our lives. ” Rebeka Warrior is a follower of audio books, where she mainly finds classics. She is currently listening to a biography of Victor Hugo. “During the period of illness and death of my wife, I read a lot and I discovered in literature, in the poetry of the keys to give meaning to life, to give me strength and comfort. I have gripped myself to literature.”
For years, Rebeka Warrior has recorded his life in notebooks, not to forget anything, she says. It was they who formed the raw material of his story, worked during stays at the Villa Medici in Rome. There, she follows a rigid routine. “I am very ritualized. I thus get rid of asking myself questions that take too long. I don’t need inspiration, but a schedule. Sometimes, you can’t write, but you have to force yourself. This is the schedule to be respected. Work is 80 % of the case.”
Laura Vazquez – whom she considers as “The greatest contemporary poet” – made him feedback: “To explain to me what I was doing. When you write, you are in your world. A world that does not exist. It’s good to have a referent.” Despite the pain that was the writing of this book, Rebeka Warrior withdrew, too, “A pride”, which already makes him want to write a second one.
All lives by Rebeka Warrior (Stock), 288 p., 20.90 €. In bookstores on August 20.
