In his latest book, In the spring of monsters ( Editions Mialet-Barrault), Philippe Jaenada retraces the murder of a little boy in 1964 and the story of his main suspect, Lucien Léger, who spent 41 years in prison. A news item that absorbed the writer, just like those who fed his previous novels, as precise as police investigations, with added affect. Philippe Jaenada will come to talk about various facts in literature at Quais du Polar, this Saturday: we first subjected him to an interrogation.
Why do news items, which are often terrible intimate dramas, fascinate us so much?
In literature, all novels are either love stories or dramas, which are sort of miscellaneous facts. Going to the extremes of human nature, whether in a good or a bad way, allows the depths of human nature to express themselves, to develop. Above all, to be visible. In addition, for miscellaneous facts, unlike love, there is documentation! There is an investigation file, an instruction file, a trial – a raw material. An investigation file goes very, very deep into the intimate… And we discover things in it that even the relatives of the protagonists do not know.
Do you know why certain miscellaneous facts have inspired your books rather than others?
It’s not so much the news item in itself that interests me, but everything around it. Everything that happened at the time and in time, the consequences on people’s lives… And the more protagonists there are, the more varied and interesting it is. Me, if I could write books on sportsmen or bakers, that would interest me as much as on people who cut their neighbor into strips. I hate violence, brutality… Besides, in my books, I never dwell on the murder at the heart of the case.
Do you prepare your novels like an investigator?
Modestly. I do not forget that it is much easier for me than for an investigator, a lawyer, or a journalist of the time. Me, I have hindsight, and a lot more time. I spent almost four years writing In the spring of monsters, while investigators only had a few months. In my last three books, it was the correspondence I found in the files that really moved my story, and the handling of these cases, forward. Correspondence is neither police nor legal, that’s often what makes my gaze shift to a story. I’m more of an investigator of the human soul, let’s say. That’s where I want to go, find out who people are, rather than solve a puzzle.
Your empathy also makes the difference with a simple survey…
Yes, as a writer I can allow myself to go quite far in empathy, in projection, in identification with a character, which a police officer must not do. And I can also allow myself a lot of hypotheses, personal feelings. I can say of Pauline Dubuisson (heroine of The little femalendlr.) that she was a wonderful girl, except that it is a personal conviction, which would have nothing to do in court.
Does it leave traces, to frequent horror for so long?
For Au Printemps des Monstres, I did the same thing from morning to night for three and a half years. So when it suddenly stops, it’s brutal, of course. From the moment I immerse myself in these affairs, it’s almost as if I were dating someone… But I still think every day of Luc Taron, Pauline Dubuisson, Sulak. After returning this manuscript, for the first time I found myself not knowing what to do, for two or three weeks I felt empty, limp, tired. But we quickly get the upper hand!
Starting another book?
For example… A new project erases all fatigue from the previous one. There, I’m on something completely unexpected, the opposite of everything I wanted to do… After In the Spring of Monsters, I thought maybe I was going to stop the miscellaneous. I also told myself that I was going to take myself a year without doing anything, to live a little between two books. And I had sworn to myself never to deal with a current news item. There would be too many painful or destabilizing consequences for people involved in a legal case.
And then… ?
And then a guy came up to me at a book signing. He told me that he was going to be incarcerated, that I was the only one who could help him. I met his wife, who showed me the file, and I’m trying to help this guy, with a short text of 150 pages to alert the public. It should be out in October. If I can help him a little, I don’t see myself being refused to help him in the name of my comfort or my career…