Guest of the Read in Pocket show in Gradignan this weekend, the writer Marc Levy, presented as the most read French writer in the world with more than 50 million copies sold, was still in Bordeaux this Monday before returning at his home in New York. 20 minutes was able to meet him, to question the star writer on current events and the Hamas attack in Israel, as well as on the release of his next novel, The Symphony of Monsterswhich takes place in Ukraine and which appears in French on October 17.
What does this Hamas attack in Israel inspire you?
Terrible anger, because it is a human tragedy. The images are unbearable, and I obviously have all my heart with a civilian population attacked in this way, it is unbearable. Afterwards, the analysis of why this hatred and this anger is another consideration. But anyone who seeks excuses for terrorists should look where their humanity lies. We can have consideration for the fate of the Palestinian people, and at the same time not support the massacre of civilian populations. No cause, no revenge, no fight, justifies raping women, exhibiting bodies, committing massacres… Obviously, you can imagine that as soon as this conflict broke out, I was flooded on my social networks by the entire clique of anti-Semites, who accuse me of defending the Ukrainians, and not the Palestinians. I would tell them that the Ukrainians have never bombed Russian civilian targets. My father was a resistance fighter, the Resistance is discernment, terrorism is butchery, barbarism, and that is what Hamas committed. And the Palestinian people are hostage to Hamas.
What can you tell us about The Symphony of Monstersthis new novel which takes place in Ukraine?
It is a novel inspired by true events, which tells the story of a nurse in the dispensary of a small town in occupied territory. One evening, when she returned home from work, she discovered that her nine-year-old son had been kidnapped. It is the story of three characters. First of all, this little boy, brilliant, with a crazy imagination, but who doesn’t speak because he suffers from childhood selective mutism, and who has only one idea in mind: to escape. There is her sister, a teenager who will experience her adolescence differently than she had imagined, by going to look for her brother. And Veronica, this nurse, who will do everything to recover her son, in the middle of an occupied land, like France was occupied by the Germans.
It’s a novel, but who denounces the reality of these deportations of children?
It is a novel which effectively tells the horror of this systemic deportation program which was put in place by Putin, and by a monstrous woman called Maria Lvova-Belova, who was promoted to commissioner for human rights. childhood in Russia. It’s as if we had given the Ministry of Health to Goebbels. She boasts of having kidnapped 700,000 children, while the real figures are closer to 100,000, including 36,000 identified. These are children that the Russians went to pick up from schools, nurseries and the streets. They take them to re-education camps where they teach them to hate their origins and their parents, then they give them to other Russian families. We are between kidnapping, child trafficking and slavery, and this is what led to Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova being prosecuted for war crimes.
You wanted this novel to be distributed for free in Russian on the Internet, why?
I am lucky to have a large readership in Russia, and I receive a lot of letters from Russians who tell me that they are taken hostage, that they are against this war, against what this government is doing. My readership does not only come from the bourgeois neighborhoods of Moscow, it goes as far as Siberia, it is also a rural readership, and who knows just as much about what is happening, because that is where the youth that Putin sent to be massacred on the front line without preparation.
But a people enslaved by a dictator sinks into a kind of torpor, they can no longer think for themselves. He also lives in fear of denunciation, and freedom returns when the number of resistance fighters exceeds the number of collaborators. I would make a comparison with the years 1933 and 1934 in Germany: there were many Germans who were terrified of Nazism, who did not want to follow the Nazis, I think it is in these moments that knowledge plays a role. an extremely important role, in what it can bring to the judgment. To bring down a dictator, you either succeed in bringing him down, but in the case of Putin it is difficult, or he falls from within, and for that you have to wake up the people.
So is it in this philosophy that you want Russians to have access to your novel?
I really believe in the power of books, which lead to understanding. My novel Children of Libertywhich tells the story of the 35th brigade, that is to say of the immigrant workforce, of all these young people who died shouting “Long live France” with a foreign accent, sold at 700,000 copies [La 35e Brigade FTP-MOI (Francs-tireurs partisans main-d’œuvre immigrée) regroupait des Juifs, d’anciens d’Espagne, des réfugiés antifascistes italiens, et le père de Marc Levy, Raymond Lévy, en a été un membre actif]. There were 700,000 readers who had a different vision of what a foreigner was, and that being born in France was not necessarily better than loving France, even if born abroad. This is the strength of the book, to touch without giving a moral lesson.